9th Cir.: Welfare home visits for eligibility are reasonable

The Ninth Circuit held yesterday that welfare home visits are reasonable, and the MSJ for the county was affirmed. Sanchez v. County of San Diego, 464 F.3d 916 (9th Cir. September 19, 2006). From the Lexis overview:

Plaintiff county welfare recipients sued defendant county and various county officials alleging that the county’s welfare eligibility program requiring all welfare applicants to consent to a warrantless home visit as a condition of eligibility, violated their rights under the U.S. and California Constitutions. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California granted summary judgment to defendants; the welfare recipients appealed.

OVERVIEW: The court noted that the U.S. Supreme Court had held that home visits for welfare verification purposes were not searches under the Fourth Amendment. All prospective welfare beneficiaries were subject to mandatory home visits for the purpose of verifying eligibility, and not as part of a criminal investigation. Therefore, the court concluded that the home visits did not qualify as searches under the Fourth Amendment. The court noted that even if the home visits were searches, they were reasonable. The home visits served the important governmental interests of verifying an applicant’s eligibility for welfare benefits and preventing fraud. Since the investigators had legitimate verification-related reasons for viewing items not in plain view such as clothing and the contents of medicine cabinets, and only did so with the homeowner’s explicit consent, their activity could not fairly be characterized as snooping. A warrant requirement would pose serious administrative difficulties in the welfare context including subjecting welfare applicants’ rights and privacy to greater infringement. The court concluded that the home visits were reasonable under Cal. Const. art. I, § 13.

Government contended that defendant was not arrested. “Assessing the evidence in a manner most favorable to Burrell, see Behrens v. Pelletier, 516 U.S. 299, 309 (1996), this encounter was an arrest. Burrell was removed from his car at gunpoint, handcuffed, Mirandized, and told that he was under arrest. Under our case law, this confluence of circumstances leads us to conclude that he in fact was under arrest.” Also, there was PC for the arrest. Burrell v. McIlroy, 464 F.3d 853 (9th Cir. September 20, 2006)* (Not an arrest? You’re kidding, right? This case was under submission two years.).

No expectation of privacy in a code enforcement officer walking around the plaintiff’s yard perimeter and looking in. Beganskas v. Town of Babylon, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 66938 (E.D. N.Y. September 19, 2006). Comment: The only remarkable thing about this decision is that the argument was made at all.