United States v. Watkins, 2025 WL 2907585 (10th Cir. 2025)
Most of us have stayed in a motel where the curtains on the window above the air conditioner never seem to completely close. That was the case for Cameron Watkins. His conviction and appeal led to one of the more interesting discussions about curtilage. We’ve written about the concept of curtilage in a number of contexts in Xiphos over the years. This case presents a new context—one that is important for officers to understand.
In Oklahoma City, a woman reported to police she had been violently carjacked and kidnapped in the parking lot of the OakTree Inn. She managed to escape her kidnapper. Police found her car abandoned. She described the suspect as a short, black man with dreadlocks and a goatee, wearing black jeans. Officers relayed this description to the motel manager, and he said it matched the description of a man staying in room 231.
The motel was a three-story building with guest rooms only accessible from open-air walkways around a central, rectangular courtyard. Room 231 was on the second floor at the end of one of the walkways, accessible via a stairway from the parking area below. The walkway extended a few feet past the door to Room 231. A window above the standard-issue motel AC unit overlooked the dead-end extension. A short railing enclosed two sides of the extension.
Officers ascended the stairs and an officer looked through a one-inch gap in the window curtains and saw a short, Black man with dreadlocks and a goatee, sitting on a bed without pants on. Next to the man, later identified as Cameron Watkins, was a handgun with an extended magazine. The officers knocked and announced themselves.
Watkins initially refused to answer the door. After a three-hour standoff, he surrendered and the officers arrested him. They showed photographs to the victim, who identified Watkins as the man who had carjacked and kidnapped her. Based on her account of the incident, her positive identification, and the officer’s view of the handgun on the bed next to Watkins, officers obtained a search warrant for the room. They discovered a loaded 9mm Glock handgun hidden inside a vacuum cleaner and an extended magazine loaded with 28 rounds stuffed into a hole for an electrical outlet.
“A quick peek through the narrow gap in the curtains was not — in this case — an intrusion on a legitimate expectation of privacy.”
Watkins was indicted for being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition. He asked the trial court to suppress the evidence found in Room 231, arguing the officer’s “search” violated his Fourth Amendment rights. He claimed the officer physically intruded into the room’s curtilage when he stepped onto the “porch area” in front of the window and violated his reasonable expectation of privacy by peering through a window with “partially closed curtains.” The trial court denied Watkins’ motion to suppress the evidence, finding the motel’s exterior walkway was not part of the room’s curtilage. The court concluded there was no Fourth Amendment violation because the officer did not intrude upon a protected area or the defendant’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Watkins pleaded guilty to the firearm charge, reserving his right to appeal the suppression ruling, and was convicted by a jury on the ammunition charge.
We’ve often noted that curtilage is “the area into which extends the intimate activity associated with the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life” (Oliver v. United States, 466 U.S. 170 (1984)). An area outside of a residence’s “curtilage” may be considered an “open field” and subject to lawful view. The scope of the curtilage is determined by considering the area’s proximity to the home, whether it is fenced or otherwise enclosed, the nature of the use of the area, and the efforts the resident takes to screen the area from public view (United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294 (1987)): “If a police officer makes observations while in a public place or open field” and uses only his unaided senses, then he has not committed a “search,” “even if the objects he observes lie within an area protected by the Fourth Amendment.”
The appellate court held the motel walkway was not curtilage, and Watkins did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy against officers peering through the open curtains. The court observed that nothing suggested the space outside of Room 231 was for the exclusive use of the occupant of that room. The dead-end walkway extension was a place accessible to the public — not an area “intimately tied” to Room 231. Anyone could walk to the end of the walkway “to check on a car in the parking lot below, smoke a cigarette, or simply catch a breath of fresh air” (though probably not with somebody smoking nearby).
Even if the area outside his motel room window was not within the curtilage of the motel room (if, indeed, there was any curtilage), Watkins argued that looking through “a one-inch gap in the otherwise-closed window curtain” was “the type of highly intrusive snooping that invaded his reasonable expectation of privacy.” But the United States Supreme Court had held that visual observation unaided by extraordinary means such as technology is no “search” at all for purposes of the Fourth Amendment (Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001)).
Thus, the court of appeals concluded, the officer’s visual observation through the window curtain gap, made from a public walkway using only his unaided eyes, was not a search under the Fourth Amendment. One judge dissented, opining that Watkins did have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the motel room as he sat seminude on the bed: “Any reasonable person would view a stranger peering through a small crack in the closed curtains of their occupied motel room as a Peeping Tom, not a Curious George.” The dissenting judge speculated, “simple geometry dictates that the officer must have pressed his face up to Watkins’s window” to see through a one-inch gap and observe Watkins sitting on the bed.
Officers can take guidance from the factors leading the majority to conclude that approaching the window from the walkway did not intrude on curtilage. Nothing indicated the space was exclusively associated with Room 231; there was no patio furniture or other items that seemed to be for the use of that room’s occupants. The walkway was open, and anyone could use it to look down on the parking lot. It was directly accessible from the stairs ascending from the parking lot. The question of a reasonable expectation of privacy is a little closer. Still, a quick peek through the narrow gap in the curtains was not — in this case — an intrusion on a legitimate expectation of privacy and therefore was not a search.
