Katz v. United States
Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court redefined what constitutes "searches" and "seizures" with regard to the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The decision expanded the Fourth Amendment's protections from the right of search and seizures of an individual's "persons, houses, papers, and effects", as defined in the Constitution, to include "what seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public" as a constitutionally protected area. The case introduced the Katz test to determine a reasonable expectation of privacy, defined as a two-part test written in a concurrence by Justice John Marshall Harlan II. The Katz test has been used in thousands of cases, particularly with the advancement of technology that poses new questions on expectations of privacy.
Background
Charles Katz was a resident of Los Angeles, California, who had long been involved in sports betting. By the mid-1960s, he had become "probably the preeminent college basketball handicapper in America." In February 1965, Katz on several occasions used a public telephone booth near his apartment on Sunset Boulevard to provide his gambling handicaps to bookmakers in Boston and Miami. Unbeknownst to him, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had begun investigating his gambling activities, and was recording his conversations via a covert listening device attached to the outside of the phone booth. After recording a number of his phone calls, FBI agents arrested Katz and charged him with eight counts of knowingly transmitting wagering information over telephone between U.S. states, which is a federal crime under.Katz was tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Katz's lawyer made a motion to have the court suppress the FBI's recordings as evidence, arguing that because the FBI agents did not have a search warrant allowing them to place their listening device, the recordings had been made in violation of the Fourth Amendment and should be inadmissible per the exclusionary rule. The judge denied his motion and ruled that the recordings were admissible, and Katz was convicted based on them.
Katz appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In November 1966, a three-judge panel of 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 Amendment search occurred, and so the FBI did not need a search warrant to place the device. Katz then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case and ordered certiorari. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case in October 1967, and took the unusual step of giving each party a full hour to argue their side.
Decision
On December 18, 1967, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 decision in favor of Katz that invalidated the FBI's wiretap and overturned Katz's conviction. Newly-appointed Justice Thurgood Marshall recused himself from the case to avoid a conflict of interest because, as the previous U.S. Solicitor General, he had authored the U.S. government's brief in opposition to Katz prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court.Opinion of the Court
Seven justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Justice Potter Stewart.The Court began by dismissing the parties' characterization of the case in terms of traditional trespass-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 the Fourth Amendment. 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 a now well-known passage, Stewart wrote:
The Court then briefly surveyed the history of American jurisprudence on governmental searches and seizures. It described how American courts had traditionally analyzed Fourth Amendment searches by analogizing them to the long-established doctrine of trespass. In their legal briefs, the parties had focused on the 1928 case Olmstead v. United States, in which the Court had 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 governed even recorded speech obtained without any physical trespassing, and that the law had evolved. The Court wrote:
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 with the phone booth, their wiretap was an unconstitutional search because they did not obtain a search warrant before placing it.
Harlan's concurrence
Justice John Marshall Harlan II filed a concurring opinion in Katz that has become more well-known than the majority opinion because of its importance to American courts' attempts to interpret and apply the legal principles in the Katz decision. It describes a two-part test which has come to be known as the "Katz Test".Harlan began his opinion by noting that he concurred with the majority's judgment, but then explained 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 protects any time a person has an expectation of privacy that is both subjective and objectively reasonable in the eyes of society at large. He summarized his view of the law as comprising a two-part test:
The Supreme Court eventually adopted Harlan's two-part test as a formulation of the Fourth Amendment search analysis in the 1979 case Smith v. Maryland.
Black's dissent
Justice Hugo Black was 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 protect personal privacy. Additionally, Black argued that the modern act of wiretapping was analogous to the act of eavesdropping, which was around even when the Bill of Rights was 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.Effect and legacy
The Supreme Court's decision in Katz significantly expanded the scope of the Fourth Amendment's protections, and represented an unprecedented shift in American search and seizure jurisprudence. Many law enforcement practices that previously were not "within the view" of the Fourth Amendmentsuch as wiretaps on public phone wiresare now covered by it and cannot be done without first obtaining a search warrant.However, Katz also created significantly more uncertainty surrounding the application of the Fourth Amendment. The Katz test 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. In a 2007 Stanford Law Review article, the American legal scholar Orin Kerr summarized: