Open-fields doctrine: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:16, 1 July 2021

Revision as of 06:56, 8 July 2021

Line 157:

Following ''Oliver'', a five-justice<!-- this is the correct title for those who serve on New York's appellate bench --> panel of the Third Department of the state's [[New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division|Appellate Division]] unanimously rejected that argument in 1991. "The marihuana in question here", it wrote, "was clearly grown in an open, uncultivated field away from the curtilage of any residential structure; thus, defendant had no legitimate expectation of privacy."<ref name="Scott I" /> Scott appealed to the [[New York Court of Appeals|Court of Appeals]], New York's highest court.<ref name="Scott II">{{cite court |litigants=People v. Scott|vol=79|reporter=N.Y.2d|opinion=474|court=[[New York Court of Appeals|N.Y.]]|date=1992|url=https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3389459308517600957|access-date=September 19, 2019}}</ref>

In 1992, Judge<!-- again, this is the correct title for jurists of the New York Court of Appeals --> StephenStewart Hancock wrote for the majority in a 4–3 decision reversing the appellate court and Scott's conviction that rejected the open-fields doctrine. Like Marshall and Oregon's ''Dixson'' court, he found ''Oliver''{{'}}s recourse to a property-based privacy interest at odds with ''Katz''{{'s}} reasonable expectation test. But that would have little bearing as the majority found [[New York Constitution|New York's constitution]], "with its own unique history", more relevant to the issues raised by Scott's case.<ref name="Scott II 486">''Scott II'', at 486</ref>

Prior to 1938 New York, Hancock noted, had restricted searches and seizures only at the statutory level. When the state constitution was amended that year, in addition to language similar to that of the Fourth Amendment that had long been in the statute, it included a provision explicitly including telecommunications under the same warrant requirements, a reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's ''[[Olmstead v. United States|Olmstead]]'' case a decade earlier, which had held that police did not need a warrant for [[wiretap]]ping telephones since that took place far from the property of those communicating over them. Therefore, according to Hancock, it did not follow that the state constitution should or could be interpreted in the same way the ''Oliver'' Court had interpreted the federal constitution.<ref name="Scott II 486" />