Here's One For All You Lawyers Out There

This is an interesting decision:

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police cannot search a home when one resident invites them in but another tells them to go away.

In his first dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts raised concerns about the decision's potential impact on battered women.

The 5-3 decision put new limits on officers who want to search for evidence of a crime without obtaining a warrant first.

If one occupant tells them no, the search is unconstitutional, justices said.

Roberts dissented, predicting severe consequences for women who want police to come in but are overruled by abusive husbands.

Roberts' comment may be a bit of an over-reaction. This case involved a situation where an officer responded to a domestic dispute call and the wife -- over her husband's objections -- led the officer to her husband's cocaine stash. Justice Souter, who wrote for the majority, said that because there was no evidence of wrongdoing, the wife's invitation to enter did not work to override her husband's refusal to consent to the search. But if a husband was in a house beating his wife to a pulp, this decision would not prevent police from intervening; and if the husband's pile of coke was sitting on the coffee table in plain sight when the police entered to protect the wife, then the seizure of the coke and subsequent prosecution of the husband would not be unconstitutional.

What I am not sure about is whether the State could invoke some other exception to the search warrant requirement, like exigent circumstances (i.e., the wife told the cops that there was a ton of coke under the bed upstairs and the cops feared that the husband would flush it down the toilet if they took the time to get a warrant).