First off, I could frankly care less if you do or do not believe I am a lawyer. However, there is curtilage in an apartment. Second, it is not the area "used home things" that is the curtilage. It is the area in which activities of the home extend. It is without a doubt that the door to your home is an area in which the activities of the home extend. It has been discussed in several cases.
Most recently, in United States v. Bain, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 18703 (D.Mass. February 17, 2015), which held:
In Jardines, the Supreme Court held that officers’ use of trained police dogs to sniff the front porch of a house constituted a search for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Jardines, 131 S. Ct. at 1417-18. The Court reasoned that the porch fell within the curtilage of the home, and the officers’ entry into the curtilage exceeded the implied license to approach the front door for the limited purpose of knocking. Id. at 1415-17. Thus, the Court concluded that the officers’ actions constituted an unlicensed physical intrusion on a constitutionally protected area (the curtilage of the home) under the Fourth Amendment. Id.
Similarly here, if the area at the threshold of the door to Apartment D falls within the curtilage of the home or if the doorknob constitutes part of the home itself, then the officers’ acts of approaching the door to test the lock, as well as inserting the key into the lock, would constitute an unlicensed physical intrusion on a constitutionally protected area. Accordingly, the court must determine whether the area surrounding the door to Apartment D falls within the curtilage of the home or whether the doorknob should be considered part of the home itself.
The Supreme Court has described “curtilage” as “the area immediately surrounding and associated with the home,” “to which the activity of home life extends.” Oliver v. United States, 466 U.S. 170, 180, 182 n.12 (1984). “This area around the home is intimately linked to the home, both physically and psychologically,” and thus is regarded as “part of the home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes.” Jardines, 133 S. Ct. at 1415, 1414 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). The Supreme Court has articulated four factors for determining whether an area constitutes curtilage: “[1] the proximity of the area claimed to be curtilage to the home, [2] whether the area is included within an enclosure surrounding the home, [3] the nature of the uses to which the area is put, and [4] the steps taken by the resident to protect the area from observation by people passing by.” United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 301 (1987). These factors are not “a finely tuned formula” to be “mechanically applied,” but rather are “useful analytical tools only to the degree that, in any given case, they bear upon the centrally relevant consideration-whether the area in question is so intimately tied to the home itself that it should be placed under the home’s ‘umbrella’ of Fourth Amendment protection.” Id.; see also id. at 300 (“[T]he central component of this inquiry [is] whether the area harbors the intimate activity associated with the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.” (internal quotation marks and citations omitted)).
While the curtilage doctrine has largely been developed and applied in the context of rural, single-family homes, see, e.g., Dunn, 480 U.S. at 297-303, the home in question in this case is in a multi-unit structure. Multi-unit structures, in contrast to such single-family homes, are more likely to have certain shared spaces. Accordingly, “[i]n a modern urban multifamily apartment house, the area within the ‘curtilage’ is necessarily much more limited than in the case of a rural dwelling subject to one owner’s control.” Cruz-Pagan, 537 F.2d at 558 (quoting Commonwealth v. Thomas, 267 N.E.2d 489, 491 (Mass. 1971)). This does not mean that the concept of curtilage does not, or should not, have any applicability in the apartment context. See, e.g., United States v. Jackson, 728 F.3d 367, 374 (4th Cir. 2013) (concluding that apartment’s curtilage extended to its private back patio but not the shared yard); see also Espinoza v. State, 454 S.E.2d 765, 767 (Ga. 1995) (“Like residents in single-family homes, apartment residents have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the curtilage surrounding their apartment.”).
A number of persuasive considerations weigh in favor of applying the concept of curtilage in the apartment context generally and in this case in particular. “[W]hen it comes to the Fourth Amendment, the home is first among equals.” Jardines, 133 S. Ct. at 1414. “At the Amendment’s ‘very core’ stands ‘the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.'” Id. (quoting Silverman v. United States, 365 U.S. 505, 511 (1961)). Meaningful protection for the sanctity and intimacies of the home requires that the area immediately surrounding the home enjoy a heightened degree of protection. See id. (“This right would be of little practical value if the State’s agents could stand in a home’s porch or side garden and trawl for evidence with impunity; the right to retreat would be significantly diminished if the police could enter a man’s property to observe his repose from just outside his front window.”). This is so regardless of whether the home is a freestanding dwelling or an apartment. Thus, meaningful protection for the sanctity of a person’s home requires the recognition of curtilage, at least to some extent, in the apartment context. See Fixel v. Wainwright, 492 F.2d 480, 484 (5th Cir. 1974) (“Contemporary concepts of living such as multi-unit dwellings must not dilute [an individual’s] right to privacy any more than is absolutely required.”); see also United States v. Roby, 122 F.3d 1120, 1127 (8th Cir. 1997) (Heaney, J. dissenting) (“I do not believe that the Fourth Amendment protects only those persons who can afford to live in a single family residence with no surrounding common space.”).
Moreover, the area immediately surrounding the home is “linked to the home, both physically and psychologically,” Jardines, 133 S. Ct. at 1415, whether the home is an apartment or freestanding dwelling. Residents of freestanding dwellings and apartments alike would feel a similar sense of invasion upon sitting in their homes and seeing their door knobs turn or witnessing police peer through the transom above their door. The Supreme Court has indicated that the concept defining curtilage is “easily understood from our daily experience.” Id. (quoting Oliver, 466 U.S. at 182 n.12). Daily experience counsels that apartment dwellers do not expect police officers to engage in such measures inches from or touching their homes. See, e.g., McDonald v. United States, 335 U.S. 451, 456 (1948) (holding that officers’ actions of climbing through a window of a boarding house, standing on a chair in the hallway, and peering through the transom above the defendant’s door constituted an unlawful search); United States v. Charles, 290 F. Supp. 2d 610, 614 (D.V.I. 1999) (holding that warrantless swipe of residue from doorknob of home violated defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights for “[c]learly, the doorknob on the defendant’s front door … is within the curtilage of the home.”); see also 1 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 2.3(c) (5th ed.) (“To assert that the tenant in a[n] … apartment building has an expectation of privacy in his space is to say very little if the tenant is put to the choice of papering over his transom and stuffing his keyhole or else having a policeman look in.”).
Turning to the particular area at issue in this case, several of the Dunn factors favor finding that the area surrounding the door to Apartment D falls within the curtilage of the home. …