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Right to Privacy in Restroom Not Absolute
 ST. LOUIS (AP) - A man found partly disrobed with a woman, cocaine and marijuana in the one-person restroom of an Iowa convenience store in an area known for prostitution had no absolute right to privacy, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.Those Hawkeyes sure know how to have fun An 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously rejected Lonnie Maurice Hill's claim that police who found him with the woman and drugs breached his Fourth Amendment right to privacy, making the drugs illegally seized and unusable as evidence. If you don't have a right to privacy in the can, where do you? Other courts have held that the right of privacy in bathrooms varies case to case, with some judges holding that a stall in a public restroom is not a private place when used for something other than its intended purpose. What is the intended use? The elimination of bodily fluids. That's all this poor guy was trying to do. "The Fourth Amendment protects people and not places," Judge Donald Lay unfortunate name wrote for the three-judge 8th Circuit panel. In Hill's case, "it was not a single person using the single toilet restroom but two persons of opposite gender and, under the circumstances, we hold that they had a diminished expectation of privacy They went in the bathroom because they expected privacy. If they'd had a diminished expectation of privacy, they'd have returned to the convenience store. which had expired by the time the officers arrived." Making a lot of noise, were they? When it comes to restroom privacy, "we have never held that this expectation lasts indefinitely," Lay wrote. This warning provided as a public service. Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-01-12 |
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