write an analysis of the case of katz v united states 389 u s 347 1967 using the firac facts issues rules application conclusion method please use the template provided below to organize your analysis

Included in the FIRAC CASES folder of the Canvas website for this course is a Memorandum on how to do a FIRAC analysis. The memorandum contains a link (“How to do a FIRAC Analysis”) that connects to an article containing a more detailed description of FIRAC methodology written by a law professor. That article goes into more depth than you need to complete this assignment, but it may be helpful.

The FIRAC CASES folder also includes the analysis I did for the Nelson case. It is there for your reference in case it may provide you with some guidance.

Additionally, in the HOMEWORK file, you can find the Instructor Examples I have posted for the previous Homework assignments this quarter.

This assignment will count for up to 5 points if turned in before the deadline, as follows:

Facts: 1 point

Issue/s: 1 point

Rule/s: 1 point

Application/s & Conclusion: 2 points

THE CASE:

KATZ v. UNITED STATES

389 U.S. 347

UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT

Argued: Oct. 17, 1967. — Decided: Dec 18, 1967

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. 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, because there was no physical entrance into the area occupied by the petitioner. We granted certiorari in order to consider the constitutional questions presented.

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. 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.

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, in a friend’s apartment, or in a taxicab, 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 broadcast to the world. To read the Constitution more narrowly is to ignore the vital role that the public telephone has come to play in private communication.

The Government contends that the activities of its agents should not be tested by Fourth Amendment requirements, because the surveillance technique they employed involved no physical penetration of the telephone booth. It is true that in Olmstead v. United States [. . .] and Goldman v. United States [. . .] the absence of such penetration was held to foreclose further Fourth Amendment inquiry. However, the premise that property interests control the right of the Government to search and seize has since been discredited. Warden, Md. Penitentiary v. Hayden [. . .]. Thus, although we held in Olmstead that surveillance without any trespass and without the seizure of any material object fell outside the protection of the Constitution, we have since expressly held that the Fourth Amendment governs not only the seizure of tangible items, but extends as well to the recording of oral statements overheard without any technical trespass under local property law. Silverman v. United States [. . .]. Once it is recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects people and not simply ‘areas’ against unreasonable searches and seizures it becomes clear that the protection of that Amendment cannot depend upon the presence or absence of a physical intrusion into any given enclosure.

We conclude that the Government’s activities in electronically listening to and recording 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 did not happen to penetrate the wall of the booth can have no constitutional significance.

The question remaining for decision, then, is whether the search and seizure conducted in this case complied with constitutional standards. 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 brief periods during which he used the telephone booth, and they took great care to overhear only the conversations of the petitioner himself.

Accepting this account of the Government’s actions as accurate, it is clear that this surveillance was so narrowly circumscribed that if a duly authorized magistrate had (a) been properly notified of the need for such investigation; (b) specifically informed of the basis on which it was to proceed; and (c) clearly informed of the precise intrusion it would entail; the magistrate could constitutionally have authorized the very limited search and seizure that took place.

The Government urges that, because its agents relied upon the Olmstead and Goldman decisions, and because they did no more here than they might properly have done if they had obtained a warrant, we should retroactively validate their conduct. That we cannot do.

It is apparent that the agents in this case acted with restraint. Yet the inescapable fact is that this restraint was imposed by the agents themselves, not by a judicial officer. They were not required, before commencing the search, to present their estimate of probable cause for detached scrutiny by a neutral magistrate. They were not compelled, during the conduct of the search itself, to observe precise limits established in advance by a specific court order. Nor were they directed, after the search had been completed, to notify the authorizing magistrate in detail of all that had been seized. In the absence of such safeguards, this Court has never sustained a search upon the sole ground that officers reasonably expected to find evidence of a particular crime and voluntarily confined their activities to the least intrusive means consistent with that end. Over and again this Court has emphasized that searches conducted without prior approval by a judge or a magistrate are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment — subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions, none of which apply to the sort of search and seizure involved in this case.

The Government does not question these basic principles. Rather, it argues that surveillance of a telephone booth should be exempted from the usual requirement of advance authorization by a magistrate upon a showing of probable cause. We cannot agree. Omission of such authorization would leave individuals secure from Fourth Amendment violations ‘only in the discretion of the police.

These considerations do not vanish when the search in question is transferred from the setting of a home, an office, or a hotel room to that of a telephone booth. Wherever a man may be, he is entitled to know that he will remain free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The government agents here ignored the procedure of antecedent justification that is central to the Fourth Amendment; a procedure that we hold to be a constitutional precondition for the kind of electronic surveillance involved in this case. Because the surveillance here failed to meet that condition, and because it led to the petitioner’s conviction, the judgment must be reversed.

It is so ordered. . . .

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mr. Justice MARSHALL took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.

 

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