SCOTUS rulz!

[George at Orwellian.Org]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Scotus-Heat-Detector.html
#    
#    June 11, 2001
#    
#    Court Rules Against Heat-Sensor Searches
#    
#    Filed at 11:03 a.m. ET
#    
#    WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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.
#    
#    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.
#    
#    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.
#    
#    While the court has previously approved some warrantless searches, 
#    this one did not meet tests the court has previously set, Scalia 
#    wrote.
#    
#    The decision means the information police gathered with the 
#    thermal device -- namely a suspicious pattern of hot spots on 
#    the home's exterior walls -- cannot be used against Kyllo.
#    
#    The court sent the case back to lower courts to determine whether 
#    police have enough other basis to support the search warrant 
#    that was eventually served on Kyllo, and thus whether any of 
#    the evidence inside his home can be used against him.
#    
#    Justices Clarence Thomas, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg 
#    and Stephen Breyer joined the majority.
#    
#    Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissenting opinion joined by 
#    Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, and Justices Sandra Day 
#    O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy.