“In 2007, the Texas Legislature instituted the Sexually Oriented Business Fee Act (‘the SOBF’)” which requires admission fees into strip clubs and records inspections. A sexually oriented business is not one of those that can be “closely regulated” for administrative inspections. 9000 Airport LLC v. Hegar, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 201337 (S.D. Tex. Nov. 9, 2023):
The Comptroller argues that SOBs fall within the “closely regulated industry” exception. They do not. Eight years ago, the Supreme Court wrote that “[o]ver the past 45 years, the Court has identified only four industries that have such a history of government oversight that no reasonable expectation of privacy … could exist for … such an enterprise.” Patel, 576 U.S. at 424 (refusing to classify hotels as a regulated industry) (internal quotations omitted). The Court held that “[s]imply listing” the four closely regulated industries—liquor sales, firearms dealing, mining, and running an automobile junkyard—”refutes [the] argument that hotels should be counted among them.” Id. The same act of “simply listing” the closely regulated industries refutes the argument that SOBs should be included in this quaternity.
The Court declines the Comptroller’s invitation to add a fifth industry to this “narrow exception.” Id. The Comptroller’s only argument is the conclusion that “[b]ased on a substantial history of regulation, sexually oriented business are within a ‘closely regulated industry’ for Fourth Amendment purposes,” buttressed by a citation to the nude dancing restrictions that the Supreme Court upheld in City of Erie v. Pap’s A.M., 529 U.S. 277, 120 S. Ct. 1382, 146 L. Ed. 2d 265 (2000) (DE 13). But Pap’s did not even mention the Fourth Amendment, let alone the closely regulated exception. Such a threadbare and unrelated argument does not overcome “‘[t]he clear import of our cases … that the closely regulated industry … is the exception.'” Patel, 576 U.S. at 424 (quoting Barlow’s, Inc., 436 U.S., at 313). Accordingly, the exception does not apply.
Even if the closely regulated exception did apply, the statute would still violate the Fourth Amendment. Under the closely regulated exception, “the statute’s inspection program, in terms of the certainty and regularity of its application, [must] provid[e] a constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant.” Id. 426 (internal quotations omitted). Neither the statute nor the related Administrative Code addresses this requirement. Tex. Bus. & Com. Code 102.052(b) & 34 TAC 3.722 authorize the Comptroller to search and inspect an SOB’s private records “upon request,” without any limits on how often or when he may inspect those records. The Comptroller does not dispute this. Instead, he argues that the clarity of the statute’s instructions satisfies this requirement. But clarity of how to comply with the inspection scheme says nothing about its certainty or regularity. Accordingly, the plaintiff is likely to succeed on its Fourth Amendment claim.
by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want /
But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers,
is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that
those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting
out crime."
—Johnson
v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)