I think this is a different case, though. The police didn’t succeed or didn’t try to get a warrant before pointing a camera at one guy. Then, tried to argue that they could mount it anywhere because his fence had gaps and was only 6’ high.
This seems pretty open and shut. Drug dealer though he may be, we can't allow such a blatant invasion of privacy to set the standard. The dude had a 6 foot tall fence around his yard and the police think it's okay to put a camera up on a pole to surveil him without a warrant? And they did it around the clock for 3 months...
If I point a camera into my neighbor's yard and run it 24/7 for 3 months, I'm probably in deep doo-doo even if he has no fence at all. With a fence, I'd refer to Kyllo v. US, though that disturbingly was a 5-4 decision rather than 9-0 :(.
Doesn't this rub pretty strongly against Florida v. Riley, which ruled overhead surveillance is legal as long as the viewer was somewhere a person could've reasonably been?
The issue at hand (it seems) was the lack of a warrant. In 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in US v. Jones that a GPS tracker attached to a car was a “search” and would require a warrant. This seems like the same idea.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 29.4 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones