Minnesota Court of Appeals: An Apartment Door Handle and Lock are within the Home’s Curtilage

Minnesota Court of Appeals: An Apartment Door Handle and Lock are within the Home’s Curtilage

This week, in case of first impression, the Minnesota Court of Appeals reversed a defendant’s serious drug conviction on the basis that law enforcement unlawfully intruded upon a constitutionally protected area: the defendant’s apartment door handle and lock.  The case – State v. McNeal, established that law enforcement must obtain a judicially-authorized search warrant before they can swab the areas of an apartment resident’s door handle and/or door lock for the purpose of detecting trace amounts of controlled substances.  In so doing, the court of appeals concluded that the door handle and lock are within the apartment home’s “curtilage,” thereby affording those areas constitutional protection from warrantless intrusion.

What is Curtilage?

Legally, “curtilage” refers to the area immediately surrounding a dwelling (house), which is considered part of the home for certain legal purposes, especially in the context of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and curtilage is afforded the same protections as the interior of the home.  In the case case of United States v. Dunn (1987), the United States Supreme Court established a four-factor test to determine whether an area is considered curtilage:

• The proximity of the area to the home.
• Whether the area is included within an enclosure surrounding the home.
• The nature of the uses to which the area is put.
• The steps taken by the resident to protect the area from observation by people passing by.

Areas beyond the curtilage are generally considered “open fields” to which no Fourth Amendment protection applies.  “Open fields” may refer to any unoccupied or undeveloped area outside of the curtilage, and may include forests, pastures, and open land not immediately adjacent to a home.

Curtilage v. Open Fields – Key Differences

• Location and Usage. Curtilage is closely associated with the home and used for domestic purposes, whereas open fields are more distant and not used in the same intimate, private manner.
• Privacy Expectations. There is a higher expectation of privacy in the curtilage than in open fields.
• Legal Protections. Curtilage is protected by the Fourth Amendment, requiring warrants for searches, while open fields are not, allowing law enforcement to search without a warrant.

These distinctions are crucial in determining the legality of searches and the admissibility of evidence obtained by law enforcement.

State v. McNeal

In the case of State v. McNeal, an officer from the Minnesota River Valley Drug Task Force applied for a search warrant to swab the exterior door handle and lock of the defendant’s apartment door to test for trace amounts of controlled substances.  The district court issued the warrant (the first search warrant), and an officer executed the search warrant on that same day.

The defendant’s apartment was one of two apartments on the main floor of a secured building in which the individual apartment entrances were accessible from an interior common area. The officer executing the search warrant had previously learned the security code to access the common area from a second officer who had obtained it from the apartment landlord. Using the security code, the officer executing the search warrant entered the common area of the building, and then swabbed the exterior of the defendant’s apartment door handle and lock with a swab.

After the swab was collected, the officer submitted it for analysis, which showed the presence of cocaine and MDEA (a drug similar to ecstasy). Based on that evidence and the information provided in the first warrant, officers applied for a second search warrant to search inside the defendant’s apartment.  When the second search warrant was executed, officers discovered large amounts of cash, various controlled substances, several firearms, and drug paraphernalia in the apartment.  The defendant was charged with seven counts related to possessing and selling controlled substances while possessing a firearm, as well as receiving stolen property, all based on the evidence gathered during the search of his apartment.

After he was charged, the defendant requested a contested omnibus hearing to suppress evidence that the officers seized by executing the search warrants, arguing that the first search warrant lacked probable cause, and therefore that the second search warrant was invalid. The district court judge determined that although probable cause did not support the first search warrant, the officers did not need it because the door handle and lock were not part of the curtilage of the apartment, and that the defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the door handle and lock.  Subsequently, the defendant was convicted at trial and sentenced to 48 months imprisonment.  Following his conviction and sentencing, the defendant appealed to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, arguing that the district court erred by denying his motion to suppress evidence on the conclusion that the apartment door handle and lock were not within the curtilage of the defendant’s home.

On appeal, the court of appeals recognized that whether “the warrantless collection of a sample from an apartment door handle and lock violates a party’s constitutional rights was an unanswered question in Minnesota.”  The closest case on point was State v. Edstrom, where the Minnesota Supreme Court had decided that a warrantless narcotics-dog sniff in the hallway outside the defendant’s apartment did not violate the defendant’s rights, and that officers only needed a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of criminal activity to conduct the dog sniff lawfully.  In Edstrom, the supreme court, applying the Dunn factors referenced above, observed that “the privacies of life associated with the home do not extend into the area immediately outside Edstrom’s apartment, such as the door seam,” and therefore that the area is not curtilage.

In McNeal, a different conclusion was reached by the court of appeals.  The court wrote that “[u]nlike in Edstrom, in which the supreme court analyzed whether the area where the police dog stood as it conducted a sniff of appellant’s apartment door was curtilage, the officers here went a step further and collected a sample from a door handle and lock that were physically attached to and indivisible from [the defendant’s] home.”  Thus, said the court, an apartment door handle and lock are readily distinguishable from an apartment door seam.  In discussing the Dunn factors, the court wrote as follows:

For the first factor of the area’s proximity to the home, [defendant’s] apartment door handle and lock were attached to and part of the door—the entrance to his home—weighing heavily in favor of finding them to be within the curtilage. For the second factor, although the apartment door handle and lock were not within an enclosure surrounding [defendant’s] home, they were a part of the enclosure that contained his home. Thus, they “should be treated as the home itself.” As to the third Dunn factor of the nature and use of the area, although those at issue here faced a common area, apartment door handles and locks are primarily used to enter, exit, or exclude others from a home, actions that are reserved to the tenant, the tenant’s invitees, and in limited circumstances, the landlord. The nature of the apartment door handle and lock’s use weighs heavily towards concluding that they are within the curtilage. The fourth factor is neutral here, because although [defendant] took no steps to protect the apartment door handle or lock from passersby, there was nothing readily visible on the door handle or lock that might be observed. Considered together, the Dunn factors weigh towards the apartment door handle and lock being “so intimately tied to the home itself” that they should be accorded constitutional protection.

As our readers know, the Minnesota Court of Appeals is an intermediate appellate court.  It is possible – and we think probable – that the Minnesota Supreme Court will take up the McNeal case in order to have the final say on this important aspect of constitutional law.

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