Fourth Amendment and Nighttime Warrants

In State v. Susan Ranae Jackson, the Minnesota Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits official intrusions into the home during a period of nighttime repose without proper justification, which period of nighttime encompasses the right to be free from official intrusion into the home during the nighttime when personal and private activities are likely to occur.

Although no other court in the nation has gone so far in defining a "period of nighttime repose", the court reasoned that special interests must be protected at night:

We believe that at certain times it will be readily apparent what is protected during this period of nighttime repose. For example, if the police search an unlit home at 3 a.m. without proper nighttime authorization, they run considerable risk of violating the occupants’ interest in being free from intrusion during a nighttime period of repose. But if the police search a home at 8:30 p.m. on the summer solstice when the doors are open and a party is underway at a home, they are much less likely to run the risk of seriously violating the occupants’ interest in being free from such intrusion. These examples illustrate a key aspect that we recognize and acknowledge about the interest we have articulated, especially at its beginning and end. This definition is a bit nebulous and necessarily encompasses what Justice Robert Jackson might refer to as a “zone of twilight,” within which the right to protection is less certain and will depend “on the imperatives of events and contemporary imponderables rather than on abstract theories of law.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 637 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring).

Having concluded that there is a "period of nighttime repose" at which time there are special interests to be protected inside the home that a normal search warrant does not address, and that the search warrant was executed during this "period of nighttime repose", the court held:

the police violated Jackson’s right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures guaranteed by the United States Constitution when, without information indicating that Jackson had not yet entered a period of nighttime repose, they entered her home at 9:25 p.m. in the wintertime—December 11—with a search warrant that invalidly authorized a nighttime entry. In reaching this conclusion we need not decide the exact time when Jackson’s constitutionally protected period of nighttime repose began and ended. Rather, we need only conclude that the search of her home fell within the protected time period.