Decius wrote:
] ] It's a groundbreaking court decision that legal experts
] ] say will affect everyone: Police officers in Louisiana no
] ] longer need a search or arrest warrant to conduct a brief
] ] search of your home or business.
]
] Holy Shit!!@#

The statement above (from the [local television!] news article) vastly oversimplifies this case. The typical viewer of WDSU channel 6 in New Orleans is not going to bother to read the full opinion, and WDSU wants a juicy teaser for their nightly news program, so they say things like this.

You can read the case at

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/5th/0230629cr0p.pdf

where you'll find that the circumstances of this case make it far less sweeping than the above lead paragraph would imply.

My quick reading suggests that the crux of this case lies in two questions: 1) did the second resident (not the person wanted for questioning) have the authority to grant access to the bedroom? 2) is it reasonable to expect a person to be hiding in a closet?

The officers were admitted to the home by a resident. The officers were told that the person wanted for questioning was asleep in his bedroom. The bedroom door was open, and the person was not in bed. The officers entered, found no one standing in plain sight, and opened the closet door to see if he was hiding in the closet.

If the guns had been stored inside a locked, closed cabinet, the contents of which are not in plain view (that is, for example, the cabinet does not include a glass window on the front), then this case could well have turned out very differently. It is not reasonable to expect someone to be hiding in a cabinet.

Decius also wrote:
] This is a little hard to cipher through. The crimes the perp
] in question is accused of cloud the issue. Basically, these
] two officers show up at a residence looking to question
] someone. They have no warrants of any kind. Someone lets them
] into the residence, so they go back to the room the person
] they are looking for lives in. The person isn't there. So they
] go in and have a look around. They find evidence and submit
] it.

Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. They found the guns during the initial walkthrough, but they did not confiscate them at that time. Shortly thereafter, they found the man hiding in the woods. During questioning, they talked to him about the guns and asked for permission to search the residence. He then signed a written waiver giving them permission to return to the interior of the home and search the premises. They took the weapons into evidence at that time.

Even if they hadn't seen the guns on the first pass -- say they'd stopped at the bedroom door and turned around to look outside -- they would likely have found the guns on the subsequent (explictly permitted) search. The man gave them permission to search the house even after they'd told him they knew about the guns.

RE: TheNewOrleansChannel.com - News - Court Opens Door To Searches Without Warrants