Personal Fourth Amendment Rights

Personal Fourth Amendment Rights

The earlier sections of this chapter asked whether government conduct counted as a search or a seizure. A defendant can win that question and still lose the motion to suppress, because a second gate follows it: the defendant must show that the search or seizure invaded the defendant's own Fourth Amendment rights. Those rights are personal, so a defendant may not assert them vicariously on behalf of someone else whose person, house, or property the police actually intruded upon.¹ The label usually attached to this second gate is standing. The word still appears in opinions and on exam stems, even though the Court no longer treats the question as a free-standing threshold, a point developed below.

In Rakas v. Illinois police stopped a car, ordered its occupants out, and searched the interior, finding a sawed-off rifle under the front seat and shells in the locked glove compartment.² The occupants seeking suppression were passengers in a friend's automobile. They did not contest the stop or the order to get out, and argued only that the search of the car violated their rights.³ The Court held that they could not obtain suppression, because a defendant may challenge a search only if it violated his own reasonable expectation of privacy, and being harmed by the introduction of evidence found in another person's property does not confer standing.⁴ The car belonged to someone else, and the passengers could not otherwise show that the search invaded an expectation of privacy of their own, so whatever wrong the search did was done to the owner.⁵ The owner or occupant of a home who challenges a warrantless search of his own house stands on the other side of the line, because his own expectation of privacy is the one that was invaded.⁶

The personal-rights rule has two supports, and each gives its own reason for the result. The first concerns the purpose of exclusion. Suppression is a remedy justified by its power to deter future violations, and it is not an individual entitlement to have unlawfully gathered evidence kept out of court.⁷ Officers who know that the victim of a search can have its fruits excluded already have a reason to respect the Amendment, and extending the remedy to targets, co-defendants, and bystanders would add little deterrence while costing the trial access to reliable evidence.⁸ The need for deterrence is also strongest where the unlawful search would lead to a criminal sanction against the person whose own premises or effects were invaded.⁹ The second support concerns injury. A defendant who is hurt only because evidence taken from someone else's property is offered at his trial has not suffered the invasion of a protected interest of his own, which is the harm the Amendment guards against, so suppression would vindicate nothing that belongs to him.

The word standing survives mostly as shorthand. In Rakas the petitioners urged what the Court called a target theory, under which a person against whom a search was aimed could invoke the exclusionary rule even if the search did not violate his own rights. After rejecting that theory and reaffirming that Fourth Amendment rights are personal, the Court asked whether treating the principle as standing, separate from the merits, served any useful purpose, and it concluded that it did not, because no decided case would come out differently and applying the personal-rights principle directly would produce no additional exclusion.¹² The inquiry therefore moved into substantive Fourth Amendment doctrine, where it asks whether this defendant's own rights were infringed.¹³ Later opinions describe the result in those terms: after Rakas, the standing question and the privacy question merge into one, namely whether officials violated a legitimate expectation of privacy held by the defendant.¹⁴ Byrd v. United States repeats the point by calling Fourth Amendment standing shorthand for the requirement of a cognizable interest in the place searched.¹⁵

Two limits keep that merger from being overstated. Rakas did not disturb the general understanding that standing has an injury-in-fact component and a requirement that the party assert his own rights rather than those of third parties. It held only that the Fourth Amendment's personal-rights principle already answers those questions and therefore belongs to substantive law.¹⁶ The merger also does not make the two inquiries identical. Whether the police intruded on anyone's reasonable expectation of privacy is a different question from whether they intruded on this defendant's, so a search can be plainly unlawful as to a homeowner and still leave a visitor with nothing to challenge.¹⁷

Ownership of the seized item does not by itself supply the personal right. In Rawlings v. Kentucky the defendant claimed that the drugs police found in an acquaintance's purse were his, but the Court refused to let property-law concepts control who may invoke the Amendment. Ownership was one fact among others, and a defendant who owns contraband left in plain view still owns it without holding any legitimate expectation of privacy.¹⁸ The defendant also carries the burden of proving both that the search was illegal and that he had a legitimate expectation of privacy in the thing searched.¹⁹ The reason follows from what the Amendment protects: the capacity to claim it depends on a reasonable expectation of freedom from government intrusion in the place or object searched, and ownership of whatever happens to be inside answers only part of that question.²⁰ The same logic governs businesses. A company may invoke the Amendment for its own premises, but a shareholder or manager who challenges a search of the company's property must show a reasonable expectation of privacy of his own, because ownership and management do not necessarily show one.²¹

Presence at the scene and the form of the charge fare no better. Rakas refused to treat lawful presence on the premises as enough. Justice Powell's concurrence explains why: since Jones v. United States, the view that mere legitimate presence suffices has been questioned and applied without uniformity, and the sounder standard, drawn from Katz, asks whether the defendant's claim to privacy is reasonable in light of all the circumstances.²² A passenger riding beside the owner is lawfully in the car, yet that status says nothing about whether the passenger had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the glove compartment. Nor does being charged with possession of the seized item create automatic standing, and a co-conspirator damaged by the evidence cannot challenge its seizure on that basis alone, as Salvucci and Alderman v. United States hold.²³ Each rule keeps the inquiry on the defendant's own interest in the place searched.

The dissent in Rakas shows what the rule costs, and the concurrence shows why the Court accepted that cost. The dissenters read the decision as returning Fourth Amendment protection to property rights in the invaded place, a move they said Katz had rejected. They asked how a nonowner who may validly consent to a search as a joint user of premises could lack a protected interest, and how a person riding beside the owner of a car could have no protection at all.²⁴ Justice Powell answered that the Court's opinion rests on whether the defendant held a legitimate expectation of privacy, not on property concepts, and that Katz itself requires an expectation society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.²⁵ He conceded that the standard lacks a bright line but judged it more faithful to the Amendment's purposes than a test that turns on presence alone.²⁶ The result is that a friend in the front seat holds fewer rights than the owner, and the sections that follow turn to the facts, such as an overnight stay, that can still give a nonowner an expectation of his own.

Students lose this issue when they treat the illegality of the search as the end of the analysis, because an unlawful search of a third party's car, purse, or home gives the defendant nothing to suppress.²⁷ The same error appears when an examinee notes that the defendant owned the contraband or was lawfully present and stops there. On an exam stem, look for a defendant who is contesting a search of another person's property, and check what, apart from ownership or presence, ties the defendant to that place. If the stem supplies a reasonable expectation of the defendant's own, the claim goes forward on the merits, and if it does not, the claim ends at this gate.