If, as they say, possession is nine-tenths of the law, when you set your garbage out on the curb, is it still your garbage—or can anybody take it? Recently Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law, overturning last year’s ruling by the Iowa Supreme Court, now making it legal for law enforcement officers to search a person’s trash without a warrant. The new law, which is in agreement with laws in most states, declares that once a person leaves garbage on the curb for collection, that person no longer has a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in regards to the contents. The garbage is considered “abandoned.”
Okay, maybe garbage is garbage, but to say it’s “abandoned” sounds a bit harsh, even cruel. I mean, presumably, before it was garbage, it was something you wanted or something you wanted to keep private. Maybe it was once a dozen long-stemmed roses, lovingly presented on a wedding anniversary. Or maybe it was an unsent angry letter to a boss, threatening legal action and violent rearrangement of various facial features. There are good and sufficient reasons why certain things end up in the trash. And why they ought never again to see the light of day. Like Las Vegas, what goes in the trash, stays in the trash—buried, but not abandoned.
Last year, writing for the 4-3 majority on the Iowa Supreme Court, Justice Christopher McDonald observed, that “garbage contains intimate and private details of life.” Just because your trash is stuffed in a plastic sack and left on the curb for collection doesn’t mean it is some kind of yard sale of your dirty little secrets. What if a police profiler rummages through your trash, looking for a murder weapon and finds your four empty prune juice bottles instead? You know that’s going in his report.
If your garbage is considered legally abandoned and no longer your property, what if you decide to retrieve some item from your trash? Is it stealing? And if your trash doesn’t belong to you, does that mean your trash can is also abandoned for anybody to take?
Dumpster diving is legal in all 50 states. But what if a person goes through your trash and sticks herself on your insulin syringe? Are you responsible for her medical bill? And what if somebody (and I’m not recommending this…exactly) were to plant a dye pack in their trash like banks use to mark robbers? Could the investigator who opens the bag make you pay for his clothes? And make you take down the YouTube video of him getting sprayed? After all, you’re not responsible if it’s not your trash. (Actually, you are, but it’s an amusing thought.)
I appreciate that law enforcement can be a dirty job and if an officer sometimes has to sift through a suspect’s garbage, it’s probably worth it if it helps him to “take out the trash.” And if criminals are dumb enough to leave incriminating evidence in their trash, they deserve to get caught.