COURT SAYS VISITOR'S RIGHTS LESS PROTECTED THAN HOSTS

Turns on the length and purpose of two visitors' stay.

Short-term visitors invited into a home for business purposes don't
have the constitutional protections against unreasonable police
searches that their hosts enjoy, the Supreme Court concluded 5-4 Tuesday.

The court had ruled in a 1990 Minnesota case that guests who stay
overnight at someone else's dwelling are entitled to the same privacy
rights as the occupant.

But in a new criminal case from Minnesota, Chief Justice William
Rehnquist wrote for the court that short-term guests have no such
claim to privacy.

Three dissenters protested that the decision "undermines not only the
security of short-term guests, but also the security of the home resident."

Police now will be tempted "to pry into private dwellings without
warrant, to find evidence incriminating guests who do not rest there
through the night," wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was joined
by Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter.

The decision coincided with a general Supreme Court trend over the
last 20 years to give the police greater investigative leeway by
limiting Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches
and seizures.

"It was no surprise ... it's just another example of the Supreme
Court's limited view of the Fourth Amendment," observed Tracey Maclin,
a Boston University law professor who wrote a brief for the American
Civil Liberties Union in the case.

The case arose in 1994 when James Thielen, a police officer in the
Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of Eagan, investigated a tip that some
people were putting white powder into bags in a ground-floor apartment.

Without first obtaining a search warrant, Thielen went to the
apartment, peered through gaps in the closed blinds and later arrested
Kimberly Thompson, who leased the apartment, and her guests, Wayne
Thomas Carter and Melvin Johns.

All three were convicted of cocaine violations. Lawyers for Carter and
Johns appealed on grounds that the drug evidence against them should
have been suppressed as the product of an unreasonable search. The
Minnesota Supreme Court agreed, saying that Carter and Johns had "a
legitimate expectation of privacy" and that Thielen's search-by-
peering was unreasonable.

Thompson was not part of the appeal.

Rehnquist, in overruling the state court and restoring the
convictions, concluded that Carter and Johns had no privacy right and
so "any search which may have occurred did not violate their Fourth
Amendment rights."

They could not claim privacy protection, Rehnquist explained, because
they had a commercial purpose, stayed only a short time at the
apartment and had no previous connection with the occupant.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who furnished the critical fifth vote, said
he joined the majority because "its reasoning is consistent with my
view that almost all social guests have a legitimate expectation of
privacy, and hence protection against unreasonable searches, in their
host's home."

Kennedy's concurring opinion suggested that future claims of privacy
by short-time visitors could turn on whether they were on the premises
primarily for social or commercial purposes.

A host's poker-playing buddies might have privacy rights, but a pizza
deliveryman or an Avon lady probably would not.

The justices did not discuss such possibilities, though they used
those examples when the case was argued two months ago.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady