When can the police enter a person’s home without a warrant? The Fourth Amendment and the various judicial exceptions to it don’t provide a clear answer. But the Supreme Court may provide some clarity next term after it agreed on Monday to hear a Fourth Amendment case next term involving wellness checks, suicide-by-cop threats, and warrantless intrusions into the home.
Case v. Montana began as many Fourth Amendment cases do: with a man, a gun, and a romantic partner. William Case allegedly told an ex-girlfriend during a phone call in the fall of 2021 that he was considering suicide, “threatened to harm any officers that came to his home if she called the police,” and then went silent without hanging up. The ex-girlfriend called 911 and told the dispatcher she also heard a “pop” sound on the other end of the line.
According to court filings, the officers who arrived at Case’s house said that they did not believe they needed a warrant because “it wasn’t a criminal thing” and that they were there to render emergency aid. They could not see Case through the windows, and nobody responded when they knocked on the door. Based on a previous incident with Case, his petition claimed, the cops believed that he might be attempting suicide by cop.
After obtaining more equipment and shields, the officers entered the home and searched for Case. “As [Officer Richard Pasha] searched an upstairs room, Case ‘jerked open’ a closet curtain, and Pasha saw a ‘dark object’ near his waist,” the state of Montana told the court in its reply brief, quoting from depositions. “Pasha immediately shot Case, hitting him in the abdomen.” Case survived the wound and was later convicted of felony assault on a peace officer for the encounter. Pasha was unharmed.
Case appealed his conviction by arguing that the officers’ entry of his home was unlawful. The Fourth Amendment forbids “unreasonable searches and seizures” by law enforcement. That protection is strongest in a person’s home. Accordingly, cops generally can’t enter or search a home without either the owner’s permission or a judicial warrant. Case sought to exclude any evidence obtained during the unlawful search—in effect, the entire incident—from trial.
Over the years, courts have put forward numerous exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s requirements. The state of Montana in this instance countered that the officers’ actions were reasonable and justified based on the “community caretaker” doctrine, an exception first articulated by the Supreme Court in the 1973 case Cady v. Dombrowski.
In Cady, the court sided with a Wisconsin police officer who had conducted a warrantless search of a driver’s impounded vehicle after arresting him for drunk driving to search for a potential handgun. (The driver had identified himself as a Chicago cop.) During the search, the officer found bloodstained clothes and items that eventually led to the driver’s prosecution of and conviction for first-degree murder. The driver appealed his conviction by arguing in part that the evidence obtained from the warrantless search had to be thrown out.
The Supreme Court disagreed, concluding that the search was not an “unreasonable” search or seizure because it was done for legitimate noncriminal reasons. The justices noted that local police officers frequently interact with drivers without criminal suspicion because states closely regulate cars and driving in general. For example, the court observed, officers will “frequently investigate vehicle accidents in which there is no claim of criminal liability and engage in what, for want of a better term, may be described as community caretaking functions.”
Expanding the community-caretaking doctrine beyond Cady’s bounds, however, is more controversial. Cars and other motor vehicles, which did not exist when the Fourth Amendment was drafted in 1791, generally receive less protection from warrantless searches under the court’s precedents than, say, a residence. For that exact reason, the court recently declined to extend the doctrine to a person’s home.
In the 2021 case Caniglia v. Strom, a man sued police officers who had entered his home as part of a wellness check after he allegedly placed a handgun on a table and told his wife to “shoot [him] now and get it over with” during an argument. The officers invoked the community-caretaker doctrine, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a unanimous court, held that the appeals court’s decision went too far.
“Neither the holding nor logic of Cady justified that approach,” he wrote. “True, Cady also involved a warrantless search for a firearm. But the location of that search was an impounded vehicle—not a home—‘a constitutional difference’ that the opinion repeatedly stressed. In fact, Cady expressly contrasted its treatment of a vehicle already under police control with a search of a car ‘parked adjacent to the dwelling place of the owner.’”
If the court already ruled in Caniglia that the doctrine did not apply to a person’s home, you might ask, why is the court hearing this case at all? For one thing, the Montana Supreme Court sided with the state by adopting an unusual reading of the court’s 2021 ruling. Thomas’s four-page majority opinion was fairly straightforward: “What is reasonable for vehicles is different from what is reasonable for homes,” he concluded, and he appeared to foreclose the community-caretaking doctrine for the latter altogether.
While the court’s decision in Caniglia was unanimous, however, there appeared to be significant differences lurking beneath the surface. Three of the justices wrote concurring opinions that appeared designed to narrow Thomas’s conclusion. “A warrant to enter a home is not required, we explained, when there is a ‘need to assist persons who are seriously injured or threatened with such injury,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, quoting from precedent, and said that he joined Thomas’s opinion insofar as it did not say otherwise.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote that he joined Thomas’s opinion because it “properly rejects the broad ‘community caretaking’ theory” adopted by the First Circuit. At the same time, he wrote in favor of an expansive form of the doctrine in other circumstances, pointing to the possibility of elderly Americans whose relatives could not contact them and other hypotheticals not covered by the court’s precedents.
Finally, Justice Brett Kavanaugh went further than his colleagues to explicitly conclude that the Fourth Amendment did not prevent a wide range of warrantless entrances into a person’s home, such as an imminent death by suicide, welfare checks on the elderly, or “unattended young children” alone inside a home. “To be sure, courts, police departments, and police officers alike must take care that officers’ actions in those kinds of cases are reasonable under the circumstances,” he helpfully added.
Concurring opinions carry no actual legal weight; Thomas’s opinion is the one that actually represents the decision of the high court. Nonetheless, the Montana Supreme Court quoted extensively from the concurring opinions to describe Caniglia as a case where the high court “articulated its concern that permitting warrantless entries broadly under the community caretaker doctrine risks encompassing actions that violate citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights.”
Three justices on Montana’s Supreme Court dissented from the ruling, writing that Caniglia had actually held that the doctrine was “not a standalone exception to the warrant requirement and did not permit warrantless entries into personal residences.” In his request for the Supreme Court to take up the case, Case urged the justices to decide whether officers must have probable cause before entering a home in an emergency-aid situation, as multiple lower courts have held, or whether some lower standard applied.
“By applying a relaxed standard, the [Montana Supreme Court] majority here upheld a warrantless entry even though the officers only had reasonable grounds to believe—and only purported to believe—that Case wanted to engage them in gunplay so they would kill him,” Case’s lawyers told the court. That would not amount to probable cause, they argued, because the only threat to Case’s life would be if the officers entered the house in the first place.
It is unsurprising that the justices took up that question since courts across the country have reached different conclusions on it. While the state of Montana disagreed that the circuit split was as deep as Case claimed, it acknowledged that the justices could still provide some helpful clarity if they so desired.
“No doubt the use of different formulations—probable cause, objectively reasonable basis, reasonable suspicion—to analyze warrantless entries for Fourth Amendment ‘reasonableness’ runs the risk of sowing deeper confusion among federal and state courts on an issue of vital importance to citizens and law enforcement,” it told the justices in its reply brief.
There are few spheres of life where the Fourth Amendment’s protections are as high as a person’s home. There are also situations where Americans may want emergency responders to enter a home as quickly as possible to preserve life and limb. If the diverging opinions in Caniglia are any indication, the justices will face a formidable task in laying out a comprehensive rule on the matter next term.
