Abandoned Property

As a general rule, police are free to search property that has been abandoned without the necessity of securing a search warrant. Thus, searches of abandoned property are not considered to be violations of the Fourth Amendment.

Hester v. United States (1924) is an early U.S. Supreme Court decision on the subject. After revenue agents chased [Page 64]two individuals who dropped a jug and a bottle as they fled from a field, the Court decided that the agents had not improperly seized the items for evidence because the individuals had abandoned them. In Abel v. United States (1960), the Court allowed for evidence secured from a wastebasket in a hotel room by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, who found microfilms tying Rudolph Ivanovich Abel to spying, on the basis that Abel had abandoned them.

Similarly, in California v. Hodari D. (1991), the Court ruled that Hodari D. had abandoned a rock, which later turned out to be crack cocaine, when he threw it away after he took flight as police officers approached. Consistent with the reasoning the Supreme Court used in the decision in Katz v. United States (1967), which required the government to get a warrant before placing wiretaps, the Court has generally ruled that individuals no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy that the public is willing to accept vis-à-vis items (or “effects”) that they have abandoned. Notably, however, if police initiate a chase or a search without proper authority and this leads to abandonment of property that is then collected as evidence, judges may regard such evidence as “fruit of a poisonous tree” and thus subject to the exclusionary rule, making it inadmissible in court.

Moreover, while the Court will often allow for the search of an object when defendants deny that it is theirs, courts have, on occasion, distinguished between a denial of ownership and a denial of possession. Similarly, when individuals provide blood or bodily fluids for the purpose of medical diagnosis or treatment, they are not necessarily “abandoning” such fluids for the purposes of criminal investigation. Thus, the Supreme Court decided in Ferguson v. City of Charleston (2001) that nonconsensual and warrantless police use of urine tests of mothers were improper means of ascertaining whether they were using illegal drugs.

In California v. Greenwood (1988), the Supreme Court extended the doctrine of abandoned property to garbage left on a curb, which police had searched without a warrant. The decision would not necessarily apply to garbage that owners attempt to dispose of in a manner more consistent with a continuing expectation of privacy, such as keeping the garbage on a porch as they await a garbage truck.

Numerous lower court cases involve the search of abandoned vehicles. As established in Carroll v. United States (1925), individuals have lesser expectations of privacy in vehicles than in other places, and this difference factors into such searches. Generally, courts have permitted police to search vehicles from which suspects have fled or which drivers have left at the scene of an accident.