Minnesota v. Olson

The Olson case was remarkable because it flatly refused to grant expanded rights to police, a rare occurrence in the Rehnquist Court.

In the early morning of Saturday, 18 July 1986, a lone gunman robbed a gas station in south Minneapolis, killing the station manager in the process. An officer who heard the report over the police radio suspected one Joseph Ecker as the perpetrator, and the officer and his partner drove to Ecker's home. The police officers arrived at Ecker's home just as Ecker was returning home with another person in an Oldsmobile car. Ecker and his friend fled from police; Ecker was captured, but the other person in the Oldsmobile escaped.

Police found money and the murder weapon inside the Oldsmobile. Based on this evidence, the police determined that they had caught the shooter in the killing, and they set about finding the second party involved in the crime. On the title to the car, the name Rob Olson had been crossed out as the secured party. The police tracked down the lead and confirmed that Rob Olson lived at 3151 Johnson Street in the northeast part of the city.

In the morning following the robbery and killing, police received a call from a Dianna Murphy, who stated that a man by the name of Rob had driven the car that was involved in the holdup, and that Rob was planning to leave town by bus. Murphy called a short time later and told police that Rob had admitted to two other women, Louanne Bergstrom and Bergstrom's daughter Julie, that he had driven the car for the robbery. Police visited the Bergstrom's duplex on Fillmore Street in the northeast neighborhood but no one was home in Bergstrom's upper level unit. However, Helen Niederhoffer was at home in the lower level unit, and police spoke to her. Niederhoffer, Bergstrom's mother, confirmed to police that a man named Rob Olson was in fact staying upstairs but was not home. Minneapolis police issued a probable cause arrest bulletin calling for Olson's arrest at 2:00 p.m that day and Niederhoffer promised to call the police when Olson returned home. That call came at approximately 2:45 p.m. The detective in charge of the case ordered police to surround the house on Fillmore Street. The detective then placed a phone call to the Bergstrom home and informed Julie that the house was surrounded and that Olson should come out and surrender. The detective heard a male voice in the background say "tell them I left," and Julie told the detective that Olson was not home. Minutes later, Minneapolis police stormed the upper unit on Fillmore Street and found Olson hiding in a closet. Olson was taken to jail, where he made inculpatory statements within an hour after his arrest.

Olson was charged with various crimes for his part in the armed robbery and killing. Prior to trial, Olson asked the court to exclude from trial the statements he made after he was arrested. According to Olson, the police did not have a right to storm into the house without a warrant, even if he was suspected of participating in a murder. The trial court disagreed and denied Olson's request. Olson was convicted of first-degree murder, three counts of armed robbery, and three counts of second-degree assault.

On appeal, the Minnesota Supreme Court reversed the convictions and remanded the case for a new trial. The state's highest court held that Olson had a right to challenge the legality of the warrantless arrest in the Bergstrom home because he had a sufficient interest in maintaining his privacy in the home, and that the arrest was illegal because no exigent circumstances existed to justify the failure to obtain a warrant. The state of Minnesota asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case, and the Court granted the request.

In a 7-2 decision, the Court held that the warrantless arrest of Olson in Bergstrom's home was illegal, and that the Minnesota Supreme Court was correct in ordering the exclusion of Olson's inculpatory statements. Justice White began the analysis of the case by citing Payton v. New York (1980), where the Court held that a suspect should not be arrested in his house without an arrest warrant, even if police have probable cause to make the arrest. The only exceptions to this rule are cases in which exigent circumstances exist. Exigent circumstances, as recognized by the Supreme Court, consist of cases where the police are in hot pursuit of a fleeing suspect, incidents in which the police must prevent the destruction of evidence, and emergency situations in which the police need to take immediate action to prevent injury to persons. In Olson's case, the Minnesota Supreme Court had ruled that there were no exigent circumstances: police already had the suspected shooter detained and the murder weapon in their custody, there was no indication that Olson was ready to harm someone inside the house, and the police were not in hot pursuit. The U.S. Supreme Court was "not inclined to disagree with this fact-specific application of the proper legal standard." Quoting the Minnesota court, the Court noted that three or four Minneapolis police squads had the house surrounded, and that "'[i]t was evident the suspect was going nowhere. If he came out of the house he would have been promptly apprehended.'" Under these facts, the failure of police to obtain a warrant from a magistrate before entering the Bergstrom apartment was unreasonable and therefore illegal under the Fourth Amendment.

The state of Minnesota argued that police had a right to enter and arrest Olson because he did not have sufficient connections to the house to claim the protection from warrantless arrests that persons in homes receive under the Fourth Amendment. The state listed a number of characteristics that, in its opinion, made a dwelling a home, and Olson fit none of them. Olson did not, for example, own the house, pay rent at the house, stay at the house for a long time prior to the arrest, or receive mail at the house.

The Court rejected the state's argument, ruling that none of the factors listed by the state deprived Olson of a rightful expectation of privacy. According to the High Court, Olson's case was on point with Jones v. United States (1960), a case in which the Court held that a man who used a friend's apartment for one night had the right to claim Fourth Amendment protection within the apartment. The man in Jones had a key to the apartment while its owner was away, his usual home was elsewhere, and he had not paid for the apartment. The Jones Court stated that under the circumstances the defendant was legitimately on the premises and that he therefore could challenge the warrantless intrusion of police into the apartment. In a later case, Rakas v. Illinois (1978), the Court rejected the "legitimately on the premises" standard as too broad, but it reaffirmed the "unremarkable proposition" stated in Jones that a person can have an interest in maintaining protection from governmental intrusion in a place other than his or her own home.

The Court dismissed as insignificant the factual differences between the Jones case and Olson's case. To the Court, it was of no importance that Olson's host was not away from the apartment or that he did not have a key. "Staying overnight in another's home," the Court explained, "is a longstanding social custom that serves functions recognized as valuable by society" because it provides the guest "with privacy, a place where he and his possessions will not be disturbed by anyone but his host and those his host allows inside." Nor was the power to permit and exclude others a deciding factor in determining whether Olson had the right to claim Fourth Amendment protection from warrantless arrest in Bergstrom's apartment. "If the untrammeled power to admit and exclude were essential to Fourth Amendment protection," the Court instructed, "an adult daughter temporarily living in the home of her parents would have no legitimate expectation of privacy because her right to admit or exclude would be subject to her parents' veto." Ultimately, the Court affirmed the judgment of the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Justices Stevens and Kennedy concurred and wrote short opinions. Stevens questioned whether the Court should have accepted the case in the first place. In Stevens' opinion, the power of the Court to review decisions of state courts to protect constitutional rights of their citizens "should be used sparingly. Only in the most unusual case," Stevens maintained, "should the Court volunteer its opinion that a state court has imposed standards upon its own law enforcement officials that are too high." In his concurring opinion, Justice Kennedy stated that he understood the majority opinion as merely deferring to a state court's application of the exigent circumstances test, "and not as an endorsement of that particular application of the standard." Justices Rehnquist and Blackmun both dissented, but neither wrote an opinion.