A Survey of State Laws Against Glue Sniffing and Driving Under the Influence of Glue

After writing yesterday's post on this story about a man arrested in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for allegedly driving while sniffing fumes from an aerosol can, I decided to do a little more research into glue sniffing laws in other states. As I noted in yesterday's post, Cedar Rapids' ordinance does not apply to any substances other than glue or cement, so any non-adhesive, aerosolized substances that people may inhale to get high are not covered by the ordinance. Additionally, I was unable to find any provisions in Iowa law regarding driving under the influence (operating while intoxicated) that clearly applied to driving while under the influence of inhaled glue or other aerosolized substances.

Cedar Rapids' ordinance banning glue sniffing states:

62.29 - GLUE SNIFFING.

(a) As used in this section the term model glue shall mean any glue or cement containing toluene, acetone, or other solvent or chemical having the property of releasing toxic vapors.   

(b) No person shall, for the purpose of causing a condition of intoxication, euphoria, excitement, exhilaration, stupefaction, or dulling of the senses or nervous system, smell or inhale the fumes from any model glue; provided, however, that this section shall not apply to the inhalation of any anesthesia for medical or dental purposes.                           

(c) No person shall possess, buy, sell, transfer possession, or receive possession of any model glue for the illegal purposes set forth in subsection (b) hereof.

While I concluded that Cedar Rapids' ordinance did not apply to the conduct described in the article, there are other, more expansive, state laws on glue sniffing that Cedar Rapids may want to imitate if it wants to broadly ban the huffing of fumes from glues and aerosols.

How Many States Require Warrants for Government Drone Use?

In the process of reporting on the California Assembly's approval of a bill that would require law enforcement officers to get a warrant before using drones, The Guardian states:

A total of 13 states have passed some form of legislation restricting the use of drones by public agencies, of which nine have specifically sought to rein in police snooping by requiring officers to seek warrants before using the devices. 

The nine states with warrant requirements are: Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin.

The claim that only nine states have warrant requirements is incorrect. In fact, 11 states have warrant requirements. The article fails to mention Indiana and Texas.

Indiana Passes Law Restricting Government Drone Use, Password Requests, and Cell Phone Tracking

Indiana has passed a law that restricts the government's ability to use drones, request passwords, and track cell phones without a warrant. Reports on the law are available here and here. The full text of the law is available here.

The bill prohibits law enforcement officers from using drones to collect evidence. There are several restrictions to this ban: law enforcement officers may use drones in situations where exigent circumstances would justify a warrantless search, to prevent terrorist attacks, in search and rescue operations, in responding to a natural disaster, and in non-law enforcement related situations. Law enforcement officers may also collect information using a drone with the consent of the person whose property is viewed with the drone.

I have mentioned before that while I am generally in favor of defining limitations on government use of drones, overly broad restrictions may lead to unreasonable curtailment of government use of technology. In my opinion, Indiana's law generally seems to be okay, since it contains most exceptions I would want a drone-restricting law to have. The law would leave police unable to use drones to make effective, accurate visualizations of certain situations where use of a drone may be helpful, and where it would not be typically viewed as a privacy violation. For example, police responding to an accident may seek to have a drone diagram and photograph the scene from an aerial perspective. But this law would prohibit police use of drones for that purpose.

The bill also restricts officers' ability to request users' passwords for electronic devices. Searches of phones and computers tend to reveal far more information than searches of other containers, and cases that analogize these devices to containers or diaries tend to stretch the boundaries of metaphor. I am not sure if Indiana's law will add much to protections that users already have, however, since the presence of a password on a phone or computer would make that device analogous to a closed or locked container, meaning police would need to obtain a warrant to access those devices without the added protection of the law.

Finally, I want to highlight that the law restricts the government from using cell phone tracking technology without a warrant unless exigent circumstances demand the use of this technology. This restriction comes as more and more states are adding or considering adding warrant requirements to techniques that locate cell phones. The Massachusetts Supreme Court recently ruled that police need to get a warrant before collecting cell phone location information, in contrast to the Fifth Circuit's opinion that no warrant is needed to obtain this information.

This statute is a good example of how many difficult Fourth Amendment questions may end up being answered by legislatures rather than by the courts. As technology develops, Fourth Amendment precedent may not be sufficient to provide protection of privacy that most people desire. In light of this concern, the most desirable outcome is for states to develop laws to meet these concerns, rather than for courts to strain the boundaries of precedent. Indiana's law is a good sample of laws that we can expect more states to pass as this reality becomes increasingly apparent.

It is Not Illegal to be Drunk and Annoying in Indiana

...or at least the law that criminalizes this activity is unconstitutionally vague. From the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog:

Indiana’s public-intoxication law makes a criminal of someone who, while drunk in a public place, “harasses, annoys, or alarms another person.” 

Or at least it did. 

. . . 

On Thursday, the Indiana Court of Appeals sided with [defendant, Rodregus] Morgan and struck down the “annoying” language in the law, knocking the wind out of his public-intoxication conviction. (It upheld his conviction for disorderly conduct, however.) 

The court concluded that the law was in fact too vague because it neither required intent to annoy another person, nor provided an objective standard for judging what makes something annoying.

The full text of the opinion, Morgan v. State, is available here. In concluding that the law was too vague, the court wrote:

Namely, the statute neither requires that a defendant have specifically intended to annoy another, nor does it employ an objective standard to assess whether a defendant’s conduct would be annoying to a reasonable person. Furthermore, the statute does not mandate that the defendant have been first warned that his behavior was considered annoying conduct. Instead, this section of the statute enables arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement because the illegality of any conduct—no matter how trivial or how substantial—is based solely on the subjective feelings of a particular person at any given time.

The court's reasoning seems to imply that the law may be salvaged if an objective standard is added to the existing "annoying" language. This means that if a statute bans conduct that would annoy the reasonable person, the state would have a stronger argument that the statute is not unconstitutionally vague.

All of this raises the question: what annoys the reasonable person? This is an important question that the court leaves unanswered, and should probably be the subject of a student note.