Welsh v. Wisconsin
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Last updated
[Edited from the .]
466 U.S. 740 (1984)
Supreme Court of the United States
Edward G. Welsh v. Wisconsin
Justice BRENNAN delivered the opinion of the Court.
held that, absent probable cause and exigent circumstances, warrantless arrests in the home are prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. But the Court in that case explicitly refused “to consider the sort of emergency or dangerous situation, described in our cases as ‘exigent circumstances,’ that would justify a warrantless entry into a home for the purpose of either arrest or search.” Certiorari was granted in this case to decide at least one aspect of the unresolved question: whether, and if so under what circumstances, the Fourth Amendment prohibits the police from making a warrantless night entry of a person’s home in order to arrest him for a nonjailable traffic offense.
Shortly before 9 o’clock on the rainy night of April 24, 1978, a lone witness, Randy Jablonic, observed a car being driven erratically. After changing speeds and veering from side to side, the car eventually swerved off the road and came to a stop in an open field. No damage to any person or property occurred. Concerned about the driver and fearing that the car would get back on the highway, Jablonic drove his truck up behind the car so as to block it from returning to the road. Another passerby also stopped at the scene, and Jablonic asked her to call the police. Before the police arrived, however, the driver of the car emerged from his vehicle, approached Jablonic’s truck, and asked Jablonic for a ride home. Jablonic instead suggested that they wait for assistance in removing or repairing the car. Ignoring Jablonic’s suggestion, the driver walked away from the scene.
A few minutes later, the police arrived and questioned Jablonic. He told one officer what he had seen, specifically noting that the driver was either very inebriated or very sick. The officer checked the motor vehicle registration of the abandoned car and learned that it was registered to the petitioner, Edward G. Welsh. In addition, the officer noted that the petitioner’s residence was a short distance from the scene, and therefore easily within walking distance.
Without securing any type of warrant, the police proceeded to the petitioner’s home, arriving about 9 p.m. When the petitioner’s stepdaughter answered the door, the police gained entry into the house. Proceeding upstairs to the petitioner’s bedroom, they found him lying naked in bed. At this point, the petitioner was placed under arrest for driving or operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of an intoxicant. The petitioner was taken to the police station, where he refused to submit to a breath-analysis test.
As a result of these events, the petitioner was subjected to two separate but related proceedings: one concerning his refusal to submit to a breath test and the other involving the alleged code violation for driving while intoxicated. Under the Wisconsin Vehicle Code in effect in April 1978, one arrested for driving while intoxicated [...] could be requested by a law enforcement officer to provide breath, blood, or urine samples for the purpose of determining the presence or quantity of alcohol. If such a request was made, the arrestee was required to submit to the appropriate testing or risk a revocation of operating privileges … for 60 days.
[T]he State filed a criminal complaint against the petitioner for driving while intoxicated. The petitioner responded by filing a motion to dismiss the complaint, relying on his contention that the underlying arrest was invalid. After receiving evidence at a hearing on this motion in July 1980, the trial court concluded that the criminal complaint would not be dismissed because the existence of both probable cause and exigent circumstances justified the warrantless arrest. [T]he appellate court concluded that the warrantless arrest of the petitioner in his home violated the Fourth Amendment because the State, although demonstrating probable cause to arrest, had not established the existence of exigent circumstances. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin in turn reversed the Court of Appeals. Because of the important Fourth Amendment implications of the decision below, we granted certiorari.
[T]he Court decided in that warrantless felony arrests in the home are prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, absent probable cause and exigent circumstances. At the same time, the Court declined to consider the scope of any exception for exigent circumstances that might justify warrantless home arrests, thereby leaving to the lower courts the initial application of the exigent-circumstances exception. Prior decisions of this Court, however, have emphasized that exceptions to the warrant requirement are “few in number and carefully delineated” and that the police bear a heavy burden when attempting to demonstrate an urgent need that might justify warrantless searches or arrests. Indeed, the Court has recognized only a few such emergency conditions.
Our hesitation in finding exigent circumstances, especially when warrantless arrests in the home are at issue, is particularly appropriate when the underlying offense for which there is probable cause to arrest is relatively minor. Before agents of the government may invade the sanctity of the home, the burden is on the government to demonstrate exigent circumstances that overcome the presumption of unreasonableness that attaches to all warrantless home entries. When the government’s interest is only to arrest for a minor offense, that presumption of unreasonableness is difficult to rebut, and the government usually should be allowed to make such arrests only with a warrant issued upon probable cause by a neutral and detached magistrate.
