Katz v. United States
389 U.S. 347
(1967)
01. CHARACTER OF ACTION: (How did the case reach the United States Supreme Court?)
02. FACTS: Please state the legally relevant facts of the case.)
03. ISSUE: (What was the constitutional issue raised by the Petitioner?)
04. DECISION XXXXXXXXXXMr. Justice Marshall did not take part in the consideration or decision of this case. (How did the United States Supreme Court decide on the issue?)
05. MAJORITY OPINION (by Justice Stewart whom Justices Brennan, Douglas, Fortas, Harlan, Wa
en, and White joined):
A. The Court declined to accept the formation of the issues by the petitioner:
(i).
(ii).
B.
C.
D.
E.
F.
G.
H.
06. CONCURRING OPINION (by Justice Harlan):
07. CONCURRING OPINION (by Justice White):
08. CONCURRING OPINION (by Justice Douglas whom Justice Brennan):
09. DISSENTING OPINION (by Justice Black):
10. COMMENT: (What impact has this case had in the administration of justice in this area of law? Please cite relevant arguments from legal scholars or attorneys at law as published In law journals - California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Review, etc.)
11. PRINCIPLE OF THE CASE: (What legal precedent has this case set?)
Microsoft Word - KATZ v. UNITED STATES XXXXXXXXXXdocx
United States Supreme Court
KATZ v. UNITED STATES, (1967)
No. 35
Argued: October 17, XXXXXXXXXXDecided: December 18, 1967
MR. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.
The petitioner was convicted in the District Court for the Southern District of California
under an eight-count indictment charging him with transmitting wagering information by
telephone from Los Angeles to Miami and Boston, in violation of a federal statute. 1 At
trial the Government was permitted, over the petitioner's objection, to introduce 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 from which he had placed his calls. In affirming his conviction, the Court
of Appeals rejected the contention that the recordings had been obtained in violation of
the Fourth Amendment, [389 U.S. 347, 349] because "[t]here was no physical entrance into
the area occupied by [the petitioner]." 2 We granted certiorari in order to consider the
constitutional questions thus presented. 3
The petitioner has phrased those questions as follows:
"A. Whether a public telephone booth is a constitutionally protected area so that
evidence obtained by attaching an electronic listening recording device to the top
of such a booth is obtained in violation of the right to privacy of the user of the
ooth. [389 U.S. 347, 350]
"B. Whether physical penetration of a constitutionally protected area is necessary
efore a search and seizure can be said to be violative of the Fourth Amendment
to the United States Constitution."
We decline to adopt this formulation of the issues. In the first place, the co
ect 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. 4 Other provisions of the Constitution protect
personal privacy from other forms of governmental invasion. 5 But the protection of a
person's general right to privacy - his right to be let alone by other people 6 - is, like the
[389 U.S. 347, 351] protection of his property and of his very life, left largely to the law of
the individual States. 7
Because of the misleading way the issues have been formulated, the parties have
attached great significance to the characterization of the telephone booth from which the
petitioner placed his calls. The petitioner has strenuously argued that the booth was a
"constitutionally protected area." The Government has maintained with equal vigor that it
was not. 8 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.
9 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, 385 U.S. 206, 210 ; United States v.
Lee, 274 U.S. 559, 563 . But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area
accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected. [389 U.S. 347, 352] See Rios v.
United States, 364 U.S. 253 ; Ex parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727, 733 .
The Government stresses the fact that the telephone booth from which the petitioner
made his calls was constructed partly of glass, so that he was as visible after he entered
it as he would have been if he had remained outside. But what he sought to exclude when
he entered the booth was not the intruding eye - it was the uninvited ear. He did not shed
his right to do so simply because he made his calls from a place where he might be seen.
No less than an individual in a business office, 10 in a friend's apartment, 11 or in a taxicab,
12 a person in a telephone booth may rely upon the protection of the Fourth Amendment.
One who occupies it, shuts the door behind him, and pays the toll that permits him to
place a call is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will
not be
oadcast to the world. To read the Constitution more na
owly is to ignore the vital
ole that the public telephone has come to play in private communication.
The Government contends, however, that the activities of its agents in this case should
not be tested by Fourth Amendment requirements, for the surveillance technique they
employed involved no physical penetration of the telephone booth from which the
petitioner placed his calls. It is true that the absence of such penetration was at one time
thought to foreclose further Fourth Amendment inquiry, Olmstead v. United States, 277
U.S. 438, 457 , 464, 466; Goldman v. United States, 316 U.S. 129, XXXXXXXXXX, for that
Amendment was thought to limit only searches and seizures of tangible [389 U.S. 347,
353] property. 13 But "[t]he premise that property interests control the right of the
Government to search and seize has been discredited." Warden v. Hayden, 387 U.S. 294,
304 . Thus, although a closely divided Court supposed in Olmstead that surveillance
without any trespass and without the seizure of any material object fell outside the ambit
of the Constitution, we have since departed from the na
ow view on which that decision
ested. Indeed, we have expressly held that the Fourth Amendment governs not only the
seizure of tangible items, but extends as well to the recording of oral statements, over-
heard without any "technical trespass under . . . local property law." Silverman v. United
States, 365 U.S. 505, 511 . Once this much is acknowledged, and once it is recognized
that the Fourth Amendment protects people - and not simply "areas" - against
unreasonable searches and seizures, it becomes clear that the reach of that Amendment
cannot turn upon the presence or absence of a physical intrusion into any given enclosure.
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
egarded as controlling. The Government's activities in electronically listening to and
ecording the petitioner's words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied while
using the telephone booth and thus constituted a "search and seizure" within the meaning
of the Fourth Amendment. 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. [389 U.S. 347, 354]
The question remaining for decision, then, is whether the search and seizure conducted
in this case complied with constitutional standards. In that regard, the Government's
position is that its agents acted in an entirely defensible manner: They did not begin their
electronic surveillance until 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, in violation of federal law. Moreover, the
surveillance was limited, both in scope and in duration, to the specific purpose of
establishing the contents of the petitioner's unlawful telephonic communications. The
agents confined their surveillance to the
ief periods during which he used the telephone
ooth, 14 and they took great care to overhear only the conversations of the petitioner
himself. 15
Accepting this account of the Government's actions as accurate, it is clear that this
surveillance was so na
owly circumscribed that a duly authorized magistrate, properly
notified of the need for such investigation, specifically informed of the basis on which it
was to proceed, and clearly apprised of the precise intrusion it would entail, could
constitutionally have authorized, with appropriate safeguards, the very limited search and
seizure that the Government asserts in fact took place. Only last Term we sustained the
validity of [389 U.S. 347, 355] such an authorization, holding that, under sufficiently "precise
and discriminate circumstances," a federal court may empower government agents to
employ a concealed electronic device "for the na
ow and particularized purpose of
ascertaining the truth of the . . . allegations" of a "detailed factual affidavit alleging the
commission of a specific criminal offense." Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 329 -
330. Discussing that holding, the Court in Berger v. New York, 388 U.S. 41 , said