Hey , that's MY garbage!

[webfusion]

A local '4th Amendment' question made it to court in Baltimore recently, as a preliminary hearing was held to decide if a defendant was allowed to maintain a claim of property over his garbage.

By Mary T Robbins, The Jeffersonian
http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_...pnpID=811&NewsID=701878&CategoryID=16986&on=1

Buschmann, 61, of Abingdon, faces gambling charges as a result of a December raid when police executed a warrant and removed 20 video poker machines and money from the business.

Last October, the officers attempted to collect evidence from the trash located at the 8326 Harford Road place of business and removed one trash bag from a trash can.

A search of the contents of the bag revealed what the officers believed to be evidence of gambling payoffs. Two more trash bags were removed by officers on Nov. 11.

This led to the issuance of a warrant.

The defendant argues that the taking of his trash from the rear of the business by police officers "constituted an impermissible taking of the defendant's property."

 

[Random]

I believe that there is already a fairly large body of case law concerning the searching of a person's garbage. Criminals just seem to keep throwing away incriminating evidence rather than destroying it.

 

[Manny]

Whether the police can rummage through garbage is established law. They can (California v. Greenwood 486 U.S. 35). What's at issue here is whether the material was garbage yet. What Buschmann is arguing is essentially that 'yes, it looked a lot like garbage, and it was in garbage bags, but it wasn't really garbage it was just a bunch of stuff in garbage bags. You can tell because I haul my "real" garbage off to someplace else for collection, and you coppers can't come onto my property and rummage through my stuff just because it happened to be in garbage bags.'

I think he may have a case. In Greenwood the refuse was put out on the curb for collection. SCOTUS ruled that it became subject to public (and thus police) scrutiny at that time. After all, if the garbageman can rummage through the stuff, why can't the cops? Here, Buschmann argues that in fact the garbageman could not rummage through the stuff. It would indeed be a weird interpretation if it were legal to store stuff in a cardboard box but not a Glad bag.

That said, there may be facts which work in the favor of the police. For one, he may be lying -- the police might previously have observed garbage pickups from the location where the bags lay. They may have had other evidence that it was garbage, such as the scent of spoilt food. If so, the case will turn on the reasonableness of the police' entry to retrieve the suspected garbage. This'll be an interesting case if it doesn't plead out.

 

[webfusion]

I have a question -- is it possible to lock garbage?

What if the bag in question has a secure-closing device (a cable-tie for instance, that only constricts one-way but must be cut off in order to remove it). My intent was to prevent it from being opened, and only a forced-entry can gain access.

I'm going right out to Staples -- time to invest in a cross-cut shredder. I'm not doing anything illegal, mind you, but I want to destroy all those documents that arrive to me (like credit-card companies sending a weekly supply of blank checks) which are just a disaster waiting to happen...