Introduction

Exigency and Warrantless Home Entry

Introduction

The Fourth Amendment treats the front door of a home as a boundary that officers may not cross on their own judgment. In Payton v. New York the Court described a "firm line at the entrance to the house," and absent exigent circumstances that threshold "may not reasonably be crossed without a warrant."¹ Exigent circumstances are situations so urgent that waiting for a warrant would defeat the purpose of the entry or endanger someone. A search or seizure inside a home without a warrant is therefore presumptively unreasonable, and the government bears the burden of showing a recognized exigency to justify it.² The presumption has two supports. Physical entry into the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Amendment is directed, and the warrant is the principal protection against unnecessary entries.³ A warrant makes officers present their probable cause to a neutral magistrate before they intrude, whereas a justification assembled afterward is too likely to be colored by hindsight.⁴ Officers who skip that step have chosen to depart from the ordinary safeguard, and the facts that made delay dangerous are facts they observed, so the government must come forward with them.

The presumption can be overcome, because the ultimate touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness and the warrant requirement therefore admits reasonable exceptions.⁵ Exigency is the exception that applies when the needs of law enforcement are so compelling that a warrantless entry is objectively reasonable, and it is a family of situations, each with its own limits. The Court has recognized the need to follow a fleeing suspect, to help someone who is seriously injured or imminently threatened, and to prevent the imminent destruction of evidence.⁶ It has also approved a response that stops short of entering at all: officers who have probable cause may hold a home or its occupant in place while they obtain a warrant.⁷ The Court has nonetheless been reluctant to find exigency. In Mincey v. Arizona it refused to create a blanket exception to the warrant requirement for murder scenes, so each claim has to rest on the facts of the particular case.⁸

The exam task follows from that structure. You must decide whether a particular warrantless entry, or a temporary seizure pending a warrant, was reasonable on the facts the officers actually faced. The first question is which exigency the government is invoking. The second is whether what the officers knew at that moment made delay unreasonable, a judgment measured objectively by the facts available to them.⁹ This chapter takes the exigencies in this order: chasing suspects, the limit that the seriousness of the offense places on exigency, protecting people, preserving evidence, and finally the temporary seizure of a home or its occupant while a warrant is sought. Hot pursuit comes first because it is the oldest and most intuitive exigency, and the first section begins with officers who chase a suspect toward a home.