The Supreme Court ruled on the privacy rights of hotel and motel guest registries.(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)
WASHINGTON -- Police cannot force hotel and motel owners to let them search through guest registries without first giving them a chance to go before a judge, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
By a 5-4 vote, the justices invalidated a Los Angeles law that required hotel and motel owners to keep lists of their guests, and to let the police inspect them on demand.
The court's majority said that the law violated the 4th Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches because it allowed the police to arrest owners who did not immediately allow their registries to be inspected, without giving them the chance to fight the search in court.
That lack of judicial review creates "an intolerable risk" that police would search more than the law allows, or use it as "a pretext to harass hotel operators or their guests," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court's majority.
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Lawyers for the police department had argued that unannounced searches of registries are necessary when investigating crimes such as human trafficking, drug peddling and prostitution. They had prevailed at two lower courts before the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled against them.
That argument proved less persuasive than the ones raised by lawyers for the objecting hotel and motel owners -- that registries of hotel guests enjoy privacy protection, and that they deter crimes by keeping criminals away.
The court majority ruled that even though such registries have been subject to inspection for centuries, they are subject to the 4th Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. And they said that the 4th Amendment generally requires at least the chance for a judge to be involved before a search actually takes place.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
Motels, Scalia wrote, "are a particularly attractive site for criminal activity." He said they "have been employed as prisons for migrants smuggled across the border and held for ransom ... and rendezvous sites where child sex workers meet their clients."
Under those circumstance, he said, it is not unconstitutional to allow the police "to flip through a guest register," particularly because motels are heavily regulated and have long been subject to warrantless searches to enforce those rules.
Alito called the court's decision to invalidate the law "befuddling." Some of the searches it authorized might be unconstitutional, he wrote, but others -- including seeking the names of guests paying cash to rent rooms by the hour -- would be valid. Instead of overturning the law, he said the court should have focused on how it was used in individual cases.
Sotomayor stressed that the decision on Monday by the court's four more liberal justices and Justice Anthony Kennedy was "narrow." Hotel owners can still give police permission to search their registries if they want to, she wrote. And police can still conduct surprise inspections of hotels and motels, as long as they go to a judge first to get a warrant.
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