OK, Moscowans: park whoever you want until they change to digital parking metering.
The next time parking enforcement officers use chalk to mark your tires, they might be acting unconstitutionally.
A federal appeals court ruled Monday that “chalking” is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
https://twitter.com/OrinKerr/status/1120412475466375168
“Trespassing upon a privately-owned vehicle parked on a public street to place a chalk mark to begin gathering information to ultimately impose a government sanction is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment,” Taylor’s lawyer, Philip Ellison, wrote in a court filing.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit unanimously agreed. Chalking tires is a kind of trespass, Judge Bernice Donald wrote for the panel, and it requires a warrant. The decision affects the 6th Circuit, which includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
The Fourth Amendment protects people from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” To determine whether a violation has occurred, the court first asks whether the government’s conduct counts as a search; if so, it asks whether the search was reasonable.
The court found that chalking is indeed a “search” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, because government officials physically trespass upon a constitutionally protected area to obtain information. Just as the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that sticking a GPS tracker to a car counted as a “search,” so is marking a tire with chalk to figure out how long it has been parked, the court wrote.