Assume the following facts:
A criminal suspect is arrested, with ample probable cause. An inventory search post-arrest yields a receipt for payment for a room at a self-storage facility. The receipt doesn’t indicate room number. Employees don’t recognize photographs of the suspect. The suspect isn’t connected with any other building, office, house, et cet., but is believed to have stolen property within his control. Suspect has declined to speak other than to ask for counsel.
There are 100 rooms at the storage facility.
Is this probable cause for a warrant? How to retrieve the stolen property and obtain relevant evidence without violating someone’s constitutional rights?
We don’t think there’s an easy answer. But we hope to address this problem – and electronic analogues – in future posts. Comments and guest posts welcome.
My unhelpful response is that it may serve as probable cause for a warrant to search the suspect’s unit; but, I do not think it would support issuance of a warrant to search other locked storage units anymore than law enforcement would be permitted to search all the apartments in an apartment building because the police were unsure which apartment the suspect inhabits.
Further inquiry might determine that the storage unit lease grants the lessor the right to gain entrance in furtherance of a police investigation. In that event, the lessor may be permitted to afford such access to law enforcement without the necessity of resolving constitutional considerations.
Craig,
Thanks for spotting an issue – the contractual issues (and perhaps state law or municipal regulations) are, in a real-world case, definitely things we’d want to look at – post haste. Your characterization of your own comment as “unhelpful,” however, is off the mark.
It’s my intention to take the same fact-pattern and alter it in two ways (parallel, not combined):
(1) assume there’s a plausible safety issue – for instance, chemicals which could be used to make an explosive;
(2) Assume no safety or terrorism issue – and change the storage center to an ISP.
For present purposes, it’s fact variant (2) that I want to examine closely and about which I’d like to generate further conversation.
Jon