The Supreme Court decided four search and seizure cases during its October 2012 term. Florida v. Jardines involved the question of "[w]hether a trained narcotics-detection dog's sniff at the front door of a suspected [marijuana] grow house is a Fourth Amendment search." Florida v. Harris related to whether an alert by a trained drug-detection dog is sufficient to establish probable cause for a search of a vehicle. Bailey v. United States concerned the question of whether "the detention of an individual who has just left premises to be searched under warrant is permissible when the individual is detained out of view of the house as soon as possible." Missouri v. McNeely addressed whether "the natural metabolization of alcohol in the bloodstream presents a per se exigency that justifies an exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement for nonconsensual blood testing in all drunk-driving cases." Is a dog sniff at the front door of a suspected grow house by a trained narcotics-detection dog a Fourth Amendment search requiring probable cause? Last term in Jones , five Justices declared that a Fourth Amendment "search" occurs when "the Government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area." This term, the Court declared that a search occurs when the police obtain information on the basis of the performance of a drug-sniffing dog on the front porch of a private house. Although the answer might seem something of a departure from the Court's past treatment of dog sniffing cases, those cases relied upon the "expectation of privacy rationale" rather than the alternative Jones "property intrusion" rationale. On November 3, 2006, Miami-Dade Police received an unverified "crime stoppers" tip that Jardines was growing marijuana in his house. A month later, as part of an elaborate multi-agency enterprise, authorities descended on Jardines's house at dawn. They saw no activity in the house. The blinds were drawn. The driveway was empty. The air conditioning was running. An officer and a trained drug-sniffing dog entered the front porch, where the dog "alerted" for the presence of drugs, most emphatically at the front door. A second officer then stepped to the front door to conduct a "knock and talk." He received no response. He used the dog's reaction to obtain a search warrant. A subsequent search turned up marijuana growing in the house. On appeal, the Florida district court overturned the trial court's suppression of the evidence seized at Jardines's house. The Florida Supreme Court in turn reversed the district court's decision, concluding that the dog's use under the circumstances constituted a warrantless search. It also endorsed the trial court's determination that without the dog-sniffing evidence, authorities had presented insufficient evidence to establish the probable cause necessary for issuance of the search warrant. Drug-sniffing dogs first appear in the Court's jurisprudence in Place . There, federal agents, suspicious of Place's conduct when he arrived in New York on a flight from Miami, stopped him, questioned him, and seized his luggage. A trained dog eventually alerted to the presence of drugs in one of the bags. Place sought to suppress evidence found in the bag. The Court concluded that the 90-minute delay between when the luggage was seized and when it was sniffed by the dog exceeded the delay permissible under Terry for detention of the luggage detained solely on reasonable suspicion. In doing so, however, the Court observed that "the particular course of investigation that the agents intended to pursue here—exposure of respondent's luggage, which was located in a public place, to a trained canine—did not constitute a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment." Again in Edmond , the use of dogs was not an issue. But again, the Court noted in passing that use of drug-sniffing dogs in a public area was something less than a typical Fourth Amendment search. Edmond objected to the City's suspicionless drug checkpoint program that had ensnarled him. The program featured a drug-sniffing dog walking around each of the cars stopped at the checkpoint. The Court held the drug-interdiction, law enforcement purpose precluded the program's claim to the "special needs" exception necessary to excuse the checkpoint seizures without either probable cause or a warrant. In the course of its opinion, the Court pointed out that "[i]t is well established that a vehicle stop at a highway checkpoint effectuates a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The fact that officers walk a narcotics-detection dog around the exterior of each car ... does not transform the seizure into a search, see United States v. Place ." Nevertheless, the Court went out of its way to emphasize that the case was not about the use of dogs: "The Chief Justice's dissent also erroneously characterizes our opinion as holding that the 'use of a drug-sniffing dog ... annuls what is otherwise plainly constitutional under our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.' Again, the constitutional