(Source: MIRS.news, Published 05/03/2024) A rural Michigan township's use of a drone to check if property owners were following an agreement on the number of junked cars on their property does not violate the Michigan exclusionary rule, which prevents use of evidence collected in violation of a defendant’s constitutional rights.
The high court did not address whether Long Lake Township’s use of a drone to take aerial photographs and video of residents Todd Maxon and Heather Maxon’s property was an unconstitutional search in violation of both the state and U.S. Constitutions.
The decision means a township's attempt to enforce zoning issues can't be found to violate the exclusionary rule, which was created by judges to deter law enforcement misconduct. According to one justice, “it's not a constitutional right.”
“The zoning-enforcement action is meant to prevent the Maxons from continuing to thwart the township’s zoning laws,” wrote Justice Brian Zahra in the court’s unanimous opinion. “Suppressing this evidence would require this court to ignore important evidence of this ongoing violation and to close our eyes to ongoing illegal activity. We decline to do so here . . ."
Long Lake Township hired Zero Gravity to conduct drone flyovers of the Maxon couple’s 5-acre property between April 2017 and May 2018 to determine if they had expanded a junkyard beyond the scope of a 2008 agreement that limited the number of junked cars on their property.
Those photographs and video were used to sue the Maxons for violating local zoning and nuisance ordinances.
The couple sought to suppress the drone evidence and the trial court denied the request, but in March 2021 the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed that finding.
However, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the appeals court to determine if the exclusionary rule applied. On review, the appeals court held in 2022 that the rule didn’t apply.
The Supreme Court agrees, noting the U.S. Supreme Court has refined the rule, and declined to apply it to other proceedings except criminal trials “with very limited exceptions.”
The state Supreme Court has applied the exclusionary rule to civil asset-forfeiture cases, which are known as “quasi-criminal proceedings,” and to evidence obtained from a warrantless blood draw following an automobile crash in civil negligence or wrongful-death proceedings.
That narrow application, Zahra noted, “is inconsistent” with the Maxons’ request to apply it to their civil case.
