There’s a common intuition about flashlights: a flashlight doesn’t search anything. It just lets you see what’s already there. Point one at a dark corner and the corner was always there — you’ve added light, not intrusion. Police officers use flashlights constantly, and for decades courts have said that’s fine.
On June 5, 2026, an en banc panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court held that this intuition has a limit. In Commonwealth v. Herlth, a divided court ruled 6-3 that a state trooper conducted an unconstitutional search when he shined his flashlight through a one-inch hole in a closed shoebox sitting on a man’s living room floor. The contents — capsules of “scramble,” a fentanyl mixture — were not visible to the naked eye. The flashlight is what made them visible. And that, the court held, was a search.
The decision is a win for the defense, and it sharpens a line Pennsylvania courts had not drawn before: the difference between using a flashlight to brighten something a person has left exposed, and using one to peer into something a person has closed up.
Where the Law Stood: Flashlights, Closed Containers, and Plain View
The Fourth Amendment protects people against unreasonable searches. The threshold question in any search case is whether a person had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the thing the police looked into — meaning both that the person actually expected privacy and that society would treat that expectation as legitimate.
Two settings get the strongest protection. The first is the home. The U.S. Supreme Court has called it “first among equals” when it comes to the Fourth Amendment. The second is a closed container — a purse, a backpack, a locked box. As one Superior Court decision put it, the Fourth Amendment protects the owner of every container that hides its contents from view. The flip side, from the foundational case of Katz v. United States: what a person knowingly exposes to public view isn’t protected, even inside the home.
Flashlights have lived in a comfortable place in this framework. Courts have long said an officer who is lawfully positioned may use a flashlight to see better, and doing so isn’t a search. The reasoning is that a flashlight at night just reveals what daylight would have revealed anyway. The classic example is the officer who shines a light into a stopped car and sees contraband on the seat. That’s not a search, because there’s little privacy in the visible interior of a car and the light is only standing in for the sun.
Then there’s plain view. Plain view is often called an exception to the warrant requirement, but it’s narrower than people assume. It justifies a seizure, not a search. If an officer is lawfully positioned, the object’s incriminating nature is immediately apparent, and the officer has a lawful right of access, the officer can seize it without a warrant. What plain view cannot do is justify extending a search to find the object in the first place.
That distinction is the whole case.
A 5 a.m. Overdose Call and a Shoebox With a Hole
At around 5:00 a.m. on August 31, 2020, a Pennsylvania State Police trooper responded to a reported overdose at a duplex in Red Lion, York County. By the time he arrived, three EMS paramedics were already treating James Herlth for an overdose. The trooper was candid about why he was there: not to provide medical care, which he wasn’t trained to give, but to provide security, because some patients become violent when they’re revived with Narcan.
The living room was small — the trooper could stand in one spot and turn in a circle. At his feet, less than a foot from his left leg, was a closed shoebox. The box had a one-inch manufacturer’s hole. The trooper shined his flashlight through the hole, recognized scramble capsules inside, opened the box, and seized 117 capsules along with about $1,700 in cash.
Two facts decided the case. First, the Commonwealth conceded that the trooper could not have seen the capsules without the flashlight. Second, nothing in the record suggested the room was dark or that a flashlight was needed to see around the living room. The light wasn’t substituting for daylight. It was the only thing that let the trooper see into a closed box.
And when asked why he looked, the trooper gave the answer that would come back to haunt the Commonwealth. He explained that officers go to overdose scenes to see what the person overdosed on and “to possibly make an investigation further.” That was a criminal-investigation reason, not a medical one. The majority did not miss it.
The Question That Split the Court: Was the Flashlight a Search?
Every judge on the court agreed Herlth had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the shoebox. It was in his home, it was closed, and closing it showed he meant to keep its contents private. That much was unanimous.
The fight was over a single question: did shining the flashlight through the hole count as a search at all? If it didn’t, the privacy interest never mattered, because there was no government intrusion to justify.
