In an earlier case,
Michigan v. Summers, decided in the early 1980s, the Supreme Court held that when police are
executing a search warrant the police are entitled to temporarily hold
people they discover on the premises even if they do not have a reason
to suspect them of engaging in any wrongdoing.
This issue was tested in 2005 when police in Wyandanch, NY arrested a man,
Chunon Bailey, even though he had already left the premises before any
police arrived to search the building. Furthermore, Mr. Bailey was not
stopped on the property in question, but was instead found a mile away
from the house. Police officers who stopped Bailey found evidence that
linked him to drugs and a weapon found in the house they were sent to search.
On Tuesday, the Court voted 6-3 to refuse to extend the principle laid
out in 1981 to the facts of the present case. The justices agreed that
the distance, in both time and geography, were too great to allow police
the same authority found in the previously decided case. Justice Kennedy
wrote that the practical necessities for why an officer might need to
detain someone on the premises during a search disappear when that person
is a great distance from the scene of the search.
Kennedy elaborated on the problem with allowing such a detention away from
the premises. He said that the extraordinary intrusion on personal liberty
would be even greater in such a circumstance given that the person would
be stopped in public and then be forced to go back to the premises of
the search, giving an outward appearance that the subject had been arrested.
The case resulted in a very odd voting alliance among the justices. Besides
Kennedy, Roberts, and Scalia joined with Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor
and Kagan to form the majority. Thomas and Alito, two staunch conservatives,
joined Justice Breyer in dissenting.
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