Case Comment, Fourth Amendment – Exigent Circumstances Exception: Kentucky v. King

Abstract

The Fourth Amendment requires police officers to obtain a warrant before they conduct a search or seizure within a private residence. However, law enforcement agents may conduct warrantless searches in emergencies, a rule known as the “exigent circumstances exception to the general warrant requirement.” In order to protect the integrity of the warrant requirement, lower courts developed a variety of tests to disqualify “police-created” exigencies from the scope of this exception. Last Term, in Kentucky v. King, the Supreme Court held that police officers may not rely on the exigent circumstances exception to justify a warrantless search if the officers created the exigency by violating or threatening to violate the Fourth Amendment. The Court considered six possible tests to identify when the police impermissibly create exigent circumstances. Unfortunately, the Court never mentioned a seventh option: “none of the above.” Rather than craft a separate police-created exigency rule, the Court could have improved this area of Fourth Amendment law by simply merging the analysis of police causation into the determination of whether an exigency existed at all.

Keywords: Fourth Amendment, Kentucky v. King, Exigent Circumstances, Police-Created Exigency, Warrant Requirement, Warrant