Pole Cameras Are not an Unreasonable Search
The Department of Homeland Security began investigating Michael Dennis after a number of individuals described delivering marijuana to him. DHS agents installed pole cameras pointing to the front and back of Dennis’s property, and they stayed in place over ninety days. One day, they captured video of boxes being unloaded from pickup trucks into the garage, and Dennis moving the boxes from the garage to inside the house. The videos also showed a man delivering boxes to the garage twice; Houston police stopped him after he left the property and seized about $5,000 and thirty pounds of marijuana.
Dennis moved to suppress the pole-camera evidence. The district court denied the motion. He appealed. The Fifth Circuit held that DHS did not violate Dennis’s Fourth Amendment rights by maintaining pole cameras pointed at his house for months on end. It said,
Dennis argues that the pole cameras were an unreasonable intrusion into his privacy under the Fourth Amendment. “[O]fficial intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search and requires a warrant supported by probable cause.”However, a defendant cannot assert a privacy interest in information which he “voluntarily conveyed to anyone who wanted to look.” Dennis relies on United States v. Cuevas-Sanchez to argue that the fencing around his property established his privacy interest, but given that one can see through his fence and that the cameras captured what was open to public view from the street, this is not a clear or obvious application of our precedent. Dennis argues the prolonged and continuous nature of the surveillance violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Although the Supreme Court addressed a form of continuous surveillance in Carpenter, unlike cell-site location information, there is nothing inherent in the use of security cameras to cast doubt on their validity.
It is rather whether the surveillance invades protected privacy interests. Surveillance of areas open to view of the public without any invasion of the property itself is not alone a violation. All that was surveilled here was from the view from the street, continuously visible to individuals. We do not say that the length of time surveilled is irrelevant, but we find no privacy interest was here invaded—information subject to the daily view of strollers and the community. The legal issues here are not so clear that any error would be plain or obvious.
The court’s opinion was not inconsistent with a number of other circuits that have considered the issue.