New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Courton Monday agreed to decide whether the police in Los Angeles may inspect hotel and motel guest registries without permission from a judge.

Dozens of cities, including Atlanta, Denver and Seattle, allow such searches, which law enforcement officials say help them catch fugitives and fight prostitution and drug dealing.

A group of motel owners challenged the law. They said they were not troubled by its requirement that they keep records about their guests. But they objected to a second part of the ordinance, requiring that the records “be made available to any officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for inspection.”

The city said this means the police may look at the records at any time without the owners’ consent or a search warrant.

In December, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, struck down the Los Angeles ordinance, saying it ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. The vote was 7 to 4.

Judge Paul J. Watford, writing for the majority, said hotel guests had given up their right to privacy when they provided information to the hotels. But the hotel owners, he went on, were protected by the Fourth Amendment.

“Businesses do not ordinarily disclose, and are not expected to disclose, the kind of commercially sensitive information contained in the records,” he wrote, noting that they can include “customer lists, pricing practices and occupancy rates.”

Judge Watford said that meant there must be some judicial involvement in the process. “The Supreme Court has made clear that, to be reasonable, an administrative record-inspection scheme need not require issuance of a search warrant,” he wrote, “but it must at a minimum afford an opportunity for pre-compliance judicial review.”

The Los Angeles law, he said, makes hotel owners guilty of a misdemeanor as soon as they refuse to comply with a police request to see their records.

In urging the justices to hear their appeal in the case, Los Angeles v. Patel, No. 13-1175, the city’s lawyers said the law was an important tool to regulate sketchy motels that can serve as magnets for crime. They added that immediate access to guest registries could be vital in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

In response, the motel owners told the justices that some level of judicial involvement was required by the Constitution and would not lead to excessive delays or the loss of evidence in the meantime, as the owners were not challenging the record-keeping part of the ordinance.

“There is no evidence that the books are being cooked,” the owners said, adding that the city “cannot explain why it even needs the ability to search without a warrant.”

The city called this empty rhetoric from motel owners who “are either hopelessly naïve or darkly misleading this court.” The owners’ brief, the city said, “falsely and cynically assumes the operators of these parking meter motels are honest people who follow the rules so the immutable records always will be available for inspection.”

“There is no doubt,” the city’s brief said, “the city’s loss of surprise guest-register inspections has had an immediate and dangerous impact on the decent people who live and work around these motels and these communities as a whole.”