United States V. Place - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

The Fourth Amendment protects the interest people have in keeping their persons, houses, papers, and effects free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Though most of the Court's container jurisprudence deals with the search of the container rather than the initial seizure, there existed some general principles. First, the seizure may not take place without a warrant, supported by probable cause, and describing particularly the things to be seized. Second, over time, exceptions to the warrant requirement had evolved, allowing for seizure without probable cause in exigent circumstances not allowing for the time to obtain a warrant.

The Court first had to consider whether, as the lower courts had assumed, the framework of Terry v. Ohio, under which a limited detention of a person can be justified in the face of reasonable suspicion, can apply to the temporary seizure of a person's luggage. Indeed, when government agents have reason to suspect (but not probable cause to believe) that, for instance, a traveler's luggage contains narcotics, it has a substantial interest in confirming or denying that suspicion. In order to dispel that suspicion, the Court reasoned a brief seizure of the luggage could be justified. This brief seizure could not encompass a full-blown "search," just as a Terry stop may not increase in seriousness to a full-blown arrest, unless probable cause to perform the search arose during the brief detention.

In this case, the whole reason the DEA agents seized Place's luggage was so they could subject it to the dog sniff. The sniff, in turn, would violate Place's Fourth Amendment rights if it constituted a "search." A "search" is an unwarranted intrusion on a person's objectively reasonable expectation of privacy. But the sniff does not require opening the luggage; it does not expose things that are not contraband to public view. The sniff is thus far more limited than the typical search. Moreover, the sniff merely reveals the presence or absence of narcotics. Thus, it is sui generis, and does not constitute a "search" under the Fourth Amendment.

However, in this case, even though the DEA agents did not "search" Place's luggage when they subjected it to the dog sniff, their seizure of the luggage was unreasonable because it exceeded the limits of a Terry-type investigative stop. The length of time the agents had possession of Place's luggage was too great—90 minutes before the dog sniff had been conducted. Also, the agents knew what time Place's plane was scheduled to land at LaGuardia, and thus had ample time to arrange their investigation accordingly, so that taking Place's luggage from LaGuardia to Kennedy airports should not have been necessary. Thus, the seizure of Place's luggage was unreasonable in this case.