BREAKING: SCOTUS Decision Weakens 4th Amendment Protections

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

73. It's a little trickier than that...

They wanted to search his apartment on the robbery complaint, and the suspect refused. While police were at the apartment, they found his girlfriend, who appeared to have been the victim of a beating at the hands of the suspect. He was taken in for domestic abuse. While in custody, the girlfriend subsequently gave police permission to search the apartment for evidence regarding the robbery. It wasn't like police arrested the guy just to get him out of the way -- there was a legitimate complaint of domestic abuse to be considered.

All that being said, since the suspect was in custody (and subsequently charged in the robbery as well), there was ample time to get a proper search warrant -- and certainly no judge would have denied it. All that being said, I'm not sure what sort of broad legal precedent is being set here. Police already have the right to search all "common areas" of an apartment if one roommate agrees to the search. In this case, we can assume that the two were co-habitating and so all areas of the apartment would have been considered common areas. So I'm not sure if there's any new ground being broken here.