Justices Struggle With Police Entry For Safety Checks | Will The Right Finally Be Able To Take SCOTUS For Granted?
March 25, 2021
YOU CAN LET YOURSELF IN
|Robert Barnes with The Washington Post reports the Supreme Court yesterday “struggled” with when police can enter a home without a warrant to conduct safety or suicide checks. Justices expressed views on both sides of the argument for relaxing requirements for when a police officer can enter a person’s home. But Barnes notes JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH “seemed particularly concerned about hampering police who have been warned someone is contemplating suicide.” JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS wanted to know where a wellness check was prohibited in the Constitution and JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT posed an unfortunate hypothetical at one point and asked if police could break up a gathering of unmasked people in a city where coronavirus cases were spiking but masks weren’t mandated. Barnes writes, “It was hard not to recall the criticism PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP received for a Rose Garden event nominating Barrett in which a number of attendees later were diagnosed with the virus.”
WHO NEEDS A WARRANT ANYWAY
|John Kruzel with The Hill also reports on yesterday’s case at SCOTUS concerning the Constitution’s warrant requirement. He notes, “For nearly five decades the courts have allowed police, when acting as community caretakers, to dispense with the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement while carrying out reasonable searches or seizures related to motor vehicles. Wednesday’s case placed the issue in a novel context, asking the justices whether to extend the so-called community caretaking exception to the home, which has long enjoyed special protections under the law. The case raised similar questions about what kinds of situations would permit the police, without a warrant, to force someone to undergo a psychological evaluation or relinquish their guns to authorities.”
TAKEN FOR GRANTED
|For her column this week, Linda Greenhouse with The New York Times writes about the case that was before justices regarding a California law that allows union organizers access to private property to meet with farmworkers. She argues it’s one of the most important cases of the current term because it asks a very important question: “whether, after years of disappointment, the political right may finally be able to take the Supreme Court for granted.”
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
|In The Atlantic, Eduardo M. Peñalver also discusses the Cedar Point Nursery case out of California and notes that ever since the state law allowing labor organizers onto commercial farms went on the books in 1975, agribusiness has hated it. “Previous challenges to the California law have been uniformly rejected by state and federal courts, and the plaintiffs in Cedar Point failed to persuade any of the lower courts to invalidate the law. And yet, the farmers may now have found just the audience they need in the Supreme Court’s new 6–3 conservative majority. If the court does endorse the legal theory that the farmers advocate, the consequences could reshape American law for decades to come. This is because the theory rests on the dramatic claim that any government regulation allowing people not invited by the owner to enter private property is equivalent to the government installing a sidewalk or a pipeline on private land.”