Court hears arguments on when police may enter a home without a warrant

The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared ready to side with police officers in Case v. Montana, a Montana man’s challenge to a 2021 incident that left him with a gunshot wound to the abdomen after police entered his home. The police officers say that they only went into the man’s home to help him, not because they believed that he was committing a crime. The question before the justices was how certain police officers must be that there is an emergency before, as in this case, going into a house without a warrant. After approximately 75 minutes of debate, the justices signaled that they were likely to give police officers more leeway in such situations, rather than adopting the more stringent standard that the Montana man, William Case, advanced.

The dispute began when Case’s former girlfriend called police officers in Anaconda, Montana, to tell them that Case, who is an Army veteran, had both threatened to commit suicide and to harm any police officers who came to his house.

The police officers who went to Case’s home were already familiar with him. He had threatened to commit suicide once at the school where he worked; on at least one other occasion, police officers believed that Case was intentionally trying to provoke them into shooting him. The officers said that they did not consider getting a warrant to enter Case’s home because they were simply trying to help him, and it wasn’t a criminal matter.

Upon their arrival at Case’s home, the police officers knocked on the door and yelled into an open window, but they did not get an answer. When they looked through a window, they saw (among other things) a notepad – which contained what “they believed to be a suicide note” – and an empty handgun holster.

About 40 minutes later, the police officers entered Case’s home. In an upstairs bedroom, one officer saw Case with an object at his waist that the officer believed was a gun. He shot Case in the abdomen.

Prosecutors charged Case with assault on a police officer. Case argued that because police had entered his house without a warrant, the evidence obtained from that entry should not be admitted at his trial. But the state courts rejected that contention, holding that when a case does not involve a criminal investigation, police do not need a warrant to enter a home as long as the entry is reasonable. Case then appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed in June to weigh in.

Representing Case, lawyer Fred Rowley stressed that the Supreme Court “has never allowed state officials to force their way into someone’s home without a warrant or probable cause. It should not start now,” he said.

By contrast, Montana Solicitor General Christian Corrigan emphasized that “the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches, not all warrantless ones.” Case’s request to impose a probable cause requirement, he argued, “has no basis in text, no footing in history, and no support in this Court’s exigency precedents.” Indeed, he suggested, “a rule demanding probable cause of peril would force officers to stand outside a dying man’s door, calculating legal thresholds instead of saving his life.”

Rowley’s suggestion that police officers must have probable cause to believe that someone in the house is “seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury” drew skepticism from both sides of the bench.

Justice Clarence Thomas asked whether courts “normally use [the] probable cause standard outside of the criminal context.”

Chief Justice John Roberts observed that “when we talk about probable cause, we use it as a shorthand” for probable cause that a crime is occurring. What, he asked Rowley, does “probable cause” stand for in this context? He later asked why the standard wouldn’t be “something like probable concern or reasonable concern? It seems to me that you’re taking a totally different context and applying these things just because we’re familiar with them and because authorities are involved.”

Justice Elena Kagan also expressed concerns about using the probable cause standard outside of the criminal context. She told Rowley that “one of the things that strikes me here is [that] the term ‘probable cause’ is not itself self-defining, and most of the way we know what probable cause is is because we have a body of case law that talks about it, and it talks about it in an investigatory criminal context. And in this context, that way of figuring out whether there’s probable cause just disappears because that’s not the context we’re in.”

“So I guess I’m wondering,” Kagan continued, “whether then taking a term from a context which has a body of precedent that is pretty much irrelevant to this one . . . seems like a bad idea, and maybe what we did in” cases like Brigham City v. Stuart, in which the court ruled that no warrant is required to enter a home if police “have an objectively reasonable basis for believing that somebody needs emergency help,” “is exactly what we should have done.” “It’s just sort of a different inquiry,” Kagan reasoned, “but it does focus on what’s important. Do you have to have an objectively reasonable basis for believing that somebody needs emergency help?”

Justice Samuel Alito worried aloud that adopting Case’s probable cause standard could keep police officers from responding to emergencies. “It seems to me that if the police could not enter this house based on the facts that they knew,” he said to Rowley, “then I don’t know when the police are ever going to be able to enter a house to prevent somebody from committing suicide.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson echoed Alito’s concerns. She pushed back against Rowley’s contention that police officers had “extensive experience with Mr. Case … from which they drew the inference that he was unlikely to kill himself, [and] that what he was likely to do instead was to provoke” the police into shooting him. Case, Jackson noted, “had a long history of threatening suicide, whether it be by cop or whether it be on his own or whatever,” and police had “a long conversation, detailed, specific, with the girlfriend about circumstances that look like they’re creating a pretty significant emergency.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the police officers had “thought about it carefully and decided that the risk was sufficiently high, to Justice Jackson’s point, and that [the] harm that would occur was sufficiently substantial that they should go in. And, by the way,” Kavanaugh added, the police officers were “going in at great risk to themselves” – “to help someone,” rather than “pretextually looking for a crime.”

With fairly broad agreement that police should have more leeway than the probable cause standard, the debate also included a discussion of what should happen next in the case if the Montana Supreme Court had not applied the “objectively reasonable” standard outlined in the court’s decision in Brigham City. Some justices, like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, indicated that the case should return to the state court so that it “can decide, not us, on these facts whether it meets the Brigham standard” – a suggestion with which Rowley agreed. 

Thomas also seemed to agree. “Isn’t it our normal practice,” he asked Corrigan, “if we’re not certain about [the] standard and we state a new standard, that we send it back?”

But Alito countered that if the justices were to send the case back to the Montana Supreme Court, it might suggest to police officers and their attorneys that “if the Supreme Court thinks that this is even a close case … we don’t know when you can ever go in and try to prevent somebody from committing suicide, unless you literally see through the window the guy has got a gun to his head or they see a dead body on the floor.” The result, Alito posited, would be that police officers would opt to “do the safe thing” and say that “[w]e’re just not going in unless we’ve got absolutely ironclad proof.”

Gorsuch similarly indicated to Corrigan that even if it wasn’t clear what standard the state court had applied, it might “help to provide guidance to confused lower courts for us to use a concrete set of facts” – such as this case – “to explain what that means.”

Zoe Jacoby, the assistant to the U.S. solicitor general who argued on behalf of the federal government, which supported Montana, agreed with Alito that the Supreme Court should apply the “objectively reasonable” standard to this case rather than sending it back to the Montana court. “[I]f you give … officers and lower courts the impression that there is any doubt about whether the facts here satisfy the Brigham City test,” she said, “I think that’s going to lead to a lot of confusion and a lot of concern that officers can’t make entries based on the type of information.”

A decision in the case is expected by the end of June or early July.