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GungnirSniper writes "By a six to three vote, the US Supreme Court has ruled police may enter a home if one occupant allows it even after another previously did not consent.
In the decision on Tuesday in Fernandez v. California, the Court determined since the suspect, Walter Fernandez, was removed from the home and arrested, his live-in girlfriend's consent to search was enough. The Court had addressed a similar case in 2006 in Georgia v. Randolph, but found that since the suspect was still in the home and against the search, it should have kept authorities from entering.
RT.com notes "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined in the minority by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, marking a gender divide among the Justices in the case wrote the dissenting opinion, calling the decision a blow to the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits 'unreasonable searches and seizures.'"
Could this lead to police arresting people objecting to searches to remove the need for warrants?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday February 28 2014, @08:18PM
I'm sure you'll go to +5 so I'll save my mod points. You are absolutely right, though the way I heard the saying was "bad facts make bad law."
Case in point: Smith v. Maryland. This is the case upon which Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act is predicated, and is the substance behind NSA shills saying that the programs are "legal." It was one of those bad facts/bad law cases -- Smith was a real creep. He robbed a woman and then stalked her. Everyone wanted to see him go to jail. The issue there was whether the police should have gotten a warrant to put a pen register on Smith's phone. They definitely could have gotten a warrant, but instead did not and just asked AT&T to do it. The Supreme Court dusted off the Third Party Doctrine (share info with a third party and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy), refused to exclude the evidence, and made sure Smith did his time.
Three decades later, this is the basis for all of the NSA masspionage we see today. Note that Smith involved a specific person, undergoing a specific investigation, where probable cause to search him or his records certainly existed. That factual matrix however, has been utterly divorced from the Third Party Doctrine so that today, that case is seen as the legal basis for searching the general population, in the absence of any specific investigation, in circumstances in which there is no probable cause at all.
Given the pattern Constitutional abuse engaged by our government entities, I fully expect that this case will be divorced from its particular ugly facts, and turned into a principal where police can go occupant shopping to avoid the warrant requirement.