William T. Case v. Montana, USSC No. 24-624, certiorari granted 6/2/25
SCOTUS added to its docket when it accepted an increasingly rare grant from state criminal proceedings in this Fourth Amendment case:
Whether law enforcement may enter a home without a search warrant based on less than probable cause that an emergency is occurring, or whether the emergency-aid exception requires probable cause.
This is an important Fourth Amendment case that will clarify an unresolved legal question: When police use the existence of an alleged emergency to enter a home without a warrant, how certain must they be that said emergency is, in fact, ongoing?
Following the demise of the community caretaker exception as applied to the home as a result of SCOTUS’s decision in Caniglia v. Strom, officers are now left invoking community caretaking’s doctrinal relative, the “emergency aid” exception when they want to enter a home without a warrant, ostensibly to respond to some exigent circumstances arising from within.
As this petition points out, the “emergency aid” doctrine is not a long-established legal concept. Instead, it appears to have entered our common law definitively in 2006 via SCOTUS’s decision in Brigham City v. Stuart.
However, courts have struggled to agree as to whether the “objectively reasonable basis” for entry identified in that case requires officers to have probable cause that an emergency is ongoing or merely to assume the existence of such via some lower quantum of proof. Wisconsin, for example, askes whether a reasonable person “under the totality of the circumstances […]would have believed that there was an immediate need to render aid or assistance to the children due to actual or threatened physical injury, and that there was an immediate need for entry into the home to provide aid or assistance to them.”
Accordingly, if the petitioner in this case gets their way and establishes a higher burden, this case will have an impact on our State’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
