Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Justice Scalia: Underappreciated Fourth Amendment Defender

In addition to his many judicial bona fides, Justice Antonin Scalia was an underappreciated defender of the Fourth Amendment. With his typical thoroughness and deep textualism that reshaped American judging, the late conservative icon threw out convictions of individuals who were arrested as a result of unconstitutional violations. In Kyllo v. United States (2001), police illegally took thermal images of a man’s home to find a marijuana grow operation. In United States v. Jones (2012), a man had his Jeep tracked with GPS devices without a warrant, leading to a drug trafficking conviction. And in Florida v. Jardines (2013), police brought a drug dog onto a man’s porch to indicate drug activity inside, again, a marijuana grow operation. To Justice Scalia, the sanctity of a person’s home and property—beyond the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard that dominates Fourth Amendment jurisprudence—was to be held above the governmental interests in fighting crime.

In Kyllo, Scalia wrote for a divided 5-4 majority that included Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer: “The Fourth Amendment’s protection of the home has never been tied to the measurement of the quality or quantity of information obtained….In the home, our cases show, all details are intimate details, because the entire area is held safe from prying government eyes.” In Jardines, another non-traditional 5-4 split in which he was joined by Justices Thomas, Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, Scalia affirmed this dedication to the home, writing “[W]hen it comes to the Fourth Amendment, the home is first among equals.” 

By Jonathan Blanks
read full article at CatoInstitute

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