Thoughts on Case v. Montana and the Standards for the Emergency Aid Exception

The Fourth Amendment returns.

It's been a long, long time since the Supreme Court heard argument in a real Fourth Amendment case.  This Wednesday, the Court will finally break the spell with argument in Case v. Montana.  I thought I would offer some thoughts on it. (Full disclosure: I have consulted with the lawyers for the petitioner in the case, although the thoughts here are my own.)

Here's the context. In Brigham City v. Stuart (2006), officers entered a home to break up a fight in which one person was being badly beaten in view of the officer from outside. The Court ruled that an "objectively reasonable basis for believing that an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury" allows a warrantless entry into the home. In such circumstances, the thinking runs, there is a strong and immediate government interest in saving the life and preventing further injury of the person being attacked.

On the other hand, in Caniglia v. Strom (2021), the Supreme Court held that the community caretaking exception to the warrant requirement does not allow entry into a person's home.  In Caniglia, officers had entered the home of a suicidal man and taken his guns.  Although the Court had recognized a community caretaking exception in an earlier case that allowed the entry into a car to prevent a gun from falling into the wrong hands,  Caniglia ruled that this exception did not apply to allow entry into a home.  Justice Thomas's short majority opinion in Caniglia was followed by concurrences from Justices Alito and Kavanaugh that speculated about circumstances in which entry into a home to aid might be allowed under other exceptions to the warrant requirement, such the emergency aid exception of Brigham City.

The Case case—confusing name, I know—picks up where Caniglia and Brigham City left off.  The facts here are somewhere in between those two precedents. William Case, who lived in a small town in Montana, called his ex-girlfriend and threatened suicide. The police in the small town all knew Case and his mental health problems, and they had reason to believe from past interactions that he was planning "suicide by cop"— a shoot out with the police when they checked on him. Officers eventually decided to enter his home with their guns drawn.

The question in Case is the legality of the officers' entry, and in particular, what's the specific standard for entry under the emergency aid exception. Case argues that entry under Brigham City's objectively reasonable evidence standard requires probable cause of an emergency.  The state argues that probable cause isn't needed, and that all the officers need is an objectively reasonable belief that they needed to enter to render emergency medical aid.

As I read the briefs, the dispute here is really a choice between a very general standard (was the belief about the need to enter to render emergency aid a reasonable belief) or a somewhat more rule-based approach (was there probable cause of an emergency).  Do you keep the standard more abstract, leaving it at case-by-case reasonableness, or do you provide more guidance and root that in the known standard of probable cause?

Here are the two things I will be listening for at Wednesday's argument:

(1) The role of common law history versus the role of pragmatism.

As I blogged last December, back at the cert stage, one of the things that makes Case unusual is that there's actually a lot of common law authority on the standards for emergency entry.  A key question to look out for is how much the Justices focus on that authority. As Justice Scalia emphasized in Kyllo v. United States, the Fourth Amendment must be interpreted to ensure "preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." And the common law standards of search and seizure have long provided the Fourth Amendment baseline of what is "reasonable," especially where there is "precise guidance from the founding era," as Riley put it.  Given the originalist turn at the Court in recent years, that history may matter a lot.

But there's a very different approach Justices might take instead. The concurrences in Caniglia suggest that at least some Justices are likely to have quite strong instincts about what kinds of entries officers should be able to make.  I think it's fair to say that those views are rooted not in history but instead in the Justices' view of common sense and what amounts to reasonable and sensible police practices.  It's not obvious that the history and a particular Justice's view of sensible police practices will happen to line up.  So one thing to watch for is what particular Justices will care about more.  Are they focused on figuring out what the 18th Century authorities say, or are they focused on finding a standard that matches their intuitions about what the police should and should not be able to do?

(2) How important is the "emergency" part of the emergency aid exception?

A challenge of Caniglia is that it wasn't entirely clear what the Court was doing when it ruled that the community caretaking exception did not apply to entries into the home.  Was Caniglia saying that a real emergency was needed to enter the home, and that community caretaking concerns were irrelevant to the lawfulness of a warrantless entry?  Or was Caniglia just saying that community-caretaking-related concerns had to be addressed under the emergency aid exception?  Everyone wants short opinions until you actually get one, it seems to me.  Caniglia's brevity left a lot unclear.

The reason that matters, I think, is that the variable of time tends to challenge the notion of an emergency.  In Brigham City, the officer watched and observed the victim being brutally beaten; obviously, time was of the essence.  Wait even just a few more seconds, and the victim could be injured worse or even killed.  In Caniglia, by contrast, there was no hurry at all. The suicidal man was not home when officers entered to take the guns.  But between those facts you can imagine a lot of scenarios in which there isn't much of a pressing need for immediate entry in terms of time but there may be a government interest in entering nonetheless.  A big question there is how much does the time element matter.  Is the emergency aid exception really focused on emergencies, when time is of the essence?  Or is it the exception more about countervailing government interests in warrantless entry, even if, as a formal matter, the community caretaking exception is not available?

As always, stay tuned.