Gun groups backed NC defendant’s ‘knock-and-talk’ SCOTUS petition

Quashaun Reel’s US Supreme Court petition had no link to firearms.

Yet the group Gun Owners of America supported Reel, along with gun-rights groups in California and Tennessee. Working with America’s Future, Downsize DC, and the Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund, gun owners urged the nation’s highest court to take Reel’s case.

The court rejected the petition Monday. That means no Supreme Court action for now on police “knock-and-talk” operations.

High Point police arrested Reel on multiple drug charges in August 2020. He eventually entered guilty pleas but still argued that the trial judge should have thrown out evidence in the case. Reel accused police of conducting an unconstitutional warrantless search of his home.

Officers followed a guest to Reel’s door, then forced their way in as Reel tried to close the door, he argued. Officers justified forced entry because they smelled marijuana.

North Carolina trial and appellate courts rejected Reel’s arguments.

Turning to the US Supreme Court, Reel emphasized a 2013 precedent case, Florida v. Jardines.

“This Court has recognized an ‘implied license’ that permits a ‘visitor to approach the home by the front path, knock promptly, wait briefly to be received, and then (absent invitation to linger longer) leave,’” Reel’s lawyers wrote.

“Police rely on this ‘implied license’ to conduct untold thousands of so-called ‘knock-and-talk’ investigations each year under the theory that entering the curtilage of the home to conduct a ‘knock and talk’ does not implicate the Fourth Amendment,” Reel’s petition continued.

Curtilage is “the area immediately surrounding and associated with a dwelling,” according toCornell University’s Legal Information Institute.

“But this Court in Jardines also instructed that an officer’s purpose in entering the curtilage of the home has constitutional relevance,” Reel’s lawyers wrote. “If police ‘enter the protected premises of the home in order to do nothing but conduct a search,’ they have conducted a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”

A 2018 case, Collins v. Virginia, determined that an officer who “physically intrudes on the curtilage to gather evidence” has engaged in a search covered by the Fourth Amendment, Reel’s petition explained.

“The question presented is: When police enter the curtilage of the home to conduct a ‘knock-and-talk’ investigation with the purpose of gathering incriminating evidence against the homeowner, do police conduct a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment?” Reel’s lawyers wrote.

Gun groups joined an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief in April supporting Reel.

“The ‘implicit license’ for the police was predicated on the ‘implicit license’ granted to any person — such as ‘Girl Scouts or trick-or-treaters’ — to do the same,” the brief explained. “As the ‘knock and talk’ technique has become more prevalent in police work, the controversy that surrounds how this technique is being used has grown exponentially.”

“Predictably, police have invented ways to build on that narrow ‘implied license’ to conduct activities that violate the property-based Fourth Amendment protections for the home,” the brief argued.

“The conduct of the police challenged here by Petitioner illustrates how the ‘implicit license’ recognized by this Court has been abused in practice,” according to the brief. “Here, the officers did not ‘approach the home by the front path,’ did not ‘knock promptly,’ did not ‘wait briefly to be received,’ or receive an ‘invitation to linger longer,’ and then, did not ‘leave.’

“Instead, they forced their way in immediately behind an invited guest, without ever ‘knocking and talking’ at all,” the brief continued. “When ‘knock and talk’ is expanded to cover such behavior, and then combined with ‘exigent circumstances,’ the Fourth Amendment’s protections of the home are dramatically weakened.”

The brief criticized North Carolina’s courts.

“The court below largely ignored every word this Court has written on principles of relevance here, and it is not alone,” the friend-of-the-court brief argued. “Many other federal and state courts have sanctioned all manner of police efforts to expand this rule, granting increasingly abusive intrusions into the home and its curtilage.”

“The front path rule, the duration limitation, the time of day, and other limitations that apply to other visitors have been stretched beyond any understanding of the original rule,” the conservative and gun-rights groups explained.

The brief urged justices “to adopt a clear and enforceable rule, that ‘the right of a police officer to conduct a “knock and talk” is no greater than a Girl Scout has to approach a house to sell cookies.’”

The US Supreme Court accepts just a fraction of the petitions submitted each year nationwide. Fourth Amendment advocates will have to wait for clarity on police “knock and talk” restrictions.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.