Supreme Court Needs To Close Loophole That Lets New York Cops Seize Guns Without Warrants

Thanks to a little-known loophole, lower federal courts have regularly written the government a blank check to search homes and seize firearms from lawful gun owners without a warrant. One of those owners, Wayne Torcivia, is now calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to close that loophole once and for all.

Torcivia’s case dates back to April 6, 2014, when three officers from Suffolk County, New York showed up at his house in Ronkonkoma right after midnight. They were responding to what they were told was a “a violent, domestic dispute of a 17-year-old female and an intoxicated father.” Both sides dispute what happened next.

Torcivia claimed one of the officers threatened him with a Taser, and he warned the officer, “I wouldn’t do that, I have a heart condition. I could die.” According to the officers, Torcivia asked them to “please tase me and kill me.” Torcivia, for his part, denied any making suicidal statements.

In any case, that alleged request was “the magic phrase, the phrase that got him to the point where we needed to have him evaluated,” one officer recounted. Torcivia was promptly handcuffed and taken to the Stony Brook University Hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program Unit.

Since hospital policy didn’t allow in-depth evaluations until an admitted person was sober, staffers let Torcivia sleep it off. When he woke up, a nurse determined there was “no indication for acute psychiatric admission” and that Torcivia was “not imminently dangerous” to himself or others; the nurse recommended discharging Torcivia.

But Torcivia couldn’t leave right away. Curiously, only after Torcivia handed over the combination to his gun safe, which let Suffolk County seize his guns without a warrant, did the hospital formally discharge him. Torcivia spent more than 12 hours detained at the psychiatric hospital—plenty of time for police to get a warrant.

Because he was involuntarily committed, Torcivia was no longer eligible for a pistol license in Suffolk County; two months after he was detained, police revoked Torcivia’s pistol license. It’s been over eight years now and Torcivia still hasn’t gotten his handguns back, even though he wasn’t charged with a crime.

To vindicate his Fourth Amendment rights, Torcivia sued. It should have been a slam dunk. Just last year in Caniglia v. Strom, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of a Rhode Island man who had his firearms seized without a warrant while he underwent a psychiatric evaluation. With its ruling, the Supreme Court firmly rejected expanding a Fourth Amendment exception (“community caretaking”) to include the home.

Even though Caniglia was handed down just six months prior, the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals still ruled against Torcivia last November. In fact, despite nearly identical fact patterns for both cases, the Second Circuit only spent a single footnote to discuss Caniglia. Instead, the court relied on the so-called “special needs exception,” which lets the government authorize a warrantless seizure if they invoke a vague health or safety reason that “serves a special need beyond the normal need for law enforcement.”

For Suffolk County to justify seizing Torcivia’s guns, they simply cited a “special need” to prevent suicide and domestic violence, even though Torcivia wasn’t deemed a suicide risk and his daughter never claimed she had been assaulted.

Although Torcivia’s case centers on firearm confiscation, the special needs exception goes far beyond guns. The Second Circuit has sided with an environmental conservation agent who trespassed onto a Long Island man’s “completely enclosed” backyard for a permit to extend his dock. Other federal courts have used the exception to uphold warrantless home intrusions to seize documents and to forcibly evict a 64-year-old Holocaust survivor, who died while being removed from her home.

Urging the Supreme Court to take Torcivia’s case, the Institute for Justice warns in an amicus brief that the special needs exception “lacks any meaningful limiting features.” After all, given the sheer scope and scale of the government today, “what does the government do that cannot somehow be framed in terms of health or safety?” And unlike narrowly limited and “historically rooted” exceptions for emergency situations, the special needs exception is completely “detached from the Fourth Amendment’s text and history.” Simply put, the special needs exception has written police officers “a blank check…to justify warrantless home invasions.”

The special needs exception also flies in the face of recent Supreme Court precedent. In addition to Caniglia, the High Court closed off another major Fourth Amendment loophole last year. In Lange v. California, the court refused “to print a new permission slip for entering the home without a warrant,” and rejected the idea that pursuing a fleeing misdemeanor suspect would always qualify as an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

Lange also reaffirmed a long line of cases that emphasized that “the home is entitled to special protection.” Any exception that would permit a warrantless home intrusion must be “jealously and carefully drawn.” “When it comes to the Fourth Amendment,” the late Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, “the home is first among equals.” The “very core” of the Fourth Amendment, he added, is “the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”

Unless the Supreme Court takes Torcivia’s case, the special needs exception will continue its unwarranted attack on the Fourth Amendment.