Court Opinion

ID: 9430866
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:30:46.192673+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:26.219824
License: Public Domain

Justice O’Connor’s
dissent suggests that we uphold the action here on the ground that it was a “cursory inspection” rather than a “full-blown search,” and could therefore be justified by reasonable suspicion instead of probable cause. As already noted, a truly cursory inspection — one that involves merely looking at what is already exposed to view, without disturbing it — is not a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes, and therefore does not even require reasonable suspicion. We are unwilling to send police and judges into a new thicket of Fourth Amendment law, to seek a creature of uncertain description that is neither a “plain view” inspection nor *329yet a “full-blown search.” Nothing in the prior opinions of this Court supports such a distinction, not even the dictum from Justice Stewart’s concurrence in Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U. S. 557, 571 (1969), whose reference to a “mere inspection” describes, in our view, close observation of what lies in plain sight.