On October 31, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the oral argument in the consolidated case “Florida v. Harris and Jardines: A case about whether police violated the Fourth Amendment guard against unreasonable search and seizure, by taking a dog that had been trained to smell for drugs to the door of a house where they suspected that marijuana was being grown.
And Saturday, September 15 on C-SPAN Radio’s Historic Supreme Court oral argument: A case cited in “Florida v. Harris and Jardines.” From 2001: Danny Kyllo, petitioner v. United States, respondent.”
The Department of the Interior used a thermal imaging device outside of Danny Kyllo's Oregon home; a device limited to recording heat being emitted from the home; it did not penetrate walls or windows to reveal conversations or human activities inside the home. That device showed that there was an unusual amount of heat radiating from the roof and side walls of the garage, compared with the rest of his house. This information was subsequently used to obtain a search warrant for inside the home, where federal agents discovered over 100 marijuana plants. Danny Kyllo was charged with growing marijuana in his home. He first tried to suppress the evidence obtained from the thermal imaging search, but then he pled a conditional guilty. He appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court on the grounds that observations with a thermal-imaging device constituted an illegal search under the Fourth Amendment. The Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually accepted Mr. Kyllo’s petition.
Listen to the courtroom recording of the oral argument in the 2001 case "Kyllo v. United States”--Saturday, September 15 at 6 pm ET on C-SPAN Radio: 90.1 FM in the Washington, DC area, online at cspanradio.org and nationwide on XM Satellite Radio, channel 119. The audio and information in this program are courtesy of the Oyez project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law at: http://www.oyez.org/