U.S. Supreme Court Cites Restatement of the Law Second, Torts §§ 197 and 214

The case began when the petitioner threatened to kill himself during a call to his ex-girlfriend, who heard a popping sound followed by dead air, leading her to believe that he might have committed suicide. The ex-girlfriend called 911 and drove to the petitioner’s home, where she met up with police officers who ultimately decided to enter without a warrant to render emergency aid. The officers announced themselves, but received no answer, and eventually found the petitioner when he threw open the curtain of a closet where he had been hiding while holding a black object that looked like a gun, causing an officer to respond by shooting him in the abdomen. The officers later found a handgun nearby.

The petitioner recovered, and the county attorney charged him with assaulting a police officer. The trial court denied the petitioner’s motion to suppress evidence, in which he argued that the officers violated the Fourth Amendment by entering his home without a warrant, finding that the officers were responding legitimately to an emergency. The Montana Supreme Court issued a divided opinion affirming the trial court under the state’s “community caretaking rule,” which permitted police to enter a home for a “welfare check” when “objective, specific and articulable facts” would lead an experienced officer to suspect a person inside needed help or was in peril.

Noting that it had previously determined, in Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006), that a police officer may enter a home without a warrant if the officer had an “objectively reasonable basis for believing” that someone inside needed emergency assistance, the Supreme Court affirmed, holding that, under such circumstances, the officer did not need to have “probable cause” for the intrusion as an officer typically would when investigating a crime. Because the officers had an objectively reasonable basis for believing that their intervention was necessary to prevent serious harm, their warrantless entry did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Associate Justice Elena Kagan, delivering the opinion for a unanimous Court, reasoned that the “probable cause” standard, borrowed from the criminal context, was inapt. The Court stressed that an emergency-aid entry provided no basis to search the premises beyond what was reasonably required to deal with the emergency while maintaining the officers’ safety.

In a concurring opinion, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed out that the Court’s opinion echoed both the common-law emergency-aid rule described in Restatement Second of Torts § 197, and its limitations under § 214. Under § 197, an actor is “privileged to enter or remain on land in the possession of another if it is or reasonably appears to be necessary to prevent serious harm” to the actor, the other, or a third person, “unless the actor knows or has reason to reason to know that the one for whose benefit [the actor] enters is unwilling” for the actor to do so. The privilege has logical limitations under § 214, however, such that a private citizen who entered a home to render emergency aid lacked license to do so in a manner “which a reasonable man would not regard as necessary to” address the apparent emergency. Although the rule discusses the actions of private citizens, rather than law-enforcement officers, Justice Gorsuch noted that the common law had long provided that officers generally enjoyed the same legal privileges as private citizens. Justice Gorsuch concluded by stating that:

It should come as no surprise that our decision today might accord with the accumulated learning of the common law—just as it should come as no surprise that our application of the Fourth Amendment ought to be informed by the common law’s lessons rather than mere intuition.

Read the full opinion here.