Brief Basics
This section of a legal brief summarizes what happened before the case reached the court.
What are the facts?
This government agency investigated Danny Kyllo's home for suspected marijuana growing.
What is the police / law enforcement? (Department of the Interior)
The constitutional amendment at the center of the Kyllo case protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures.
What is the Fourth Amendment?
The Supreme Court's decision in Kyllo was in favor of this person, who challenged the warrantless thermal scan.
Who is Danny Kyllo?
The majority emphasized that the home receives especially strong protection under this amendment.
What is the Fourth Amendment?
This section identifies the specific legal question the court must answer.
What is the issue?
Investigators used this device to detect heat patterns coming from Kyllo's home.
What is a thermal imager (thermal imaging device)?
The main legal question was whether using thermal imaging to examine a home's interior without a warrant counted as this.
What is a search under the Fourth Amendment?
The Supreme Court concluded that the thermal scan of Kyllo's home was this under the Fourth Amendment.
What is a search?
According to the majority, the government generally cannot use technology not in general public use to obtain information about this without a warrant when the information could not otherwise be obtained without physical intrusion.
What is the interior of a home?
This section states the court's decision on the legal issue.
What is the holding?
Investigators used thermal imaging to look for signs of this illegal activity inside Kyllo's home.
What is growing marijuana?
The case asked whether the government could use technology to learn details about the inside of a home that it could not otherwise learn without this.
What is physically entering or intruding into the home?
Because the thermal scan was a search, the majority concluded that officers generally needed this before conducting it.
What is a warrant?
Why did the majority reject the government’s argument that the thermal scan was not a search because agents never entered Kyllo’s home?
What is because the Fourth Amendment protects the privacy of the home, not just against physical entry?
This section explains why the court reached its decision, including the legal principles supporting it.
What is the reasoning or rationale?
Before using the thermal imager, officers did not obtain this legal authorization to search Kyllo's home.
What is a warrant?
The majority's legal test considered whether the technology was sense-enhancing and whether it was in this condition of public availability.
What is not in general public use?
The Supreme Court did this to the lower court's decision that had upheld the use of the thermal scan.
What is reverse it (reverse the Ninth Circuit's judgment)?
In this 1967 Supreme Court case, police attached an electronic listening device to the outside of a public telephone booth to record a man’s conversations about illegal gambling. The Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not just places, and recognized the importance of a reasonable expectation of privacy.
What is Katz v. United States?