Can you imagine being pressured by your boss to find a way to arrest a suspect before the only evidence you had disappeared? That is exactly what happened to the police officers who scanned a suspect's home using a thermal imager. This suspect, who will further be referred to by his initials DLK, was suspected of growing marijuana plants in his home. When the police used this new form of technology to scan the suspect’s house, they found abnormal heat signatures coming from his windows and doors, so they entered DLK’s house and seized around one hundred illegal plants in addition to the arrest that was made on DLK. While some may disagree, the government certainly did not violate DLK’s rights when they performed the scan of his home using a thermal imager. This is primarily evidenced by the fact that the imager did not scan the inside of DLK’s house, nor were the officers on his property while they were operating the scanner, and finally, the police had reason to fear loss of evidence, and therefore scanning DLK’s house was not a violation of his rights.
To begin, the thermal imager which police used to scan DLK’s home was not capable of viewing the inside of the house. To further elaborate, the thermal imager scans the outside of a
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A thermal imager can be successfully operated while the operator is standing outside of the residence in which the suspected illegal activity is occurring, as stated in Document B. Consequently, the operators were able to operate the thermal imager while not on the property of DLK. This fact, accompanied by the fact that the police were not able to see the inside of the suspects home means that the police were most certainly not in violation of the suspects rights. Therefore, the claim in which the petitioner states that the government violated his rights by scanning his house is not at all