WASHINGTON (CN) - Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch formed an uncommon team on Tuesday when both questioned government attempts to undercut citizen protections against police searches.
Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, and Gorsuch, a Trump pick, appeared on the same side at oral arguments on Tuesday in two cases concerning law enforcement’s ability to search vehicles.
The first case raised the question of whether a man driving a car his fiancée rented had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the car, while the second probed the limits of a recognized exemption to warrant requirements when police seek to search vehicles.
Government lawyers argued in both cases that law enforcement should be free to search the vehicles, but Gorsuch and Sotomayor struggled with the limits of the lawyers' claims.
"So, if there is no real distinction, as Justice Gorsuch suggested, you're asking us to expand the automobile exception dramatically and to basically make an all-time exception forever?" Sotomayor asked during Tuesday's second hearing.
The first case of the day revolved around Terrence Byrd, who entered a conditional guilty plea after a police traffic stop revealed heroin and body armor in the trunk of a car rented from Budget. Although Byrd was driving the car, his fiancée had signed the rental agreement and he was not an authorized driver on it.
Byrd lost his challenge to the search when the Third Circuit found the officers had a good reason to perform the traffic stop and search the car and that Byrd did not have full protection against searches because he was not authorized to drive the car.
Robert Loeb, who argued for Byrd, said it would be unusual for the court to decide a rental agreement could determine a man's constitutional rights, and that because Byrd's fiancée allowed him to use the car, he enjoyed an expectation of privacy.
"Our rule is that if you are given permission by the renter to store items, your personal items in the trunk, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in it," Loeb said.
Some of the justices struggled with where Loeb's argument would end. Justice Samuel Alito posed a hypothetical in which a family gave the keys to their home to their cat sitter with the instructions that he could not let anyone else in the house. If the sitter then let a friend sell drugs out of the house, Alito wondered whether that friend would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Loeb said exceptions exist for people whose "mere presence is criminal," but Alito found it difficult to see the distinction between the hypothetical drug dealer and Byrd.
"What is the difference between the kid who's selling drugs from the house and Mr. Byrd who's using the car to transport drugs?" Alito asked.
But Assistant to the Solicitor General Eric Feigin had similar trouble convincing the justices that the government had a right to search the car. He argued Byrd did not have privacy expectations because he was simply an "interloper" in the agreement between the rental company and his fiancée.
"As I was saying to Justice Alito, the Fourth Amendment rights are personal, and here petitioner, like other unauthorized drivers, simply has no connection to the car at all," Feigin said. "He is a stranger to the relationship between Budget and Reed."