Oregon declines to find expectation of privacy in trash picked up for disposal

Oregon considers trash searches under its state constitution, and it declines to find a reasonable expectation of privacy. State v. Howard, 342 Ore. 635, 157 P.3d 1189 (2007):

We note, as an initial matter, that defendants do not argue on review that they retained either an ownership or a possessory interest in the garbage once the sanitation company picked it up. It follows that, if defendants had no ownership or possessory interest in the garbage once the sanitation company collected it, the officers did not seize the garbage in violation of defendants’ Article I, section 9, rights; that is, the officers did not interfere, significantly or otherwise, with defendants’ ownership or possessory interests. See Owens, 302 Ore. at 207 (explaining that a seizure occurs when government officials significantly interfere with a person’s “possessory or ownership interests in property”). Rather, the sanitation company lawfully possessed the property once it collected it. See Haslem v. Lockwood, 37 Conn 500 (1871) (citizen who raked into piles horse manure abandoned on public thoroughfare lawfully possessed it as against other citizens). If any entity had a constitutionally protected possessory interest, it was the sanitation company but that company voluntarily turned the property over to the police.

Defendants focus on review solely on the question whether they retained a protected privacy interest in the garbage, the invasion of which would give rise to a “search.” See Owens, 302 Ore. at 206 (defining a search as an invasion of a protected privacy interest). On that issue, as we noted above, defendants do not contend that they retained an ownership or possessory interest in the garbage once the sanitation company picked it up. Similarly, they have not identified any other subconstitutional right or relationship that would prohibit the sanitation company from doing what it did here. For instance, defendants have not claimed that their contract with the sanitation company limited what the company could do with the garbage once the company took possession of it.

Texas’s exclusionary rule does not exclude evidence of a new crime. “Thus, the evidence that must be excluded under article 38.23 is evidence of the crime that was committed before the officer’s unlawful search or seizure, not evidence of a crime that was committed thereafter.” State v. Iduarte, 232 S.W.3d 133 (Tex. App. — Ft. Worth 2007).*

Defendant claimed she was detained for a dog sniff because she refused to consent, but the officer [barely] had reasonable suspicion based on the totality of circumstances [giving the officer every benefit of the doubt and the citizen none]. State v. Daniels, 221 S.W.3d 438 (Mo. App. S.D. 2007):

Considering the “totality of the circumstances” after drugs were found on one of the group, and taking “into account a police officer’s trained instinctive judgment operating on a multitude of small gestures and actions impossible to reconstruct,” the trial court could plausibly conclude the police had more than an “inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or hunch” that criminal activity was afoot, and a “minimal level of objective justification” to hold the two cars long enough to run the drug dog (arguably the quickest and least intrusive “search” possible) in aid of their investigation. Thus, the trial court did not err and the evidence was admissible. The judgment and conviction are affirmed.