Court Opinion

ID: 9434171
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:42:25.314315+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:46.700489
License: Public Domain

Justice Souter,
concurring.
As this case was originally presented to us, the dispute centered on whether Knights’s agreement to the search, condition included in his terms of probation covered only those searches with a probation-related purpose, or rather extended to searches with an investigatory or law-enforcement purpose. At that time, the Government argued that Whren v. United States, 517 U. S. 806 (1996), precluded any en-quiry into the motives of the individual officers conducting the search. We now hold that law-enforcement searches of probationers who have been informed of a search condition are permissible upon individualized suspicion of criminal behavior committed during the probationary period, thus removing any issue of the subjective intention of the investí-*123gating officers from the case. I would therefore reserve the question whether Whren’s holding, that “Subjective intentions play no role in ordinary, probable-cause Fourth Amendment analysis,” id., at 813, should extend to searches based only upon reasonable suspicion.