defect of the program is that its primary purpose is to advance the general interest in crime control." In Caballes , the dog sniff was the issue, that is, "[w]hether the Fourth Amendment requires reasonable, articulable suspicion to justify using a drug-detecting dog to sniff a vehicle during a legitimate traffic stop." The Court said no: "A dog sniff conducted during a concededly lawful traffic stop that reveals no information other than the location of a substance that no individual has any right to possess does not violate the Fourth Amendment." The proposition that the use of a dog, trained to detect drugs, carries no Fourth Amendment implications seemed to bode ill for Jardines's claim. The Florida Supreme Court held that the use of a drug-sniffing dog on Jardines's front porch constituted a search and that such a search required probable cause before it could be conducted. The court distinguished the case at hand from the United States Supreme Court precedents on several grounds. It noted that the sniff tests conducted in Place , Edmond , and Caballes were all conducted in a "minimally intrusive manner upon objects ... that warrant no special protection." The Jardines sniff test was a "public spectacle" conducted at a private home, an area entitled to the highest level of Fourth Amendment protection. Then, the court pointed out that "[a]ll the tests were conducted in an impersonal manner that subjected the defendants to no untoward level of public opprobrium, humiliation or embarrassment." The Jardines sniff test involved the presence of multiple police vehicles and many officers that produced a spectacle "in a residential neighborhood [that would] invariably entail a degree of public opprobrium, humiliation and embarrassment for the resident ... for such dramatic government activity in the eyes of many—neighbors, passers-by, and the public at large—[would] be viewed as an official accusation of crime." Finally, the court emphasized that the Place , Edmond , and Caballes tests were conducted under circumstances in which they "were not susceptible to being employed in a discriminatory or arbitrary manner." In contrast, "if government agents can conduct a dog 'sniff test' at a private residence without any prior evidentiary showing of wrongdoing, there is simply nothing to prevent the agents from applying the procedure in an arbitrary or discriminatory manner, or based on whim and fancy, at the home of any citizen." The concurring justices offered another factor: "the lack of a uniform system of training and certification for drug-detection canines ... [:] conditioning and certification programs vary widely in their methods, elements, and tolerances of failure ... [; and] dogs themselves vary in their abilities to accept, retain, or abide by their conditioning in widely varying environments and circumstances." In the absence of exigent circumstances or non-law enforcement special needs, the court concluded that the dog sniff searches such as the one that occurred in Jardines may only be conducted on the basis of probable cause. The dissenters contended that the majority opinion flew in the face of binding United States Supreme Court precedent. Beyond Place , Edmond , and Caballes , they mention the Court's observation in Kyllo to the effect that "'a Fourth Amendment search does not occur—even when the explicitly protected location of a house is concerned—unless the individual manifested a subjective expectation of privacy in the object of the challenged search and society is willing to recognize that expectation as reasonable.'" Couple this with the Court's statement "that government conduct that only reveals the possession of contraband compromises no legitimate privacy interest," and the position of the majority opinion becomes untenable, the dissenters suggested. The justices of the Florida Supreme Court, however, did not have the advantage of the United States Supreme Court's Jones decision. There, a majority of the Court made clear that a Fourth Amendment search occurs whenever the government physically intrudes upon constitutionally protected property. The "expectation of privacy" concept, born of Katz , supplements, it does not condition, the traditional protection of the Amendment. The United States Supreme Court may have had Jones in mind when it agreed to hear Jardines . In any event, for five Justices, the principle announced in Jones dictated the result in Jardines . If anything, Jardines seems to present a clearer example of the Jones principle than does Jones . Jones , after all, involved placing a tracking device on a car parked in a public parking lot, while Jardines involved a home. On the other hand, Jardines did not involve an intrusion into the home itself, but rather the use of a drug-detecting dog at the front door and on the porch of the home. Justice Scalia began the opinion for the Court with the observation that a Fourth Amendment search occurs when the government "obtains information by physically intruding" upon constitutionally protected areas of person, houses, papers, or effects.