Editorial: Ensuring Protection from Aerial Peeping
The Vermont Supreme Court made a common-sense ruling when it held that Vermonters have the right to privacy that extends to airspace above their properties.
In a 4-1 ruling, the state's top court overturned a felony marijuana conviction of Stephen Bryant of Goshen saying the state police gained evidence in an unconstitutional flyover of the man's rural property in a military helicopter.
We should all be protected from peeping done from low-flying aircraft hovering over our homes. It makes little sense to allow law enforcement to search our homes in order to find legal justification for searching our homes.
Those who bristle at the idea a lawbreaker will escape punishment due to a technicality or feel law enforcement officers should be given the tools to pursue criminals often forget that privacy protection mainly benefits those who never break laws.
Associate Justice Marilyn Skoglund summed it up nicely in her majority opinion: "We protect defendant's marijuana plots against such surveillance so that law-abiding citizens may relax in their backyards, enjoying a sense of security that they are free from unreasonable surveillance."
The state police flight was initiated in 2003 after a local official, as Skoglund wrote in the opinion, "found defendant's insistence on privacy to be 'paranoid.'" State troopers on Vermont Army National Guard helicopters flew as low as 100 feet and staying above Bryant's property for up to 30 minutes. Rules governing such flights require helicopters to remain at least 500 feet above ground. Police observed marijuana plants on the property and used the information to obtain a search warrant during the flight.
If someone were to climb on a ladder to peer over a fence into our yard, we would consider that an invasion of our privacy. Looking down into the yard from a helicopter hovering 100 feet above would be taking the act of peeking over the fence to the nth degree.
The court ruling confirms that we are right to assume we have a right to privacy under the state Constitution. Constitutional protections that define our relationship to our government might get in the way of law enforcement, but ultimately protects our rights and protects us from abuse of power.
