A bid by the state of Tennessee to dismiss a lawsuit over spying by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency on private property has been rejected by a judge.
The dispute is over the state agencies posting of cameras on private property without permission to surveil hunting activities.
Benton County Circuit Court Judge Charles McGinley denied TWRA’s request for the case to be dismissed.
Landowners Terry Rainwaters and Hunter Hollingsworth joined with the Institute for Justice to sue the state for “ignoring their ‘No Trespassing’ signs by entering and installing cameras on their land.”
“Private land is not open to public officers,” said IJ Attorney Joshua Windham. “We look forward to Tennessee’s courts declaring once and for all that the Tennessee Constitution does not allow the government to conduct warrantless surveillance of private property.”
The state has claimed a century-old “open fields” doctrine gives its officials the right to use private land.
In 1924, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect any land beyond the home and its immediate surrounding area.
But the Tennessee constitution is different.
“Article I, Section 7 of the Tennessee Constitution protects each individual’s ‘persons, houses, papers and possessions’ from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures.’ Since 1926, the Tennessee Supreme Court has held that this provision protects private land from warrantless intrusions,” IJ said.
That would make the agency’s surveillance cameras an unconstitutional warrantless search.
The next step in the case is discovery.
Rainwaters lives, farms and hunts on the 136 acres he owns along the Big Sandy River in rural Tennessee. He has a “no trespassing” sign on his gate.
“Yet agents of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency ignored that warning, entering his property to set up and retrieve cameras that they used to watch for hunting violations,” the Institute for Justice said.
Rainwaters said that in 2017 he found a couple of cameras set up on his land. He looked later, and they were gone.
“It’s deeply disturbing that I never know whether a state game officer is walking around my land or watching my private activities,” he said. “If the state can put cameras on my farm whenever they want, that really destroys the notion that this land is private. And having unannounced visitors walking around our farm during hunting season isn’t just intrusive, it’s dangerous.”
See a video explaining the case:
