High Court Will Rule on Privacy in the Garbage

It’s not every day that the contents of a West Hollywood trash bin make their way to the Supreme Court, but that’s what happened Tuesday.

The justices, acting on an appeal from the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, agreed to examine further the contents of that trash bin--and garbage in general.

Specifically, the high court will decide whether garbage tossed into an apartment-building trash bin has been “abandoned” or whether the person who tossed it there retains a “reasonable expectation of privacy” against having it searched.

This case arose in 1983 when Los Angeles police got an anonymous tip that Peter Rooney was running an illegal bookmaking operation from his apartment on North Flores Street. Officers went to the address and found an overflowing trash bin in the garage. Searching through the trash, they found sheets with Rooney’s name on them that listed wagers on football games. After checking further, the officers arrested him.

Part of Household Effects

Before a trial could start, however, a state judge and a California appeals court ruled that the evidence from the trash bin could not be used in court. The Fourth Amendment says that people are to “be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and state judges concluded that the trash bin was part of Rooney’s household effects. Only by obtaining a search warrant based on “probable cause” could the police examine the trash, the appeals court ruled.

The district attorney’s office, in its appeal to the high court, said the California judges had misconstrued both the Fourth Amendment and the status of garbage.

“We think it’s garbage in and garbage out,” said Arnold T. Guminski, deputy district attorney in Los Angeles. The state court’s ruling “transformed what (Rooney) thought was garbage when (it was) placed in the bin into constitutionally protected property when taken out by police.”

The case, he said, gives the high court “an opportunity to make it clear that the Fourth Amendment was adopted for more noble purposes than the protection of discarded garbage.”

Guminski said he hopes that the Supreme Court will rule that garbage in general, whether in a communal bin or when placed at the curb side of a private home, is “abandoned” property and can be inspected by police.

But an attorney for Rooney disputed the notion that a person “abandons” his garbage when it is placed in a can.

“A citizen abandons his garbage solely and only to his garbage man,” attorney Arthur Lewis of Los Angeles said in his brief to the court. “We accept the ever-present possibility that four-legged members of the canine and feline species, rodents and other scavengers may find intrigue and metabolic sustenance from a noisome garbage can. It is the two-legged human wearing the police badge that the average American citizen does not take into account as being interested in searching his garbage can.”

Lewis told the court that the citizen should be protected from a policeman who “rummages through the intimacies of personal life, be it discarded love letters, used contraceptives, discarded clothing or any other similar articles.”

The competing arguments apparently caught the interest of the justices. While 155 appeals were rejected without comment Tuesday, the trash bin dispute (California vs. Rooney, 85-1835) was one of seven cases that the high court said it would decide.