Case No. 16-1371 | 3d Cir. Decision
Anyone who has ever rented a car for the weekend should know the process well: Stand in a long line, choose “Economy” or “Compact,” adjust the mirrors, scan for an acceptable radio station. And then, before driving off the lot, you sign the rental agreement, the magisterial document that, if you actually took the time to read the whole thing, would probably eat up most of your weekend getaway.
But let’s say, sometime later in the weekend, you feel too tired to drive and (responsibly!) turn the wheel over to your travel companion, who isn’t listed on the rental agreement as an authorized driver. What happens to the privacy protections covering the car?
That’s the question before the Court in Byrd. Petitioner Terrence Byrd borrowed a car that his fiancée had rented—the government contends that the two had arranged a strawman rental, since Byrd’s prior convictions would have prevented him from renting a car in his own name—and drove it from New Jersey toward Pittsburgh. Outside of Harrisburg, police stopped Byrd for a minor traffic violation. Byrd produced the rental agreement, acknowledging that he was not listed as an authorized driver. After learning that Byrd had an outstanding arrest warrant, police questioned Byrd about what he had in his car and sought his permission to search it. Although the parties dispute whether Byrd consented to a search, the officers believed that they did not need Byrd’s consent in any event because he was not listed as an authorized driver on the rental agreement. The officers’ search uncovered 43 bricks of heroin in the trunk.
Byrd entered a conditional guilty plea to charges of drug possession and possession with intent to distribute, while preserving his right to appeal the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress the products of the search. The Third Circuit affirmed the conviction, holding that the driver of a rental car who is not listed as an authorized driver on the rental agreement has no expectation of privacy in the car.
Byrd’s use of the rental car indisputably violated the Budget rental agreement, which contains an all-capitals warning that allowing an unauthorized driver to drive the car “MAY RESULT IN ANY AND ALL COVERAGE OTHERWISE PROVIDED BY THE RENTAL AGREEMENT BEING VOID.” The issue before the Court is whether Byrd’s violation of the agreement also stops him from asserting privacy rights in the car.
Byrd argues that, notwithstanding the terms of the rental agreement, it was reasonable for him to expect privacy in the rental car because he borrowed it with his fiancée’s permission. By passing possession and control of the car to Byrd, he argues, she also passed to him a right to exclude others from the vehicle. He likens the case to Jones v. United States, 362 U.S. 257 (1960), in which the Court held that an overnight visitor had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his friend’s apartment while he was staying there. Byrd also notes several undesirable policy consequences that he says would flow from allowing private agreements to determine the existence of a reasonable expectation of privacy. Noting that renters frequently flout the terms of their rental agreements, he argues that depriving unauthorized drivers of privacy protections would conflict with people’s reasonable expectations and might even create a perverse incentive for police to pull over rental cars in the hope that the driver is not authorized and thus powerless to contest a search.
The government replies that Byrd could not have had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the car because his fiancée had no authority to allow him to drive the car under the rental agreement. Thus, Byrd certainly had no more rights than a passenger legitimately present in someone else’s car, who, as the Court held in Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128 (1979), may not contest a search of the car’s trunk or glove compartment. Byrd’s asserted “possession and control” test, the government argues, would prove unworkable and would allow even car thieves to claim privacy protections in the cars they stole. For good measure, the government argues that Byrd cannot claim to have privacy rights in the car based on common-law property principles, because the terms of the rental agreement made Byrd’s fiancée’s proposed bailment of the car to Byrd ineffective.
Whichever party prevails, both sides claim quite plausibly that the impact will be significant. As Byrd noted, there were more than 115 million car rentals in the United States in 2015, making the question of privacy protections in those vehicles one of far-reaching importance.