Case Story: Protecting the Sanctity of a Client’s Home

When the United States declared its independence and the Founders wrote the Constitution, few things were clearer than their desire avoid the abuses of their former ruler: the British government.

To them, that meant making sure that citizens were safe from unreasonable searches and seizures, particularly in places they considered sacrosanct. Which meant protecting the home and the area surrounding it with a requirement that officers have a warrant before coming onto those areas and searching them.

As we approach our country’s 250th birthday, those protections couldn’t be more significant or more important.

That’s what this case is about.

The Clay County Sheriff’s Office arrived at our client’s property believing that he had committed game and fish violations. And even though the only information they had when they arrived was a citizen’s complaint, they were determined to prove it—due process be damned.

But what law enforcement officers can do in the moment without the watchful eyes of a judge is very different from what a judge will allow in court.

In our legal challenge, we showed the judge that the officers’ actions here were completely outside the bounds of the Constitution and that their resulting work deserved to be excluded in any further proceedings. Thankfully, the judge agreed and suppressed any evidence obtained by their warrantless intrusions onto our client’s property.

We got our client’s firearms back and helped him avoid the most serious charges he was facing. Here’s how we did it.

The Charges

Our client owns a large, rural property in Clay County, Minnesota. On it sits his home, a number of outbuildings that store personal belongings, and items belonging to customers for a business he runs.

The property is mostly fenced, with a driveway running through it that connects a gravel road to his home and continues on through the remainder of the property to the last outbuilding. The property is surrounded by trees that provide additional privacy.

At around dusk on an October night, law enforcement received a report of an individual who had just shot from a rural gravel road at something—the caller was not sure what. The caller indicated that they drove by the suspect vehicle, and despite not being able to provide a description of the driver or other occupants, were somehow able to grab a license plate.

When a deputy and state trooper arrived on scene, they located neither a vehicle nor any deceased animals or humans. But when they searched the license plate provided, the registered address led them to our client’s home.

Upon arrival, the officers pulled up the driveway and parked alongside our client’s home. At the same time, our client approached the deputy, introduced himself, and began speaking with him.

Immediately, the deputy took on an accusatory tone. He asked several times whether our client had shot anything, and the first two times our client told him he had not. Eventually, however, our client told the deputy he had shot a deer and that it was lying out in the field.

The deputy responded by patting our client down and placing him in the back of his squad vehicle. At this point, the deputy read our client his Miranda rights, asked again where the deer was, and asked whether anyone else was present on the property. Our client told the deputy that the deer was out in the field and that no one else lived there.

As the first officer was speaking with our client, the other officer had found the reported vehicle and began walking around it, looked inside, and saw a number of guns. When the two officers convened, one suggested that they walk down the gravel driveway to the other end of the property, some 400 yards away, to “go check out where our client came from.”

So that’s what they did.

The two walked all the way down the driveway to a large pole barn that had a pickup parked outside. There were no doors on the pole barn, so they had a clear view inside from the driveway. When the deputy looked inside with his flashlight, he saw a deer carcass hanging from a backhoe. They were also able to see blood on the tailgate of the pickup.

But remember, none of this was visible from where the officers originally were on our client’s property. Instead, it only became visible once they moved further onto the property. In other words, the only way they saw evidence of our client’s guilt was by walking onto his property without his permission.

After seeing the deer carcass, the officers left the pole barn, walked back up to the house, and re-engaged with our client. They also called Game and Fish, but their closest officer was over an hour away. So after speaking with our client a second time, the officers again walked all the way down to the pole barn for reasons unknown.

This time, they encountered two individuals standing by the truck that had not been there before. After some commands to get on the ground, they eventually got those individuals detained and went back to speak with our client yet again. They learned that those individuals were contractors who had been working on putting sliding doors on the pole barn.

Nearly 90 minutes after our client was detained, a Game and Fish officer finally arrived on scene and began questioning him further about the incident. Knowing that police had already located the deer, firearms, and transport vehicle, our client capitulated and gave the conservation officer all of the details.

The conservation officer then prepared a consent to search form for the reported vehicle, the pickup that was parked outside the pole barn, and the pole barn itself. Before signing, our client asked what would happen if he didn’t sign. The response was that the officers would just go and get a warrant.

Again, knowing that police had already discovered incriminating information, our client gave up and signed. But at the point he did, no officer had started filling out an application for a search warrant, nor even talked about getting one.

Ultimately, the conservation officer seized five firearms, four of which were not used in the incident at all, and our client was charged with several criminal offenses. He hired us and told us what happened, and we immediately knew his rights had been violated.

So we moved to suppress everything the officers found during their foray onto his property.

