POLICE USE OF SENSORS IS INVASIVE

Heat-Detecting Devices Require Search Warrant

WASHINGTON -- Police violate the Constitution if they use a heat-sensing
device to peer inside a home without a search warrant, the Supreme Court
ruled Monday.

An unusual lineup of five justices voted to bolster the Fourth
Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and threw out an
Oregon man's conviction for growing marijuana.

In an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, by many measures the
most conservative member of the court, the majority found that the heat
detector allowed police to see things they otherwise could not.

"Where, as here, the government uses a device that is not in general
public use to explore details of the home that would previously have
been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a
'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant," Scalia
wrote.

Quoting from earlier rulings involving the Fourth Amendment's provisions
against unreasonable searches and seizures, Scalia said that "at the
very core" of the amendment "stands the right of a man to retreat into
his own home and there be free from governmental intrusion."

He was joined by another conservative, Justice Clarence Thomas, as well
as Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

Monday's ruling reversed a lower court decision that said officers' use
of a heat-sensing device was not a search of Danny Lee Kyllo's home and
therefore they did not need a search warrant.

Federal agents did get a warrant to search Kyllo's home in Florence,
Ore., early in 1992, but only after the heat-sensing device had aroused
the agents' suspicions that the unusual heat patterns in the house might
be from high-intensity lamps used to grow marijuana -- which, in fact,
they were.

The court sent the case back to lower courts to determine whether police
have other grounds to support the search warrant that was served on
Kyllo, and thus whether any of the evidence inside the home can be used
against him.

Justice John Paul Stevens dissented and was joined by Chief Justice
William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy.

The dissenters cited a District Court finding that "no intimate details
of the home were observed, and there was no intrusion upon the privacy
of the individuals."