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Searches and Seizures: Private Action The Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches doesn't apply to private parties - it only applies to government entities. However, sometimes a private party can act as the government's agent or police may want to use the products of a private search or seizure that would have been unconstitutional if conducted by police itself. Opinion excerpts from this category deal with these kinds of murky scenarios.
Court Opinions on the Topic:
The Court now for the first time sanctions warrantless searches of closed or covered containers or packages whenever probable cause exists as a result of a prior private search. It declares, in fact, that governmental inspections following on the heels of private searches are not searches at all as long as the police do no more than the private parties have already done. [...] Undoubtedly, the fact that a private party has conducted a search "that might have been impermissible for a government agent cannot render otherwise reasonable official conduct unreasonable." But the fact that a repository of personal property previously was searched by a private party has never been used to legitimize governmental conduct that otherwise would be subject to challenge under the Fourth Amendment. [...] Nothing in our previous cases suggests, however, that the agents may proceed to conduct their own search of the same or lesser scope as the private search without first obtaining a warrant.
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If a private party breaks into a locked suitcase, a locked car, or even a locked house, observes incriminating information, returns the object of his search to its prior locked condition, and then reports his findings to the police, the majority apparently would allow the police to duplicate the prior search on the ground that the private search vitiated the owner's expectation of privacy. As JUSTICE STEVENS has previously observed, this conclusion cannot rest on the proposition that the owner no longer has a subjective expectation of privacy since a person's expectation of privacy cannot be altered by subsequent events of which he was unaware.
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The majority opinion is particularly troubling when one considers its logical implications. I would be hard-pressed to distinguish this case, which involves a private search, from (1) one in which the private party's knowledge, later communicated to the government, that a particular container concealed contraband and nothing else arose from his presence at the time the container was sealed; (2) one in which the private party learned that a container concealed contraband and nothing else when it was previously opened in his presence; or (3) one in which the private party knew to a certainty that a container concealed contraband and nothing else as a result of conversations with its owner. In each of these cases, the approach adopted by the Court today would seem to suggest that the owner of the container has no legitimate expectation of privacy in its contents and that government agents opening that container without a warrant on the strength of information provided by the private party would not violate the Fourth Amendment.
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It is difficult to understand how respondents can be said to have no expectation of privacy in a closed container simply because a private party has previously opened the container and viewed its contents.
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While state hospital employees, like other citizens, may have a duty to provide the police with evidence of criminal conduct that they inadvertently acquire in the course of routine treatment, when they undertake to obtain such evidence from their patients for the specific purpose of incriminating those patients, they have a special obligation to make sure that the patients are fully informed about their constitutional rights, as standards of knowing waiver require.
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