Katz v. United States

Notable Items:

It is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment to conduct a search and seizure without a warrant anywhere that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, unless certain exceptions apply.

The Government's eavesdropping activities violated the privacy upon which petitioner justifiably relied while using the telephone booth
The Fourth Amendment governs not only the seizure of tangible items, but extends as well to the recording of oral statements. Silverman v. United States
Because the Fourth Amendment protects people, rather than places, ... The "trespass" doctrine of Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, and Goldman v. United States, 316 U. S. 129, is no longer controlling.
... warrant procedure which is a constitutional precondition of such electronic surveillance.
Harlan Concurrance:
(a) that an enclosed telephone booth is an area where, like a home, Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383, and unlike a[n open] field, Hester v. United States, 265 U. S. 57, a person has a constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy;
(b) that electronic, as well as physical, intrusion into a place that is in this sense private may constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and
(c) that the invasion of a constitutionally protected area by federal authorities is, as the Court has long held, presumptively unreasonable in the absence of a search warrant.

Issue(s) Before the Court:

Petitioner's Claim(s):

Respondent's Claim(s):

Holding(s) and Disposition:

Material Facts:

• The petitioner was convicted in the District Court for the Southern District of California ....
• ... evidence of the petitioner's end of telephone conversations, overheard by FBI agents who had attached an electronic listening and recording device to the outside of the public telephone booth ....
• In affirming his conviction, the Court of Appeals rejected the contention that the recordings had been obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, because "[t]here was no physical entrance into the area occupied by [the petitioner]."
• A full recounting of the facts is available below

Procedural History:

• The petitioner was convicted in the District Court for the Southern District of California ....
• In affirming his conviction, the Court of Appeals rejected the contention that the recordings had been obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, because "[t]here was no physical entrance into the area occupied by [the petitioner]."

Rationale

Stewart Majority Opinion (Warren, White, Fortas)

• A full description of the rationale is available below

Douglas Concurrance (Brennan)

• While I join the opinion of the Court, I feel compelled to reply to the separate concurring opinion of my Brother WHITE, which I view as a wholly unwarranted green light for the Executive Branch to resort to electronic eavesdropping without a warrant in cases which the Executive Branch itself labels "national security" matters.

Harlan Concurrance (none)

• I join the opinion of the Court, which I read to hold only
• (a) that an enclosed telephone booth is an area where, like a home, Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383, and unlike a[n open] field, Hester v. United States, 265 U. S. 57, a person has a constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy;
• (b) that electronic, as well as physical, intrusion into a place that is in this sense private may constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and
• (c) that the invasion of a constitutionally protected area by federal authorities is, as the Court has long held, presumptively unreasonable in the absence of a search warrant.
• Two-fold requirement:
  
• first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and,
  
• second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable."
• In Silverman, we found it unnecessary to reexamine Goldman v. United States, 316 U. S. 129, which had held that electronic surveillance accomplished without the physical penetration of petitioner's premises by a tangible object did not violate the Fourth Amendment.
• This case requires us to reconsider Goldman, and I agree that it should now be overruled.

White Concurrance ()

Black dissent (??)