The Challenge

When we received discovery, the evidence matched what our client had told us from the beginning: the police had violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

To remedy this, we moved to suppress any evidence obtained during officers’ initial conversation with our client as well as any evidence obtained after they walked down the property’s driveway to the pole barn.

The court held a hearing on our motion, and the state brought all three officers to testify.

Remember from above, peoples’ homes are entitled to special constitutional protections because we have a great expectation of privacy in them. In fact, judges often call a man’s home “his castle.” And one’s “castle” actually extends to certain areas outside the home, referred to as curtilage, because we have an expectation of privacy there as well.

That’s important for what the police did here.

When law enforcement officers go to someone’s home, they have the ability to conduct what’s called a “knock and talk.” In other words, they can enter a person’s curtilage to approach the home, look for the homeowner, and try to speak with them with their consent.

That’s what the law allows.

But the law doesn’t allow them a general license to go searching around private property without a warrant or an exception to the warrant requirement.

That was the crux of our argument here.

One of the limited exceptions to the warrant requirement is what’s called a safety sweep. After detaining an individual, officers have the limited ability to search an area for any other dangers they reasonably believe might be present.

And that’s what the officers here attempted to claim.

When the state asked them at the hearing, the two original officers claimed they went down our client’s driveway the first time to see whether anyone else was present on the property, and whether they could pose a threat to them.

That didn’t make sense to us.

For one, our client’s name was the only name listed on the property when officers pulled up the address prior to arriving. Second, our client told officers that he was the only one that lived there and the only one present on the property. And third, there was no separate indication that anyone else would have been present on the property.

We got the officers to admit that all this was true on cross-examination. We also got them to acknowledge that they had not begun applying for a warrant, and had no intention of doing so when they walked down the driveway, either.

The officers also admitted that they had our client detained for over an hour before the Game and Fish officer even showed up, and that absent their discovery of the deer in the pole barn, they would not have known it was on the property when that officer arrived.

That was because our client’s consent to search could arguably serve as a “get out of jail free card” for the police’s illegal conduct. So we had to make it clear that the illegal taint of the original search extended to our client’s later purported consent.

Finally, the Game and Fish officer admitted that the only reason he would have asked for our client’s consent to search was because of the work the deputy and the trooper had already done before he arrived. He also admitted that when he told our client that if he didn’t consent, they’d just get a warrant, he was not in the process of obtaining one, either.

The Result

After the hearing was done, we submitted briefing and waited for the court’s decision.

When we received it, we were elated.

The court determined that when the deputy and trooper walked down our client’s driveway, they violated his constitutional rights because the driveway was a part of the curtilage to his home. According to the court, the officers had already located our client, which meant their limited license to be on the curtilage had expired.

The court also found that the officers did not have a warrant and did not have any acceptable reason to go wandering onto our client’s property without one. Despite the officer’s claims that they were checking for their safety, the court didn’t buy it, thanks to our thorough cross-examinations and briefing.

Another important piece of the court’s decision was the finding that our client’s consent to search was coerced.

According to the court, the fact that our client had been detained for over an hour, the presence of numerous officers, and the fact that he was told they would just get a warrant if he didn’t consent were significant.

But the most significant evidence to making that determination was the fact that the deputy and trooper had already illegally discovered damning evidence, which was the only thing that led to our client’s confession to the Game and Fish officer and eventual consent to search.

For all these reasons, the court suppressed all evidence obtained after our client was placed in the squad vehicle. All that left the state with was a citizen’s report that they heard a firearm being shot on the road and our client’s admission to shooting a deer.

While we didn’t get the case dismissed entirely, that’s not always the way that we win.

What we did do was hamper the state’s ability to pursue a prosecution on the most serious charges our client was facing.

When our client contacted us, he was looking down the barrel of a number of charges carrying maximum jail terms of 365 days, the loss of several firearms, and the loss of hunting and fishing privileges for three years.

What he wound up with was a conviction for a low-level misdemeanor offense, no jail time, no supervised probation, all of his firearms back, and no loss of hunting and fishing privileges at all.

The Takeaway

When police come looking for you—whether you did it or not—you have rights.

Important rights.

Constitutional rights.

Those rights are the backbone of freedom and liberty in our country, and they’re key to the work we do here as a firm.

But those rights can be complex and intertwine with many escape hatches for officers to avoid accountability.

Thankfully, we understand those escape hatches, too.

It comes down to this: everyone deserves privacy and liberty, regardless of whether they’re suspected of (or have actually committed) wrongdoing. When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution, they decided the government would need to have great justification to intrude on that privacy and liberty.

If you feel like your privacy or liberty have been infringed by the government, reach out to us.

We’ll go to bat for you and ensure that those rights are protected.

Like we did here. And like we’ll do again.