The majority, in an opinion by Judge Stabile, said yes — it was a search. The reasoning tracks the old flashlight cases but turns them against the Commonwealth. An officer can use a flashlight to brighten what daylight would show. But these capsules weren’t something daylight would have shown. They were inside a closed container, invisible to the naked eye in a lit room. The flashlight wasn’t a stand-in for the sun. It was the instrument that breached the container’s privacy.
With no Pennsylvania case directly on point, the court looked to two out-of-state decisions: State v. Tarantino from North Carolina, and People v. Hagestedt from Illinois. In each, an officer used a flashlight to see through a small opening into an otherwise closed space — cracks in a boarded-up building in one, a gap in a chained-and-padlocked cabinet in the other — and in each, the court called it a search. The Superior Court found those cases persuasive, and a small hole in a shoebox no different in principle from a small crack in a wall.
Judge Bowes, joined by Judges Nichols and McLaughlin, dissented. Her point is one of degree. The officers in Tarantino and Hagestedt had to work to see inside. One had to bend and peer through quarter-inch cracks near the floor; in the other, an officer angled a flashlight through a gap while a second officer pried the cabinet doors farther open. Trooper Adams did none of that. He stood where he was, didn’t touch the box, didn’t crouch or crane, and shined a light straight down through a hole that happened to sit on the box’s upper edge. To the dissent, that’s just the old rule: a flashlight enhances vision, it doesn’t expand its scope.
That’s a fair reading of the cases, and on slightly different facts I think it would win. But it runs into one fact it can’t get around. The dissent describes the capsules as plainly visible through the hole. The record doesn’t support that. The Commonwealth conceded the trooper needed the flashlight to see them, and the room was lit. So this wasn’t a case of contraband a person left exposed for anyone to notice. It was contraband a person closed up in a box, which became visible only because an officer aimed an artificial light into it. Once that’s the fact, whether the officer bent his knees or stood up straight doesn’t change the constitutional character of what he did. The majority makes exactly this point, borrowing the dissent’s own words: even if the trooper didn’t “strain himself” or “move his body,” using an artificial aid to brighten the inside of a closed container was still a search.
In my view, the majority has the better of it. The dissent’s distinction is notable, but it measures the wrong thing — physical effort instead of whether the naked eye could see in. The U.S. Supreme Court made that point years ago in Arizona v. Hicks: the question isn’t whether the officer moved an object, it’s whether he took action unrelated to the reason he was lawfully there. Standing still and shining a light into a closed box you otherwise can’t see into is that kind of action.
The Caretaking and Plain View Exceptions Couldn’t Save It
Calling the flashlight a search only gets you halfway. The Commonwealth still had two exceptions to argue, and both failed.
The first was community caretaking — really its emergency-aid branch, which lets police enter a home without a warrant to help someone in danger. The trooper was lawfully inside Herlth’s home under that exception; nobody disputed that. But the exception is limited to the emergency. Once you’re inside to help, you can’t treat the visit as a license to investigate. The right to be there ends when the emergency does. The trooper was present to keep the scene safe while EMS worked. Shining a light into a shoebox had nothing to do with that.
The Commonwealth tried to bridge the gap by arguing the trooper was helping EMS figure out what Herlth had taken. The problem was that no evidence supported it. The trooper never testified that EMS needed to know, that they asked him to find out, or that he even told them what he found. His own explanation was that officers look around overdose scenes “to possibly make an investigation further” — an investigative purpose, and the emergency-aid exception doesn’t reach investigation. His honesty sank the argument.
Then plain view, which failed on two of its three requirements. The incriminating nature of the object wasn’t immediately apparent — a shoebox is just a shoebox, and there was no probable cause to think it held drugs until the trooper looked inside. And the trooper had no lawful right of access to the capsules, because the only way he reached them was through the unjustified flashlight search. Plain view lets an officer seize what’s already exposed. It can’t be used to justify the search that does the exposing.
That’s the line the case ultimately draws, and it’s a sound one. An officer’s lawful presence in a home — even for the best of reasons — is not a roving license to look inside whatever closed things happen to be lying around.