Katz v. United States

Katz v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 17, 1967 Decided December 18, 1967
Full case name	Charles Katz v. United States
Citations	389 U.S. 347 (more) 88 S. Ct. 507; 19 L. Ed. 2d 576; 1967 U.S. LEXIS 2
Case history
Prior	369 F.2d 130 (9th Cir. 1966); cert. granted, 386 U.S. 954 (1967).
Holding
The Court extended the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure to protect individuals with 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
Majority	Stewart, joined by Warren, Douglas, Harlan, Brennan, White, Fortas
Concurrence	Douglas, joined by Brennan
Concurrence	Harlan
Concurrence	White
Dissent	Black
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)

Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), 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. It extended Fourth Amendment protection beyond the traditional confines of citizens' homes and property via the "Katz test" to determine when a person has a "reasonable expectation of privacy" against intrusion by government or law enforcement. The Katz test has been used in thousands of cases, particularly with the advancement of technology that pose 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 the words of lawyer Harvey Schneider, who later argued Katz's case before the Supreme Court.

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 (FBI) had began investigating him, and was recording his conversations via a covert listening device attached to the outside of the phone booth. The FBI arrested Katz and charged him with eight counts of knowingly transmitting wagering information over telephone across different U.S. states, which is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1084.

Katz was tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. When the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting him moved to introduce the recordings as evidence, Katz's lawyer objected and argued that because the FBI investigators had not obtained a search warrant allowing them to place the device, the recordings had been made in violation of the Fourth Amendment and should be inadmissible per the exclusionary rule. The judge ruled that the recordings were admissible, and Katz was convicted based on them.

Katz then 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 granted 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 investigators' search. Newly-appointed Justice Thurgood Marshall recused himself from the case to avoid a conflict of interest because, as the previous 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

Justice Potter Stewart, who authored the Court's opinion in Katz

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 as hinging on whether the public telephone booth Katz had used was a "constitutionally protected area" where Katz had a "right of privacy", and whether the FBI had "physically penetrated" the protected area and thus violated the Fourth Amendment. Instead, the Court stated that the law viewed the situation through the lens of Katz and how his use of the phone booth would be perceived objectively by others. In a now well-known 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).

The Court then briefly surveyed the history of American jurisprudence on governmental searches and seizures. The Court noted that, up to that point, American courts had usually 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. 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:

We conclude that the underpinnings of Olmstead [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.

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, whose concurring opinion created the two-part "Katz test" that is regularly applied in Fourth Amendment cases.

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, and specifically the two-part test he described for these purposes.

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:

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 recognized 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, 398 U.S. at 361 (Harlan, J., concurring).

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

In his case, Hugo Black argued that the Fourth Amendment, as a whole, was only meant to protect "things" from physical search and seizure; it 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.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 389
• United States v. Graham
• United States v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972)
• United States v. Jones, a case involving similar circumstances
• Kyllo v. United States
• Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. (2018) – Supreme Court ruling that the Government's acquisition of a weeks worth of cell-site records is a Fourth Amendment search.

References

Works cited

• LaFave, Wayne R. (2012). Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment (5th ed.). St. Paul: Thomson/West. OCLC 1041412063. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• LaFave, Wayne R.; Israel, Jerold H.; King, Nancy J.; Kerr, Orin S. (2017). Criminal Procedure. Hornbook Series (6th ed.). St. Paul: West Academic Publishing. ISBN 978-1-63460-306-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Schneider, Harvey A. (2016). "Katz v. United States: The Untold Story" (PDF). McGeorge Law Review. 40 (1/2): 13–23. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Text of Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) is available from: Cornell Findlaw Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)
• Kerr, Orin S. (June 11, 2014). "Katz Has Only One Step: The Irrelevance of Subjective Expectations". University of Chicago Law Review, forthcoming. SSRN 2448617.
• Katz v. United States from C-SPAN's Landmark Cases: Historic Supreme Court Decisions