Justice Antonin Scalia (1936-2016) was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1986 until his death in 2016. Scalia may have been a social conservative and a scourge to cultural liberals and the liberal progressive movement, but to me he was a giant, a champion of the criminally accused. In this blog I will comment on the opinions and writings of this extraordinary great supreme court justice, one of liberties great defenders.
The case I am going to discuss today is Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), which is a great 4th Amendment case. It came at a time when there was widespread and indiscriminate police use of helicopters and thermal imaging devises to find indoor marijuana grows.
Scalia writing for a 5-4 majority held that where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment "search," and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant. Because there was no warrant obtained before using a thermal imaging devise to scan Kyro’s triplex to determine if the amount of heat emanating from it was consistent with the high-intensity lamps typically used for indoor marijuana growths, the information obtained was tainted fruit and a subsequent warrant was bad and evidence obtained had to be suppressed.