A forester who owns woodlands in East Feliciana Parish is suing the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF), alleging that the agency’s policy of allowing game wardens to enter private lands without warrants violates the state constitution.
The lawsuit was filed earlier this month in the state’s 19th Judicial District Court on behalf of Thomas Manuel, whose tree farm business is located on 240 acres north of Baton Rouge. The complaint argues that the Louisiana Constitution protects his property against “unreasonable searches, seizures or invasions of privacy.”
Manuel, with the help of the Institute for Justice, which works to protect property rights, sued the state agency after LDWF wildlife enforcement agents entered his property twice in December of last year without his consent or a warrant, according to the complaint. The agents interrogated Manuel and his brother, but neither were cited because the pair were complying with the state’s hunting laws, the Institute for Justice reported.
“LDWF bases that policy and practice on a state statute that empowers agents to ‘see’ whether people are violating wildlife laws ‘in the territory assigned to’ them – including on private land,” the lawsuit states. “... The statute does not require agents to have consent, a warrant, probable cause or reasonable suspicion before entering private land.”
The legal complaint seeks a judgment concluding that warrantless searches of Manuel’s property violated the state constitution and calls for an injunction barring the agency from using the statute in question to conduct further searches of private property in the state. The plaintiff is also seeking attorney fees and court costs.
State game wardens base their authority to search private lands on a U.S. Supreme Court rule called the “open-fields doctrine,” which interprets the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment as not protecting all property from warrantless searches, according to the Institute for Justice.
“Historically, they’ve justified this decision on a bad series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that said that the Fourth Amendment doesn't protect land outside … the immediate area around your house,” James Knight, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, told the Louisiana Record.
Knight added that Louisiana’s state constitution is broader in scope and expressly protects all property from unreasonable searches. In fact, other states, including Montana, New York and Oregon, have similar policies that bar warrantless searches on private lands.
“Right down the road in Mississippi, they have rejected the open-fields doctrine, and wildlife there is thriving and the game wardens are able to enforce game laws,” he said.
The issue of warrantless searches of private lands goes beyond the enforcement of hunting rules, according to the Institute for Justice.
“Officials across the spectrum – from police officers, to environmental inspectors, to code-enforcement officers, to immigration officials – use the open-fields doctrine to invade private land across the country every day,” the Institute for Justice said in a news release. “That’s not how law enforcement is supposed to work.”
Manuel stressed that constitutional limits on the application of government power need to be respected in Louisiana.
“Protecting wildlife can be accomplished without trampling on our privacy and property rights,” the plaintiff said in a prepared statement. “From my experience managing land in both Louisiana and Mississippi, I’ve seen that wildlife can thrive where the government must respect property lines.”
The LDWF did not respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.