Justices back sanctity of home

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court strengthened the rights of residents to bar police from entering and searching their homes, but Wednesday’s ruling drew a sharp dissent from new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

In a 5-3 decision, the justices said a homeowner may prevent officers from looking for evidence without a warrant, even if a spouse and co-owner had consented to the search.

In the past, most courts had said the consent of one person was sufficient to permit a home search, but the Supreme Court had never decided what police should do when one owner allows the search at the same time another vetoes it.

The new chief justice wrote his  first written dissent, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

“Sharing space entails risk,” Roberts said, including the risk of having your secrets and private items exposed to the police. In the case before the court, the wife’s wish “to cooperate with the government” in a drug investigation should not be thwarted by giving her husband a “veto power,” Roberts said.

But the majority, led by Justice David Souter, cited the “ancient adage that a man’s home is his castle” and that even “the poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.”

On a more everyday level, Souter said “no sensible person” would think he was free to enter a house if one of its two occupants stood in the doorway and said “stay out.”

That, in sum, is what happened in the case of Scott and Janet Randolph, an estranged couple from Americus, Ga.

After leaving to stay with her parents in Canada, Janet Randolph returned to their Georgia home in July 2001 and shortly afterward called police to report her husband was a cocaine user. When police arrived at their house, she invited them inside and said they would find evidence of his drug use in their bedroom.

Scott Randolph, a lawyer, refused to let the officers in. They entered anyway and upstairs found a straw with a white powder that proved to be cocaine.

The Georgia courts suppressed the drug evidence in Randolph’s case because the husband had not consented to the search of his house. These judges noted that the police could have used information from the wife to obtain a search warrant from a magistrate.

Nonetheless, state prosecutors and the Bush administration urged the Supreme Court to reverse the Georgia ruling and to make clear that searches were permitted whenever one occupant consented.

The Supreme Court refused Wednesday and ruled the drug evidence was properly suppressed.

Souter said it would be different if police had come to protect Janet Randolph from physical abuse.

Police have an “undoubted right ... to enter in order to protect a victim,” he said.

It also would have been different had Scott Randolph not been there when police arrived. “We have to admit that we are drawing a fine line,” he said.