Normally, the Fourth Amendment requires a police officer to have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed to justify the search of a person, vehicle, home, etc. One of the exceptions to this “reasonable suspicion” involves what is termed a “regulatory search”. California courts have interpreted the Fish and Game statutes as authorizing a stop of a car occupied by a hunter or fisherman to enforce Fish and Game rules. The United States Supreme Court has held in a number of cases that an administrative or regulatory search or seizure may be conducted without the presence of a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. This decision is one that unfortunately, in the opinion of a Santa Rosa criminal defense attorney, a Marin criminal defense attorney, and a Napa criminal defense attorney, deprives citizens of their rights and enlarges the ability of police to intrude upon citizens’ freedom of movement.

The courts have reasoned that without this latitude it would be impossible to enforce Fish and Game laws if a game warden were required to have a “reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed” before stopping hunters and fisherman and demanding to be shown the animals or fish caught or killed. The court has ruled that this intrusion on privacy due to this stop and demand procedure is minimal at best and these stops are limited to people who are voluntarily engaging in the heavily regulated activity of fishing and hunting and these demands to be shown the fish or animals caught or killed is directly related to fishing and hunting.

The only requirement for this type of a stop is that the stopping of the vehicle must be reasonably close in time and to the place where the fishing or hunting took place. If so, the courts have ruled that the encroachment on the hunter or fisherman’s privacy is modest, thereby justifying it. Other decisions by the same courts have limited law enforcement’s right to stop a person or vehicle. Unfortunately, the courts have, for some time now, ruled that weighing the state’s need to regulate Fish and Game rules against the intrusion on the privacy of citizens is a reasonable procedure under the Fourth Amendment.

Santa Rosa criminal defense lawyers, Marin criminal defense lawyers and Napa criminal defense lawyers believe that recent decisions in this regard incorrectly expand law enforcement’s ability to intrude on the privacy of a citizen who is not engaged in any criminal activity. In the recent case of People v. Maikhio (June 2001), the court held that a member of the state’s Fish and Game agency, who reasonably believed that a person has recently been fishing or hunting and who lacks a reasonable suspicion that the person has violated any Fish and Game rules, can still detain the vehicle in which the person is a passenger to demand that the person show all of the fish or game that the person has caught.

For more information about criminal cases, click here.