Illinois Supreme Court rulings address FOID seizures, hospital room privacy

[September 25, 2024]  By Peter Hancock and Hannah Meisel

SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois Supreme Court last week vacated a lower court ruling and reinstated a statute that authorizes the state to revoke a person’s Firearm Owners Identification card once they’ve been charged with a felony, even if they haven’t yet been convicted.

The case involved Aaron and Charles Davis, a father and son who were charged with reckless discharge of a firearm, a felony, for allegedly shooting their rifles into the air over the Fourth of July weekend in 2016.

Soon after the charges were filed, the Illinois State Police revoked their FOID cards pursuant to a provision of the law that authorizes the agency to revoke permits from anyone “who is prohibited from acquiring or possessing firearms or firearm ammunition by any Illinois State statute or by federal law.”

In the Davises’ case, ISP relied on a federal law that makes it illegal “for any person who is under indictment for a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce any firearm or ammunition or receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.”

The charges were later reduced to misdemeanors and each of the defendants had their FOID cards reissued after pleading guilty. After receiving their new cards, the Davises sued, arguing they were denied their constitutional right to keep and bear arms for self-defense during the time their FOID cards were revoked. They sought a declaration that the FOID Card Act is unconstitutional as it applies to people who have been charged with, but not convicted of, a felony.

Their attorney, Thomas Maag, of Wood River, also represents one set of plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of Illinois challenging the constitutionality of the state’s ban on assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines. A trial in that case was held last week in East St. Louis and a ruling is now pending.

In March 2023, Madison County Judge Ronald Foster granted the Davises’ motion and declared the law unconstitutional as it applied to people charged with, but not convicted of, felonies. He issued a permanent injunction barring the state from enforcing that provision of the law.

The state appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which stayed the lower court order while the appeal was pending. And in a unanimous opinion Thursday, the high court reversed the lower court decision, saying because the Davises had already had their FOID cards reissued, they no longer had standing to sue and claim they were being injured by the law.

Hospital room privacy

The Illinois Supreme Court last week unanimously ruled that patients admitted to a hospital should not have a universal expectation of privacy that would prevent law enforcement from entering a hospital room to question them or search their belongings.

The case stretches back to October 2016, when Cortez Turner arrived at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital in Murphysboro with a gunshot wound to the leg.

Emergency room staff had already been notified that a gunshot victim would be arriving via ambulance, but Turner was dropped off by a friend two minutes before the ambulance arrived carrying Detrick Rogers, who was fatally wounded by a gunshot to the head.

A statue is pictured outside of the Illinois Supreme Court chamber. (Capitol News Illinois file photo)

In the middle of the night, detectives from the Murphysboro Police Department and Jackson County Sheriff’s Office showed up to the trauma room in which Turner was being treated. During the course of being questioned, Turner agreed to the officers’ request to seize his blood-stained clothing, which was on the counter in the room.

Eventually, Turner was implicated in Rogers’ death, an alleged drive-by shooting. Turner was later charged with first degree murder in addition to perjury for lying to a grand jury about the murder. After his 2019 conviction, Turner was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

During trial, Turner’s lawyers argued the bloody clothing collected from the hospital room should have been suppressed as evidence as it was not in plain view, and because he did not provide consent for officers to take them – despite testimony and detailed hospital chart notes from a nurse who took care of Turner in the emergency room indicating otherwise.

But after trial, Turner dropped those reasonings and began arguing the evidence should have been suppressed because the detectives should have first obtained a warrant before entering the trauma room.

On appeal, however, Illinois’ 5th District Appellate Court did not agree, and after arguments in front of the state high court in May, neither did the justices of the Illinois Supreme Court.

Quoting from both a 1992 Illinois Supreme Court opinion and a 1990 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Justice Elizabeth K. Rochford wrote that Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures “offer protection to people, not places…but the extent to which they protect people depends upon where the people are.”

Rochford went on to explain a six-factor test to determine whether a person should have a reasonable expectation of privacy, eventually reaching the conclusion that the only factor in Turner’s favor was that he was “legitimately present” in the trauma room.

Turner’s attorneys tried to argue that he should have the same expectation of privacy as a person who rented a hotel room. But the justices rejected that reasoning, noting that Illinois law requires hospital personnel to call the police when a gunshot victim enters the emergency room.

The ruling pointed to a dozen or so similar cases across the country in which courts at both the state and federal level have “reached the same conclusion,” – including a recent 8th Circuit Appellate Court’s decision in a case with facts “remarkably similar” to Turner’s.

In that case, the court “relied on the existence of a similar statute” to Illinois’ law requiring hospital personnel to notify law enforcement about gunshot wound victims, rejecting arguments “that a person being treated in a trauma room has the same reasonable expectation of privacy as a hotel occupant.”

Rochford noted that Illinois’ appellate courts have previously ruled in favor of a defendant’s expectation of privacy in two separate cases involving patients in hospital rooms. But, she wrote, those rulings were careful to note that the question of reasonable expectation of privacy “depends on the totality of the circumstances and those circumstances will vary from person to person and from case to case.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.