• (1) I do not believe that the words of the Amendment will bear the meaning given them by today's decision, and
• (2) I do not believe that it is the proper role of this Court to rewrite the Amendment in order "to bring it into harmony with the times," and thus reach a result that many people believe to be desirable.
• ... connote the idea of tangible things with size, form, and weight, things capable of being searched, seized, or both.
• ... Framers' purpose to limit its protection to tangible things by providing that no warrants shall issue but those "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
• A conversation overheard by eavesdropping, whether by plain snooping or wiretapping, is not tangible and, under the normally accepted meanings of the words, can neither be searched nor seized.
• ... if they had desired to outlaw or restrict the use of evidence obtained by eavesdropping, I believe that they would have used the appropriate language to do so in the Fourth Amendment.
• ... it strikes me as a charge against their scholarship, their common sense and their candor to give to the Fourth Amendment's language the eavesdropping meaning the Court imputes to it today.
• Thus, the clear holding of the Olmstead and Goldman cases, undiluted by any question of trespass, is that eavesdropping, in both its original and modern forms, is not violative of the Fourth Amendment.
• It has been insisted only that the electronic device not be planted by an unlawful physical invasion of a constitutionally protected area. Silverman v. United States."
• As I have pointed out above, where there is an unauthorized intrusion, this Court has rejected admission of evidence obtained ....
• With this decision the Court has completed, I hope, its rewriting of the Fourth Amendment, which started only recently when the Court began referring incessantly to the Fourth Amendment not so much as a law against unreasonable searches and seizures as one to protect an individual's privacy.
• [additional Fourth Amendment history including Griswold]
• [well written, clear, well argued dissent. Extension or re-writing of the Fourth Amendment due to failure of the Court, and this dissent, to uphold the Ninth Amendment.]

Full Recounting of Facts

• The petitioner was convicted in the District Court for the Southern District of California ....
• ... evidence of the petitioner's end of telephone conversations, overheard by FBI agents who had attached an electronic listening and recording device to the outside of the public telephone booth ....
• In affirming his conviction, the Court of Appeals rejected the contention that the recordings had been obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, because "[t]here was no physical entrance into the area occupied by [the petitioner]."
• A list of the material facts is available above

Majority Full Argument

• We decline to adopt this [the petitioner's] formulation of the issues.
• In the first place, the correct solution of Fourth Amendment problems is not necessarily promoted by incantation of the phrase "constitutionally protected area."
• Secondly, the Fourth Amendment cannot be translated into a general constitutional "right to privacy."
• That Amendment protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all.
• Other provisions of the Constitution protect personal privacy from other forms of governmental invasion.
• But the protection of a person's general right to privacy -- his right to be let alone by other people -- is, like the protection of his property and of his very life, left largely to the law of the individual States.
• For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.
• What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. See Lewis v. United States
• But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected. See Rios v. United States
• "[t]he premise that property interests control the right of the Government to search and seize has been discredited." Warden v. Hayden
• We conclude that the underpinnings of Olmstead and Goldman have been so eroded by our subsequent decisions that the "trespass" doctrine there enunciated can no longer be regarded as controlling.
• The fact that the electronic device employed to achieve that end did not happen to penetrate the wall of the booth can have no constitutional significance.
• ... investigation of the petitioner's activities had established a strong probability that he was using the telephone in question to transmit gambling information to persons in other States ...
• The agents confined their surveillance to the brief periods during which he used the telephone booth, ...
• ... they took great care to overhear only the conversations of the petitioner himself.
• ... under sufficiently "precise and discriminate circumstances," a federal court may empower government agents to employ a concealed electronic device ....
• The Government urges that, ... we should retroactively validate their conduct.
• That we cannot do.
• Searches conducted without warrants have been held unlawful "notwithstanding facts unquestionably showing probable cause," See Agnello v. United States
• ... searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment -- subject only to a few specifically established and well delineated exceptions. [For exceptions see: e.g., Carroll v. United States, 267 U. S. 132, 267 U. S. 153, 156; McDonald v. United States, 335 U. S. 451, 335 U. S. 454-456; Brinegar v. United States, 338 U. S. 160, 338 U. S. 174-177; Cooper v. California, 386 U. S. 58; Warden v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 387 U. S. 298-300.]
• And bypassing a neutral predetermination of the scope of a search leaves individuals secure from Fourth Amendment violations "only in the discretion of the police."
• These considerations do not vanish when the search in question is transferred from the setting of a home, an office, or a hotel room to that of a telephone booth.
• Wherever a man may be, he is entitled to know that he will remain free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
• The government agents here ignored "the procedure of antecedent justification . . . that is central to the Fourth Amendment," ....
• Because the surveillance here failed to meet that condition, and because it led to the petitioner's conviction, the judgment must be reversed.
• The core of the rationale is available above