During a carjacking investigation, police officers stood outside a motel room in an open-air walkway and peeked through a one-inch gap in the room’s window curtains. They saw Cameron Watkins sitting on a bed without pants on, next to a handgun with an extended magazine. The officers arrested Watkins after a three-hour standoff and later obtained a warrant to search his room. Watkins pleaded guilty to a § 922(g)(1) firearm count (preserving his suppression challenge) and a jury convicted him on a separate ammunition charge.
On appeal, Watkins challenged the search through his window curtains as a Fourth Amendment violation. The Tenth Circuit disagreed. It first distinguished constitutionally protected “curtilage” from public areas, noting that unlike a home’s porch or yard, the walkway extension and area outside the motel room were open to the public, unmarked, unfenced, and commonly used by staff and guests. There was no breach of curtilage because the officer did not enter a space “intimately tied” to the private activities of the room.
In addressing whether Watkins had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the area observable through the window, the panel held that the interior of the motel room was in plain view. Partially closed curtains, it reasoned, did not shield the interior of the room from anyone using the walkway, and so did not trigger Fourth Amendment protection. The court likened the case to other situations where, for example, officers could see a yard through cracks in a fence or an interior through broken shutters.
In dissent, Judge Moritz criticized the majority opinion for “expanding permissible surveillance and eroding privacy.” She argued that under Katz, Watkins had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the motel room behind drawn curtains, and that the officer “broke basic privacy norms” by peering through the one-inch gap was intrusive “snooping”, not plain view.
Appeal from Western District of Oklahoma.
Opinion by Hartz, joined by Phillips. Dissent by Moritz.