Appeals Court: ‘Plain View” Also Includes Using iPhone Camera Options To See Through Tinted Car Windows

Legal Issues

from the enhanced-view-still-an-unsettled-issue dept

As tech advances, the law mutates. In some cases (Riley, Carpenter) we get more protections. In other cases, we get fewer protections.

This case dates back to 2022. Christopher Poller was a suspect Waterbury, Connecticut police officers were seeking to arrest. While surveilling his residence, officers approached his parked car. Poller wasn’t in it at the time, but it was parked on the public street. Other officers approached Poller’s home to arrest him.

No officer had a warrant to search Poller’s car, but since it was parked on the street, they didn’t need one to look through the windows to see if they could spot any contraband. The problem here, though, was that the car’s windows were tinted, making it extremely difficult to see anything in “plain view” that could be used to support a deeper search or additional criminal charges.

Well, one officer knew a neat little trick to get around window tint — his iPhone’s camera. The enhancements meant to create better, clearer photos also allowed the officer to, effectively, bypass the tint and see the car’s contents. Here’s what that looked like in action, as pictured in the lower court’s decision:

With the camera engaged, the officer was able to see what looked like two guns inside the car. Poller challenged this “search,” claiming it violated his rights. The trial court decided it wasn’t. The first factor was the car being parked on a public street. The more interesting rejection was tied to a 2001 Supreme Court case, where the nation’s top court ruled against law enforcement officers using thermal imaging tech to effectively “search” a home for a suspect without actually having to obtain a warrant to enter it.

In that case, the Supreme Court reasoned that everyday people didn’t have access to powerful thermal imaging tech, therefore this search violated the Fourth Amendment.

The trial court went the other way here, reasoning that because any iPhone owner could do the same thing to see through tinted windows, there’s nothing unreasonable happening when cops do it. So, even if it wasn’t literally “plain view,” it was close enough to plain view to be acceptable under the Fourth Amendment.

Poller appealed, but this challenge doesn’t fare well at the next judicial level. The Second Circuit Appeals Court has sided with the lower court, ruling [PDF] that enhanced plain view is no different than pre-iPhone plain view.

Previous jurisprudence cited by the court compares the use of a cell phone to the use of a flashlight to see into a vehicle when there’s no daylight to assist in the plain viewing. Poller argued the window tint itself created an “expectation of privacy” in his parked vehicle. But, as the court points out, if the window tint complied with state law, some observation of the interior of the car would have been possible even without the use of a cell phone. More importantly, a subjective expectation of privacy is not the same thing as an objective expectation of privacy.

The ubiquity of the tech and the subjective nature of Poller’s privacy expectations doom this evidentiary challenge.

The record in this case alone demonstrates a number of ways in which an officer or private citizen could see through the car’s tinted windows from the public vantage point of the street: by cupping his hands around his eyes to block out external light and leaning close to the window, using an iPhone camera application, or utilizing any number of widely available digital cameras. Given that the tinted windows continued to make the interior of Poller’s vehicle susceptible to view by those standing outside of the car in a myriad of ways, Poller “knowingly expose[d] [the interior of the car] to the public” in a manner that “is not [] subject [to] Fourth Amendment protection.”

Citing 2001’s Kyllo doesn’t help either. First, Kyllo dealt with a technology-enhanced search of a house, which has been given far more privacy protections than cars parked on public streets. Second, the tech in Kyllo effectively gave officers “superhuman powers:” the ability to “see” the interior of a house (or at least the house’s warmest residents/objects) without actually entering it. Just because a cop used a phone rather than cupping his hands around his eyes to look inside Poller’s car doesn’t turn this into a constitutionally unreasonable search.

[T]he iPhone camera here only aided the officers in viewing what they undisputably could see with their naked eyes. We therefore cannot say that the use of an iPhone camera here compared to the use of cameras and illumination devices generally, which the Supreme Court has consistently sanctioned, differs by an order of constitutional magnitude.

This conclusion is unsurprising. While it’s one thing to caution against cops warrantlessly accessing months of location data (Carpenter), it’s quite another to insist officers not be allowed to do what any pedestrian passing a car could do, even if most of them never would.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, kyllo, plain view, privacy, tinted windows, vehicle search