A local television news team on a media “ride-along” may have violated one University student’s right to privacy recently when it entered his home with Eugene Police Department officers.
The KVAL team, the local CBS affiliate, entered the student’s Alder Street home around midnight Oct. 1 and shot footage as officers from the EPD’s Party Patrol issued 21 minor in possession citations and two tickets for allowing the consumption of alcohol by minors.
The resident of the home, Zack Schliefer, said at no time did KVAL reporters or camera personnel ask for permission to enter his home or film on the premises.
KVAL’s reporter on the scene, Jodi Unruh, will not return to work until early November and was unavailable for comment, a KVAL staff member said. KVAL News Director Deana Reece declined to comment about the incident.
Schliefer said the news team entered through the south gate to his back yard and later filmed from his porch. During the filming, he was unaware of his right to ask KVAL to leave.
“[KVAL] put a big flashing light on me,” Schliefer said. “I flat told them that made me uncomfortable. The officer never told me that I had the right to ask them to leave.”
But EPD spokeswoman Jan Powers said Schliefer forfeited his right to ask the television news team to leave because he’d already given them permission to be there.
The indicator, she said, was a sign in front of Schliefer’s home that read: “Enter through back door.”
The sign “issued to anyone — whether it’s media, police … or whoever — permission to enter through the back door,” Powers said.
Schliefer said he disputes that claim because the sign could have been written by anyone and was in no way an invitation to police and media personnel to enter.
But Powers said Schliefer is responsible for his home, and therefore cannot claim that the sign was not his invitation to enter, even if he did not write it.
The sign presents a dilemma for lawmakers, who must decide if it constitutes an invitation to the media to enter, said Mike Hiestand, attorney for the Student Press Law Center.
He said the May 24, 1999, rulings by the U.S Supreme Court, Wilson vs. Layne and Hanlon vs. Berger, don’t necessarily ring true in Schliefer’s case.
In Wilson vs. Layne, the court ruled that a media “ride-along” in a home violates the homeowner’s Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. Though the officers had a warrant, the court said, the presence of the newspaper reporter and photographer accompanying them “was not in aid of the warrant’s execution.”
A similar case, Hanlon vs. Berger, contested that special agents from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service — who had a warrant to search structures on a private ranch owned by residents suspected of illegally hunting wildlife — did not have the right to allow media to film the incident on private property.
A television crew from the Cable News Network (CNN) “accompanied and observed the officers, and the media crew recorded the officers’ conduct in executing the warrant,” officers said before the Supreme Court.
The court ruled the officers’ actions in this case violated the homeowners’ Fourth Amendment rights on the same grounds as Wilson vs. Layne.
“The fact is, both cases were different [from Schliefer’s] in that the media were invited along [in the Supreme Court cases] by law enforcement authorities,” Hiestand said. The sticking point in Schliefer’s case is whether or not the sign constituted an invitation for the media to enter the premises.
Though Schliefer is not pushing for legal recourse, saying “what’s done is done,” he said even if the sign was an invitation for KVAL to enter through the back door, the television news team did not enter through his back door — they came in the rear gate.
He said the back door is located on the north side of the house by the carport, not the south gate where officers and KVAL originally entered.