Wikipedia

Katz v. United States

Katz v. United States,389 U.S. 347 (1967), was alandmarkdecision of theU.S. Supreme Courtin which the Court redefined what constitutes a"search" or "seizure"with regard to theFourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[1][2]The ruling expanded the Fourth Amendment's protections from an individual's "persons, houses, papers, and effects," as specified in the Constitution's text, to include any areas where a person has a "reasonable expectation of privacy."[3]The reasonable expectation of privacy standard, now known as theKatztest, was formulated in a concurring opinion by JusticeJohn Marshall Harlan II.[4]

Katz v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 17, 1967
Decided December 18, 1967
Full case nameCharles Katz v. United States, Leach-Lewis v. Bd. of Supervisors
Citations389U.S.347(more)
88 S. Ct. 507; 19L. Ed. 2d576; 1967U.S. LEXIS2
Case history
Prior369F.2d130(9th Cir.1966);cert.granted,386U.S.954 (1967).
Holding
TheFourth Amendment's protection from unreasonablesearch and seizureextends to any area where a person has a "reasonable expectation of privacy."
Court membership
Chief Justice
Earl Warren
Associate Justices
Hugo Black·William O. Douglas
John M. Harlan II·William J. Brennan Jr.
Potter Stewart·Byron White
Abe Fortas·Thurgood Marshall
Case opinions
MajorityStewart, joined by Warren, Douglas, Harlan, Brennan, White, Fortas
ConcurrenceDouglas, joined by Brennan
ConcurrenceHarlan
ConcurrenceWhite
DissentBlack
Marshall took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. IV
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
Olmstead v. United States(1928)

TheKatztest has since been used in numerous cases, particularly because of technological advances that create new questions about privacy norms and governmentsurveillanceof personal data.[5]

Background

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Charles Katz was asports bettorwho by the mid-1960s had become "probably the preeminent college basketballhandicapperin America. "[6]In 1965, Katz regularly used a publictelephone boothnear his apartment onSunset Boulevardin Los Angeles to communicate his gambling handicaps tobookmakersin Boston and Miami.[6]Unbeknownst to Katz, theFBIhad begun investigating his gambling activities and was recording his conversations via acovert listening deviceattached to the outside of the phone booth. After recording many of his phone calls, FBI agents arrested Katz and charged him with eight counts of knowingly transmitting wagering information by telephone between U.S. states,[7]which is a federal crime under Section 18 of the United States Code, particularly a law on the transmission of wagering information.[8]

Katz was tried in theU.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.[a]Katz moved to suppress the FBI's recordings, arguing that because the agents did not have asearch warrantallowing them to place their listening device, the recordings had been made in violation of theFourth Amendmentand should be inadmissible in court per theexclusionary rule.The judge denied Katz's motion and held that the recordings were admissible as evidence, and Katz was convicted based on them.[3]

Katz appealed his conviction to theU.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.In 1966, the Ninth Circuit affirmed Katz's conviction, ruling that because the FBI's eavesdropping device did not physically penetrate the telephone booth's wall, no Fourth Amendmentsearchoccurred, and so the FBI did not need a warrant to place the device.[9][7]Katz then appealed to theSupreme Court,which grantedcertiorari.[10][11]

Opinion of the court

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On December 18, 1967, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1[b]decision in favor of Katz that invalidated the FBI's wiretap evidence and overturned Katz's criminal conviction.[3]

JusticePotter Stewart,who authored the Court's opinion inKatz

The majority opinion was written by JusticePotter Stewart.The Court began by dismissing the parties' characterization of the case in terms of a traditionaltrespass-based analysis that hinged on, first, whether the public telephone booth Katz had used was a "constitutionally protected area" where he had a "right of privacy"; and second, on whether the FBI had "physically penetrated" the protected area and thus violated theFourth Amendment.[12]Instead, the Court viewed the situation through the lens of how Katz's use of the phone booth would be perceived by himself and then objectively by others. In an oft-cited passage, Stewart wrote:

The petitioner [Katz] has strenuously argued that the booth was a "constitutionally protected area." The Government has maintained with equal vigor that it was not. But this effort to decide whether or not a given "area," viewed in the abstract, is "constitutionally protected" deflects attention from the problem presented by this case. 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. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.

