Privy Privacy?

Not legally so, says a St. Louis federal judge after hearing a case about a man found partly disrobed with a woman, cocaine and marijuana in the one-person restroom of an Iowa convenience store had no absolute right to privacy.

"The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously rejected Lonnie Maurice Hill's claim that police who found him with the woman and drugs breached his Fourth Amendment right to privacy, making the drugs illegally seized and unusable as evidence.

Other courts have held that the right of privacy in bathrooms varies case to case, with some judges holding that a stall in a public restroom is not a private place when used for something other than its intended purpose. "The Fourth Amendment protects people and not places," Judge Donald Lay wrote for the three-judge 8th Circuit panel. In Hill's case, "it was not a single person using the single toilet restroom but two persons of opposite gender and, under the circumstances, we hold that they had a diminished expectation of privacy which had expired by the time the officers arrived."