HIGH COURT REFINES RULES ON SEARCHES STANDARDS DIFFER FOR HOSTS, SOME
SHORT-TERM VISITORS

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

Police 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, joined by Justices John Paul
Stevens and David Souter.

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

The case arose in 1994 when James Thielen, a police officer in the
Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of Eagan, investigated a tip that 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 said, 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.