Today the Supreme Court handed down Georgia v. Randolph, a third-party consent case, ruling in favor of the defendant. The opinions are available here at How Appealing. The opinions raise lots of juicy questions of Fourth Amendment law, and I’ll be blogging about them later today. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, congrats to Tom Goldstein for the victory.
UPDATE: Given my class schedule, I probably won’t be able to post anything about Randolph until around 7pm tonight.
The whole issue of “how close to the door is close enough” is going to be unworkable in practice, and doesn’t accord with logic anyway. If the consentor doesn’t have authority to bring in guests over the other roommate’s objections, then it doesn’t matter how close the other roommate is –they might even be somewhere else entirely. And if the consentor does have authority to bring in a guest over the roommate’s objection, then it doesn’t matter if the roommate is standing in the doorway objecting.
I’m interested in your comment on this bit:
My question is, is this true as a factual matter? It seems like I’ve been in some similar situations, mostly involving disputes between siblings when I was a kid, where the rule didn’t seem so clear. The policy result seems reasonable, but I’m not sure about this analysis of social norms.
Justices Souter, Stevens, Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Breyer, in Randolph, “recognize that domestic abuse is a serious problem in the United States.” (Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. ___ (2006), Slip Op. at page 13.)
Could this foreshadow their opinion in Davis v. Washington that a domestic violence victim’s excited utterances to a 911 dispatcher are not “testimonial,” and, thus, are not within the scope of the Confrontation Clause?
If, as is often the case, the Court considers the practical implications of its rulings, and “balances” the competing interests at hand (and is not constrained by the “original meaning” construct puprortedly adhered to by Justices Scalia and Thomas), it would appear that the respondents’ arguments in Davis, and in Hammon v. Indiana, might garner five votes?
When you talk about this, I’d be interested in hearing why an exigency exception to the warrant clause didn’t develop at the time he denied consent, since at that point the police knew that he was home, and they didn’t have reason to get a warrant beforehand, since they thought they’d be able to do a consent search until that time.