This morning, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously ruled against the government in a long-running class action lawsuit from the Institute for Justice (IJ) on behalf of people who rented security deposit boxes at US Private Vaults. The decision slammed the FBI for overstepping its authority when it opened up hundreds of renters’ boxes, conducted criminal searches of them all, and attempted to permanently keep everything in the boxes worth more than $5,000, all without charging any box renter with a crime.“Today’s opinion draws a line in the sand, to ensure something like this never happens again,” said IJ Senior Attorney Rob Johnson. “If this had come out the other way, the government could have exported this raid as a model across the country. Now, the government is on notice its actions violated the Fourth Amendment.”Judge Milan D. Smith, writing for the court, likened the FBI’s actions to the abuses that motivated the Bill of Rights: “[T]he government failed to explain why applying the inventory exception to this case would not open the door to the kinds of ‘writs of assistance’ the British authorities used prior to the Founding to conduct limitless searches of an individual’s personal belongings. It was those very abuses of power, after all, that led to adoption of the Fourth Amendment in the first place.”
