Court to consider circumstances in which police may enter a home during an emergency

The Fourth Amendment generally requires police officers to obtain a warrant before they enter a home. But the Supreme Court has recognized several exceptions to that rule for emergencies. On Wednesday, Oct. 15, in Case v. Montana, the justices will consider how certain police must be that there is an emergency before they can enter a home without a warrant. Is it enough, as the Montana Supreme Court held, that police have only “reasonable suspicion” that there is an emergency? Or are police officers required to meet a higher bar and have probable cause to believe that there is an emergency?

In 2021, police officers went to William Case’s home in Anaconda, Montana, after Case’s former girlfriend told them that Case, who is an Army veteran, had threatened to commit suicide. When the girlfriend told Case that she planned to contact the police, he threatened to harm any police officers who might come to his home.

Three police officers went to Case’s house. They said that they did not think about getting a warrant to go into the house because “it wasn’t a criminal thing.” Instead, they said, they “were going in to assist him.”

The police officers knocked on the door, and yelled into an open window, but Case did not answer. They saw empty beer cans, a notepad (which “they believed to be a suicide note”), and an empty handgun holster on a table. They had also encountered Case before – including at the school where he worked, where he had threatened to commit suicide, and another time when police officers believed that Case was deliberately trying to provoke them into shooting him.

About 40 minutes after they arrived, the police officers decided to enter the home. They yelled loudly while moving through the house to alert Case to their presence. When Case pulled aside a closet curtain in an upstairs bedroom, one officer saw an object near Case’s waist that he believed was a gun and shot Case in the abdomen. Another officer who then entered the room found a handgun in a laundry hamper near Case.

Case was charged with assault on a police officer. He sought to exclude all evidence obtained after the police officers entered his house without a warrant. But the trial court denied that request, and a divided Montana Supreme Court upheld that ruling. It concluded that in cases that do not involve criminal investigations, police can enter a home without a warrant as long as such an entry is “reasonable given the facts and circumstances.”

Case came to the Supreme Court last December, asking the justices to take up his case, which they agreed to do in June.

In his brief at the Supreme Court, Case urges the justices to hold that “to make a warrantless home entry on emergency-aid grounds, the State must have probable cause to believe someone is in urgent need of help.” He emphasizes that as a general matter, police must have a warrant, supported by probable cause, to enter a home because homes are entitled to special protection under the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, he says, “the ‘physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.’”

Case notes that the court has carved out an exception to that general rule for emergencies, including the need to provide emergency assistance. Nearly 20 years ago, in Brigham City v. Stuart, Case writes, the court ruled that no warrant is required to enter a home if police “have an objectively reasonable basis for believing that an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury” – a standard, Case says, that is the same as requiring probable cause.

The Supreme Court, Case continues, “has never applied” the reasonable suspicion standard “to home entries.” Instead, he says, that standard has applied only to “‘minimally intrusive’ searches, typically involving brief stops in public places or vehicles” – locations that are very different from the home. “Adopting a reasonable suspicion standard here,” Case concludes, “would weaken Fourth Amendment protections at the very point where they should be strongest.”

If the probable cause standard is applied, Case continues, then the police officers’ entry into his home without a warrant was not justified. The officers “all knew that Case had a history of suicide threats that came to naught” and believed that he likely did not require emergency assistance but was instead “lying in wait for them to commit suicide by cop.” In fact, he stresses, the officers “waited roughly 40 minutes after their arrival to enter the home.”

Montana counters that Case’s argument would require the court to “reimagine the Fourth Amendment” and overrule Brigham City. First, it argues, the Fourth Amendment has never imposed a “rigid warrant or probable cause requirement.” Instead, it says, the key question is whether a search or seizure is reasonable. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brigham City, it contends, reflects this standard, applying the “objectively reasonable” standard in a case involving a warrantless entry to provide emergency aid – just as the Montana Supreme Court did here.

Second, Montana continues, requiring probable cause for warrantless entries to provide emergency assistance “doesn’t work” because that standard “is inextricably tied to criminal investigations and ‘belief of guilt,’ and so does not apply to noncriminal, noninvestigatory, emergency-aid situations.”   

The federal government also urges the justices to leave the Montana Supreme Court’s decision in place, echoing Montana’s contention that the Fourth Amendment requires only that police “avoid ‘unreasonable’ entries.” “As a historical matter,” the government contends, “that standard responds to overzealous policing of criminal wrongdoing, not government officials’ efforts to save lives in emergency situations. Indeed,” the government writes, “the Founding-era common law recognized a robust necessity doctrine, under which even cherished property rights could give way when life and limb were at stake.”  

Both sides warn that adopting the other’s rule could have dangerous consequences. If police officers could go into a home without a warrant and without probable cause, Case contends, it would “increase the risk of pretextual, mistaken, and tragic home entries.” And a “friend of the court” brief by civil liberties groups supporting Case adds that if the Montana Supreme Court’s decision were allowed to stand, it could also “open the door to warrantless searches of less historically protected areas like electronic devices and accounts, producing a devastating loss of privacy for all Americans.”

Montana, for its part, argues that requiring probable cause for a warrantless entry in cases like this one “will turn American homes into ‘the place where’ citizens who need urgent medical help ‘die[] alone and in agony,’” because law enforcement officials are often “first responders to calls involving suspected overdoses, strokes, diabetic comas, and suicide attempts” but will not have probable cause to believe that a crime has occurred. Local government groups reiterate this point in a “friend of the court” brief supporting Montana. “Applying a probable cause standard would subject police departments that proactively seek to prioritize mental health treatment over arrest to liability for failing to act, including those departments that adopt co-responder models which incorporate clinicians in their response teams.”

A decision in the case is expected by summer.