Antonin Scalia

“ I find it hard to understand how not addressing that point fails to leave it enshrouded in darkness—unless the Court means that such reporting requirements are clearly bad. (If voluntary betrayal of a trust in mere cooperation with the police constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, surely betrayal of a trust at the direction of the legislature must be.) But in any event, reporting requirements are an infinitesimal part of the problem. What about a doctor's—or a spouse's—voluntary provision of information to the police, without the compulsion of a statute?↑ . ”

“ The initial goal of the doctors and nurses who conducted cocaine testing in this case was to refer pregnant drug addicts to treatment centers, and to prepare for necessary treatment of their possibly affected children. When the doctors and nurses agreed to the program providing test results to the police, they did so because (in addition to the fact that child abuse was required by law to be reported) they wanted to use the sanction of arrest as a strong incentive for their addicted patients to undertake drug-addiction treatment. ”

“ The Constitution does not resolve all difficult social questions, but leaves the vast majority of them to resolution by debate and the democratic process—which would produce a decision by the citizens of Charleston, through their elected representatives, to forbid or permit the police action at issue here. ”

“ But in fact the drug testing sought, independently of law enforcement involvement, the "immediate" health benefits of identifying drug-impaired mother and child for necessary medical treatment. The concurrence concedes that if the testing is conducted for medical reasons, the fact that "prosecuting authorities then adopt legitimate procedures to discover this information and prosecution follows [p. 103] ...ought not to invalidate the testing." Ante, at 90 (emphasis added) . But here the police involvement in each case did take place after the testing was conducted for independent reasons. ”

“ The question before us is a narrower one: whether, whatever the desirability of this police conduct, it violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. In my view, it plainly does not.
I The first step in Fourth Amendment analysis is to identify the search or seizure at issue. What petitioners, the Court, and to a lesser extent the concurrence really object to is not the urine testing, but the hospital's reporting of positive drug-test results to police. But the latter is obviously not a search. ”

“ Since the Court declines even to discuss the issue, it leaves law enforcement officials entirely in the dark as to when they can use incriminating evidence obtained from "trusted" sources. [3] Presumably the [p. 96] lines will be drawn in the case-by-case development of a whole new branch of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, taking yet another social judgment (which confidential relationships ought not be invaded by the police) out of democratic control, and confiding it to the uncontrolled judgment of this Court—uncontrolled because there is no common-law precedent to guide it. ”

“ That is irrelevant to the point I make here, which is that the presence of a law enforcement purpose does not render the special-needs doctrine inapplicable. In any event, I doubt whether Griffin's reasonable expectation of privacy in his home was any less than petitioners' reasonable expectation of privacy in their urine taken, [p. 102] or in the urine tests performed, in a hospital—especially in a State such as South Carolina, which recognizes no physician-patient testimonial privilege and requires the physician's duty of confidentiality to yield to public policy, see McCormick v. ”

“ He is an employee of the State Department of Health and Social Services who, while assuredly charged with protecting the public interest, is also supposed to have in mind the welfare of the probationer.... In such a setting, we think it reasonable to dispense with the warrant requirement. ”