| Smith v. Maryland | ||||||
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Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued March 28, 1979 Decided June 20, 1979 |
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| Full case name | Michael Lee Smith v. Maryland | |||||
| Citations | 442 U.S. 735 (more) 99 S. Ct. 2577; 61 L. Ed. 2d 220; 1979 U.S. LEXIS 134 |
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| Prior history | Cert. to the Court of Appeals of Maryland | |||||
| Court membership | ||||||
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| Case opinions | ||||||
| Majority | Blackmun, joined by Burger, White, Rehnquist, Stevens | |||||
| Dissent | Stewart, joined by Brennan | |||||
| Dissent | Marshall, joined by Brennan | |||||
| Powell took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. | ||||||
Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979)[1], was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the installation and use of the pen register was not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and hence no warrant was required. The pen register was installed on telephone company property at the telephone company's central offices. In the Majority opinion, Justice Blackmun rejected the idea that the installation and use of a pen registry constitutes a violation of the "legitimate expectation of privacy" since the numbers would be available to and recorded by the phone company anyway.
In Katz v. United States (1967), the United States Supreme Court established its "reasonable expectation of privacy" test. It overturned Olmstead v. United States and held that wiretaps were unconstitutional searches, because there was a reasonable expectation that the communication would be private. The government was then required to get a warrant to execute a wiretap.
In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that a pen register is not a search because the "petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company." Since the defendant had disclosed the dialed numbers to the telephone company so they could connect his call, he did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers he dialed. The court did not distinguish between disclosing the numbers to a human operator or just the automatic equipment used by the telephone company.
The Smith decision left pen registers completely outside constitutional protection. If there was to be any privacy protection, it would have to be enacted by Congress as statutory privacy law.