HIGH COURT: TEMPORARY GUESTS HAVE FEWER RIGHTS

People who are temporarily in someone else's home to conduct business may
not invoke the Constitution's protection against unreasonable police
searches, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday by a vote of 5-4.

The decision overturned a 1997 ruling of the Minnesota Supreme Court, which
set aside the narcotics convictions of two men who had spent several hours
in a third person's apartment preparing cocaine for sale.

A police officer, acting on a tip, watched the activity in the basement
apartment through a gap in closed Venetian blinds. Although the officer
later obtained a search warrant, the Minnesota court ruled that the initial
observation was an illegal search that the two men, as guests of the
resident, were entitled to challenge.

Although "society does not recognize as valuable the task of bagging
cocaine," the state court said, "we conclude that society does recognize as
valuable the right of property owners or leaseholders to invite persons
into the privacy of their homes to conduct a common task, be it legal or
illegal activity."

Range of distinctions

In his majority opinion Tuesday, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said that
the men had no "legitimate expectation of privacy" in a home that was not
theirs and that was "simply a place to do business."There was no need to
decide whether the officer's observation amounted to a search, he said,
because the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and
seizures did not apply.

The Supreme Court's precedents in this area have made a "legitimate
expectation of privacy" the test for determining whether someone is
entitled to invoke the Fourth Amendment.

In a 1990 case, Minnesota vs. Olson, the court ruled that an overnight
guest had such an expectation and could claim Fourth Amendment rights. By
contrast, a 1978 ruling, Rakas vs. Illinois, held that automobile
passengers were not entitled to raise a Fourth Amendment objection to the
seizure of incriminating evidence if they owned neither the evidence nor
the car, even if they had a right to be in the car at the time.

Judge Rehnquist, in an opinion joined by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor,
Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, said that in this
case, the "purely commercial nature of the transaction," combined with the
men's short stay and lack of previous connection to the apartment's
resident, made their situation "closer to that of one simply permitted on
the premises," much like the passengers in the 1978 decision.

But in a dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the case was
much closer to the 1990 ruling about the overnight guest. The majority
opinion overlooked "the unique importance of the home - the most essential
bastion of privacy recognized by law," she said, adding that the logic of
shielding an overnight guest's privacy "extends to shorter-term guests as
well."

Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter joined the dissenting opinion.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski