The Fourth Amendment protects against government intrusion in the home and provides for a reasonable expectation of privacy. But does this protection extend to the most intimate areas of a person’s body? The case of Brown v. Wisconsin is pending before the Supreme Court and looks at the issue of whether police officers were justified in searching a woman’s vagina and anal cavity without a warrant. The Supreme Court of the United States must grant cert and decide whether the Fourth Amendment protects a person from unreasonable and humiliating searches by law enforcement officers.

What happened in the Brown case?

Sharon Brown is a Native American woman residing in Minnesota. In May of 2017, she was a passenger in her boyfriend’s car following a trip to Wal-Mart. The police stopped the vehicle after learning that her boyfriend allegedly shoplifted from the store. Despite her only being the passenger in the car, the police took her along with her boyfriend to jail and placed her in the holding cell. The jail’s policy allowed manual body-cavity searches without a warrant, probable cause, or exigency. Less than a day after Brown was detained, another detainee told a correctional officer, Steven Hillesheim, that Brown was hiding drugs. This detainee was a know liar and troublemaker. Hillesheim, however, did not investigate the legitimacy of these claims, despite Brown not having a history of drug use and being held in prison for shoplifting, an unrelated claim.

Peremptory challenges are an essential tool used by trial lawyers.  They allow an attorney to object to a proposed juror during selection without giving a reason or justification.  However, when peremptory challenges are coupled with racial bias, dangerous results can occur.  The case of Miles v. California is pending before the Supreme Court and asks the question of whether a court may consider reasons distinguishing stricken jurors from those accepted by the prosecutor when the prosecutor did not cite a reason.

What happened in the Miles case? 

The Miles case concerns Johnny Duane Miles, a Black man charged with the rape and murder of a white woman.  He was eventually convicted and sentenced to death.  The issue here is not whether Miles was innocent or guilty, but instead whether Mile’s case would have turned out differently if the jury selection process was different.  During jury selection, the prosecutor raised some eyebrows when he used peremptory challenges to remove every single Black juror from the main panel.  The prosecutor tried to justify his strikes but it seemed that race was the only factor because the prosecutor even removed a young Black man named Simeon Greene, who had pro-prosecution and pro-law enforcement beliefs, which would help the prosecution.

The Community Care taker Exception to the Fourth Amendment allows police officers to make warrantless search when the purpose of the officer to to help the public and not look for evidence of criminal activity.  A case pending before the United States Supreme Court, Caniglia v. Strom, asks the question of whether the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement extends to the home.

What is “community caretaking?”

Community care taking has been recognized as an exception to the Fourth Amendment by the United States Supreme Court.  In Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433 (1973), the United Starts Supreme Court held that police officers did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they searched the trunk of a car that had been towed after an accident.  The Court acknowledged that, “except in certain carefully defined classes of cases,” police cannot search private property without consent or a warrant.  It emphasized, however, that “there is a constitutional difference between houses and cars.”  Since Cady, there has been a whole host of cases that took this holding and created the doctrine of “community caretaking.”  Cady defined community caretaking activities as those “totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute.”