Case No. 16-969 | Va. Decision
In Collins, the Court confronts an apparent clash between the privacy protections applicable to the automobile and those applicable to the home. After a high-speed motorcycle chase, police officers in Albemarle County, Virginia identified Petitioner Ryan Collins as a suspect. Further investigation traced Collins and the motorcycle to a residence where Collins’s girlfriend lived and Collins stayed several nights each week. A police officer walked up the driveway of the residence to a partially enclosed parking patio, where he found a motorcycle under a protective cover. Lifting the cover, the officer recorded the motorcycle’s license plate number, which allowed him to confirm that the motorcycle was stolen. After unsuccessfully attempting to suppress the evidence from the officer’s search, Collins was convicted of knowingly receiving stolen property.
The facts of the contested search in Collins fall into an overlapping region between two Fourth Amendment doctrines. The Court has long held that police may search automobiles upon probable cause without first obtaining a warrant. The Court has justified the so-called “automobile exception” on two principal grounds: first, that automobiles are readily movable, rendering a warrant requirement impractical; and second, that individuals have a reduced expectation of privacy in automobiles, owing to the pervasive regulatory scheme governing their use on public roadways.
On the other hand, it is well settled that police must ordinarily obtain a warrant before searching an individual’s home. The protection of the home against warrantless searches extends past the four corners of the dwelling to the curtilage—those areas of the premises, like the porch and the garage, that are closely connected to the home. The Court recently confirmed the strength of the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the home in Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. 1 (2013), where it found that an officer had conducted an unreasonable search by bringing a drug-sniffing dog into the curtilage of the home. In an opinion grounded in common-law property principles, the Court held that, although homeowners may grant strangers an “implicit license” to enter their property and approach the door, intrusions by the government that exceed the scope of the license are searches requiring a warrant.
Affirming Collins’s conviction, the Supreme Court of Virginia held that the automobile exception is a categorical rule that applies even when a car is located on property that police could otherwise only search pursuant to a warrant. Since the officer had probable cause to search the motorcycle, the court concluded that the search was reasonable.
Put simply, the issue before the Court is which rule should trump the other: the warrant requirement applying to searches of private property or the exception to the warrant requirement applying to automobiles. Collins argues that the automobile exception should not apply to a vehicle parked on private property or curtilage. He relies heavily on Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443 (1971), in which the Court held unreasonable a search of a car parked in a private driveway. In that case, however, only a plurality of the Court concluded that the automobile exception should not apply to a car parked in a driveway; Justice Harlan, providing the fifth vote, declined to follow the plurality’s conclusion. Urging the Court to adopt the Coolidge plurality’s holding as binding precedent, Collins notes that the traditional rationales for the automobile exception do not apply to vehicles parked on private property. Cars parked on private property, for instance, are subject to fewer state regulations than those in use on public roads. Collins warns that the Virginia Supreme Court’s bright-line rule for applying the automobile exception would severely undercut the ironclad Fourth Amendment protections that have historically applied to private homes.
The state replies that the automobile exception has always operated as a bright-line rule, rather than a case-by-case determination. The categorical nature of the exception aligns with the justification for it, since the ready mobility of a vehicle effectively creates per se exigent circumstances that justify a departure from the warrant requirement no matter where the car is located. The probable cause requirement, the state argues, effectively guards against unjustified intrusions. Alternatively, however, the state argues that if the Court finds that the automobile exception does not apply on private property, it should limit this carve-out from the exception so that it operates only inside the home or other physical structures.
Collins might serve as a useful gauge of the Court’s recent trend toward property-based Fourth Amendment analysis and its continued viability following the death of Justice Scalia (the author of Jardines). Of course, even if the Court finds that the automobile exception does not apply within the home or curtilage, it might not be enough for Collins: Although the state assumed for the sake of argument that Collins’s motorcycle was located in the curtilage, it asks the Court to remand the issue to the state court if necessary to resolve the case.