We [...] conclude that the common-sense approach utilized by most lower courts is required by the Fourth Amendment prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and hold that an important factor to be considered when determining whether any exigency exists is the gravity of the underlying offense for which the arrest is being made. Moreover, although no exigency is created simply because there is probable cause to believe that a serious crime has been committed, application of the exigent-circumstances exception in the context of a home entry should rarely be sanctioned when there is probable cause to believe that only a minor offense, such as the kind at issue in this case, has been committed.
Application of this principle to the facts of the present case is relatively straightforward. The petitioner was arrested in the privacy of his own bedroom for a noncriminal, traffic offense. The State attempts to justify the arrest by relying on the hot-pursuit doctrine, on the threat to public safety, and on the need to preserve evidence of the petitioner’s blood-alcohol level. On the facts of this case, however, the claim of hot pursuit is unconvincing because there was no immediate or continuous pursuit of the petitioner from the scene of a crime. Moreover, because the petitioner had already arrived home, and had abandoned his car at the scene of the accident, there was little remaining threat to the public safety. Hence, the only potential emergency claimed by the State was the need to ascertain the petitioner’s blood-alcohol level.
Even assuming, however, that the underlying facts would support a finding of this exigent circumstance, mere similarity to other cases involving the imminent destruction of evidence is not sufficient. The State of Wisconsin has chosen to classify the first offense for driving while intoxicated as a noncriminal, civil forfeiture offense for which no imprisonment is possible. This is the best indication of the State’s interest in precipitating an arrest, and is one that can be easily identified both by the courts and by officers faced with a decision to arrest. Given this expression of the State’s interest, a warrantless home arrest cannot be upheld simply because evidence of the petitioner’s blood-alcohol level might have dissipated while the police obtained a warrant. To allow a warrantless home entry on these facts would be to approve unreasonable police behavior that the principles of the Fourth Amendment will not sanction.
III
The Supreme Court of Wisconsin let stand a warrantless, nighttime entry into the petitioner’s home to arrest him for a civil traffic offense. Such an arrest, however, is clearly prohibited by the special protection afforded the individual in his home by the Fourth Amendment. The petitioner’s arrest was therefore invalid, the judgment of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin is vacated, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
Justice BLACKMUN, concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion but add a personal observation.
I yield to no one in my profound personal concern about the unwillingness of our national consciousness to face up to—and to do something about—the continuing slaughter upon our Nation’s highways, a good percentage of which is due to drivers who are drunk or semi-incapacitated because of alcohol or drug ingestion. I have spoken in these Reports to this point before. And it is amazing to me that one of our great States—one which, by its highway signs, proclaims to be diligent and emphatic in its prosecution of the drunken driver—still classifies driving while intoxicated as a civil violation that allows only a money forfeiture of not more than $300 so long as it is a first offense. The State, like the indulgent parent, hesitates to discipline the spoiled child very much, even though the child is engaging in an act that is dangerous to others who are law abiding and helpless in the face of the child’s act. Our personal convenience still weighs heavily in the balance, and the highway deaths and injuries continue. But if Wisconsin and other States choose by legislation thus to regulate their penalty structure, there is, unfortunately, nothing in the United States Constitution that says they may not do so.
In 1984, the Court prohibited police from entering a house to arrest an apparently intoxicated man who had recently driven his car off the road and stumbled home. In 2016, the Court allowed states to demand—under threat of criminal prosecution—that motorists arrested for drunk driving submit to breath tests. The home entry was “unreasonable,” and demanding the breath test is “reasonable.”
Perhaps the results can be explained by Fourth Amendment doctrine that has remained constant since 1791. Students might also consider, however, that the decisions could result in part on changing attitudes toward drunk driving. What was a noncriminal violation in Wisconsin in the 1980s is now punished far more severely across the nation. The position articulated by Justice Blackmun in his dissent in Welsh, in which he chastised Wisconsin for its lax treatment of drunken drivers, has won widespread appeal among lawmakers, both those on the bench and those in legislatures. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, founded in 1980 after the founder’s daughter was killed in a crash involving a drunk driver, won important legislative victories beginning in 1984, when Congress acted to force states to raise their drinking ages to 21 years.
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