Borderlines of Home Privacy Against Warrantless Home Entries under the United States Criminal Procedure

The protection of privacy interest can be extended to the curtilage including a garage, driveways, a front porch, and back yards surrounding the home for a single family home and locked common spaces for multi-unit dwellings. The United State Supreme Court in 2021 decided on whether a warrantless entry into a home is in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the United State Constitution which requires warrants before entering into private premises to search and seizure. The Court in Caniglia v. Strom held that the police need to obtain a warrant before entering into a home even if they perform community caretaking duties. The Court reasoned that community caretaking duties alone do not justify a warrantless home entry without exigent circumstances. In addition, the Court in Lange v. California ruled that the exigency-circumstances exception to the warrant requirement does not apply to a warrantless home entry during a hot pursuit in case of a fleeing misdemeanor. The Court relied on a case-by-case or case-specific approach, by rejecting a categorical approach in determining exigencies in hot pursuit of a fleeing misdemeanor suspect. The two cases emphasized the importance to protect an individual’s privacy interest in a home against the government’s unreasonable intrusions and warned a flat or categorical approach or application of previously-established case laws. This paper reviews the warrant requirement and its exceptions in relation to a warrantless home entry of the police. It analyzes two decisions together to observe how a community caretaking exception and an exigency-circumstances exception are applied to warrantless home entries. In addition, the paper attempts to review some provisions of Korean law addressing exceptions to the warrant requirement in case of exigencies related to home entries.