ShareThisPolice have the right to sift through your garbage once its reaches your property line, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled.
In a ruling that settled a classic contest over the constitutional right to privacy, the Court said garbage is discarded for a reason -- because it is no longer wanted.
The case involved a Calgary man named Russell Patrick, a former record-holding national swimmer, whose garbage was removed from the back of his property by police. The evidence they found of a potential drug-manufacturing operation allowed them to obtain a search warrant and, ultimately, charge him with several drug offenses.
"When Patrick's conduct is assessed objectively, he abandoned his privacy interest when he placed his garbage for collection at the rear of his property where it was accessible to any passing member of the public," Justice Ian Binnie said.
"Patrick did everything required to rid himself of the items taken as evidence," Binnie said. "His conduct was incompatible with any reasonable expectation of confidentiality."
On Dec. 17, 2003, Calgary police swooped down in a predawn raid to snatch Patrick's garbage. Reaching over his property line, officers made off with several bags of refuse, eliciting enough evidence of a potential drug-manufacturing operation to obtain a search warrant on his house.
The area behind Patrick's home where garbage receptacles were stored was an indentation in his fence, which otherwise ran straight along his property line.
Shortly afterward, Patrick was charged and convicted of producing and trafficking the methamphetamine MDA. He was sentenced to four years in prison in 2006.
He appealed, asking the courts to overturn his conviction and exclude the evidence on the grounds that seizing a citizen's garbage is the mark of a police state.
Lawyers for. Patrick argued that while a hand reaching over a fence may seem like a minor intrusion, it can easily lead directly to a search warrant being issued for a dwelling.
They argued that an adverse ruling could mean that an individual's medicine, sexual activities and personal correspondence could be splashed across the media. They said that material as seemingly innocuous as household waste could disclose a variety of personal information -- including one's lifestyle choices, DNA, finances, health and identification.
The judge at Patrick's trial ruled that he did not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in relation to his garbage. The Alberta Court of Appeal agreed, saying in a 2-1 ruling that Patrick would have had a better claim to privacy had his garbage been secured with a locked lid.
"The reasonableness of an expectation of privacy varies with the nature of the matter sought to be protected, the circumstances in which and the place where state intrusion occurs, and the purposes of the intrusion," the Supreme Court said, upholding the Alberta Court of Appeal finding.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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