A federal appeals court has ruled that “chalking” vehicle tires violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, the provision that protects citizens against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
The decision was issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which oversees Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The judges unanimously agreed that chalking tires is in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The case was brought forth by a Michigan woman, whom the court described as a “frequent recipient of parking tickets.” The woman, Alison Taylor, sued the city of Saginaw, Michigan, after receiving 15 parking tickets within a few years. Attorneys for Taylor argued that the chalking was unconstitutional, and described a particular city parking enforcement officer, named Tabitha Hoskins, as a “prolific chalker.”
“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,” Philip Ellison, attorney for Taylor, wrote in a court filing.
In deciding that making chalk marks on tires violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, the justices had to decide if making such marks amounts to a search, and if so, was the search reasonable?
The justices found that placing chalk marks on tires is a “search” as defined by the Constitution because officials from the government physically trespass upon a constitutionally protected area in order to obtain information.
A previous Supreme Court ruling in 2012 determined that placing a GPS tracker on a car counted as a “search.” Therefore, marking a vehicle with chalk in order to determine how long the car has been parked, amounts to the same thing, the justices concluded.
The court also determined that marking a vehicle with chalk is not a reasonable search.
The court wrote that the city searches vehicles “that are parked legally, without probable cause, or even so much as ‘individualized suspicion of wrongdoing’ — the touchstone of the reasonableness standard.”
