holding that warrantless search of probationer’s apartment that was supported by reasonable suspicion and authorized by probation condition comported with Fourth Amendment and explaining that, “[b]ecause [the Court’s] holding rests on ordinary Fourth Amendment analysis that considers all the circumstances of a search, there is no basis for examining official purpose” of search
How later courts described this case
- holding that warrantless search of probationer’s apartment that was supported by reasonable suspicion and authorized by probation condition comported with Fourth Amendment and explaining that, “[b]ecause [the Court’s] holding rests on ordinary Fourth Amendment analysis that considers all the circumstances of a search, there is no basis for examining official purpose” of search
- holding that “the reasonableness of a search is determined ‘by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests” (quoting Wyoming v. Houghton, 526 U.S. 295, 300, 119 S.Ct. 1297, 143 L.Ed.2d 408 (1999))
- holding that “when an officer has reasonable suspicion that a probationer[, who is already] subject to a search condition [pursuant to his probation agreement,] is engaged in criminal activity, [then] there is enough likelihood that criminal conduct is occurring that an intrusion on the probationer’s ... privacy interests is reasonable.”
- stating that rationale for upholding search was not based solely on prior waiver of rights, but was rather rooted in the basis that the search was “reasonable under our general Fourth Amendment approach of ‘examining the totality of the circumstances,’” including Knights’s “signficantly diminished” expectation of privacy
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by United States v. Keith, 375 F.3d 346 (2004)
534 U.S. 112, 122 S.Ct. 587, 151 L.Ed.2d 497 (2001) are distinguishable because unlike Louisiana, in both states where the searches were conducted in those cases, the probationer either agreed to a search as a written condition of probation or a state regulation authorized a warrantless search by a probation officer upon reasonable suspicion.
The opinion
Justice Souter,
concurring.
As this case was originally presented to us, the dispute centered on whether Knights’s agreement to the search, condition included in his terms of probation covered only those searches with a probation-related purpose, or rather extended to searches with an investigatory or law-enforcement purpose. At that time, the Government argued that Whren v. United States, 517 U. S. 806 (1996), precluded any en-quiry into the motives of the individual officers conducting the search. We now hold that law-enforcement searches of probationers who have been informed of a search condition are permissible upon individualized suspicion of criminal behavior committed during the probationary period, thus removing any issue of the subjective intention of the investí- *123 gating officers from the case. I would therefore reserve the question whether Whren’s holding, that “Subjective intentions play no role in ordinary, probable-cause Fourth Amendment analysis,” id., at 813 , should extend to searches based only upon reasonable suspicion.