— Katz,389 U.S. at 352 (footnotes and citations omitted).[13]

The Supreme Court then surveyed the history of American jurisprudence on governmentalsearches and seizures.It described how American courts had traditionally analyzed Fourth Amendment searches by comparing them to the long-established doctrine oftrespass.In their legal briefs, the parties had focused on the 1928 precedentOlmstead v. United States,in which the Court ruled that surveillance by wiretap without any trespass did not constitute a "search" for Fourth Amendment purposes. However, the Court stated that in later cases it had begun recognizing that the Fourth Amendment applied to recorded speech obtained without any physical trespassing, and that the law had evolved.[14]Stewart wrote:

We conclude that the underpinnings ofOlmstead[and similar cases] have been so eroded by our subsequent decisions that the "trespass" doctrine there enunciated can no longer be regarded as controlling. The Government's activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitioner's words violated the privacy on which he justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted a "search and seizure" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

— Katz,389 U.S. at 353.[15]

Stewart then concluded the Court's opinion by ruling that even though the FBI knew there was a "strong probability" that Katz was breaking the law when using the phone booth, their use of the wiretap was an unconstitutional search because they did not obtain a warrant before placing the listening device. This overturned Katz's criminal conviction as a constitutional violation.[16]

Harlan's concurrence

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JusticeJohn Marshall Harlan II,whose concurring opinion created the two-part "Katztest "that is regularly applied in Fourth Amendment cases

JusticeJohn Marshall Harlan II's concurring opinion inKatzhas become more influential than the majority opinion. It describes a two-part test that has come to be known as theKatztest.[16]

Harlan began his opinion by noting that he was writing separately to elaborate on the meaning of Stewart's majority opinion. Harlan explained that he interpreted Stewart's statements that "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places" and "what a person knowingly exposes to the public [...] is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection" to mean that the Fourth Amendment is activated any time a person has anexpectation of privacythat is reasonable in the eyes of society at large.[3]He summarized his view of the law as comprising a two-part test:

My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold 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." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.

— Katz,389 U.S. at 361 (Harlan, J., concurring).[17]

The Supreme Court adopted Harlan's two-part test as a formulation of the Fourth Amendment search analysis for most subsequent cases involving governmental searches that generated constitutional challenges.[18]

Black's dissent

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JusticeHugo Blackwas the only dissenter in the decision. He argued that the Fourth Amendment was only meant to protect "things" from physical search and seizure, and was not meant to protectpersonal privacy.Additionally, Black argued that the modern act of wiretapping was analogous to the act of eavesdropping, which was common even when theBill of Rightswas drafted. Black concluded that if the drafters of the Fourth Amendment had meant for it to protect against eavesdropping they would have included the proper language.[3]

Impact and legacy

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The Supreme Court's decision inKatzsignificantly expanded the scope of the Fourth Amendment's protections, and represented an unprecedented shift in Americansearch and seizurejurisprudence. Many law enforcement practices that previously were not "within the view" of the Fourth Amendment—such as wiretaps on public phone wires—are now covered by the Fourth Amendment and cannot be conducted without first obtaining asearch warrant.[19]TheKatzprecedent continues to be consulted regularly to interpret disputes over modernelectronic surveillanceby theNational Security Agencyand law enforcement entities,[20]though with some concerns that theKatztest is becoming outdated due to modern surveillance technologies.[21]

However,Katzalso created significantly more uncertainty surrounding the application of the Fourth Amendment. TheKatztest of an objective "reasonable expectation of privacy,"which has been widely adopted by U.S. courts, has proven much more difficult to apply than the traditional analysis of whether a physical intrusion into" persons, houses, papers, and effects "occurred.[22]In a 2007Stanford Law Reviewarticle, legal scholarOrin Kerrdescribed the scholarly consensus that theKatztest has been a failure:

According to the Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment regulates government conduct that violates an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy. But no one seems to know what makes an expectation of privacy constitutionally "reasonable." [...] Although four decades have passed since Justice Harlan introduced the test in his concurrence inKatz v. United States,the meaning of the phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy" remains remarkably opaque. [...] The consensus among scholars is that the Supreme Court's "reasonable expectation of privacy" cases are a failure.[23]

Other legal scholars have praised the case as "the king of surveillance cases" due to Potter's holding that "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places."[24]They also state that this case stood as a "bulwark against wiretaps and other emerging forms of surveillance."[24]

See also

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Wikisourcehas original text related to this article:

Notes

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  1. ^The Southern District was split in 1966, and today the case would fall under theUnited States District Court for the Central District of California.
  2. ^Newly appointed justiceThurgood Marshallrecused himself from the case to avoid aconflict of interest.Marshall had been theU.S. Solicitor Generalup until two weeks before oral arguments, and he had helped write the U.S. government'sbriefin the case.

References

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  1. ^LaFave (2012),§ 2.1(a).
  2. ^D'Onfro & Epps (2023),p. 910.
  3. ^abcdeKatz v. United States,389 US 347(1967).
  4. ^LaFave (2012),§ 2.1(d), p. 586.
  5. ^Tokson, Mathew (2016)."KNOWLEDGE AND FOURTH AMENDMENT PRIVACY".Northwestern University Law Review.
  6. ^abSchneider (2016),p. 13.
  7. ^abLaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), p. 576.
  8. ^18 U.S.C.§ 1084.
  9. ^Katz v. United States,369 F. 2d 130(9th Cir., 1966).
  10. ^LaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), pp. 576–77.
  11. ^Schneider (2016),p. 18, n. 32.
  12. ^LaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), p. 577.
  13. ^Quoted inLaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), p. 577.
  14. ^LaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), pp. 576–78.
  15. ^Quoted inLaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), pp. 578–79
  16. ^abLaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), p. 579.
  17. ^Quoted inLaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), p. 579.
  18. ^"Katz and the Adoption of the Reasonable Expectation of Privacy Test".Legal Information Institute, Cornell University.U.S. Constitution Annotated (Congressional Research Service). Archived fromthe originalon September 18, 2023.RetrievedNovember 7,2022.
  19. ^Serr, Brian J. (1989)."Great Expectations of Privacy: A New Model for Fourth Amendment Protection"(PDF).Minnesota Law Review.73(3):583–642 – via HeinOnline.
  20. ^Smith, Lauren Elena (2013)."Jonesing for a Test: Fourth Amendment Privacy in the Wake of United States v. Jones".Berkeley Technology Law Journal.28(Annual Review):1003–1036 – via HeinOnline.
  21. ^Arcila, Jr., Fabio (December 2012)."GPS Tracking out of Fourth Amendment Dead Ends: United States v. Jones and the Katz Conundrum".North Carolina Law Review.91(1):1–78 – via HeinOnline.
  22. ^LaFave (2012),§ 2.1(b), pp. 580–82.
  23. ^Kerr (2007),pp. 504–05.
  24. ^abSwire, Peter P. (2004)."Katz Is Dead. Long Live Katz".Michigan Law Review.102(5):904–932.doi:10.2307/4141984.ISSN0026-2234.JSTOR4141984.Archived fromthe originalon March 18, 2020.

Works cited

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  • Kerr, Orin S. (2007). "Four Models of Fourth Amendment Protection".Stanford Law Review.60(2):503–52.JSTOR40040415.
  • LaFave, Wayne R. (2012).Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment(5th ed.). St. Paul: Thomson/West.OCLC1041412063.
  • LaFave, Wayne R.; Israel, Jerold H.; King, Nancy J.; Kerr, Orin S. (2017).Criminal Procedure.Hornbook Series (6th ed.). St. Paul: West Academic Publishing.ISBN978-1-63460-306-5.
  • D'Onfro, Danielle; Epps, Daniel (February 2023)."The Fourth Amendment and General Law".Yale Law Journal.132(4):910–1212. Archived fromthe originalon June 29, 2024.RetrievedSeptember 29,2024.
  • Schneider, Harvey A. (2016)."Katz v. United States:The Untold Story "(PDF).McGeorge Law Review.40(1/2):13–23. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on August 12, 2017.RetrievedAugust 30,2019.
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