616
Opinion of the Court
of the Fourth Amendment that the conduct of the officers in this case violated the Amendment.
Second, although media ride-alongs of one sort or another had apparently become a common police practice,3 in 1992 there were no judicial opinions holding that this practice became unlawful when it entered a home. The only published decision directly on point was a state intermediate court decision which, though it did not engage in an extensive Fourth Amendment analysis, nonetheless held that such conduct was not unreasonable. Prahl v. Brosamle, 98 Wis. 2d 130, 154- 155, 295 N. W. 2d 768, 782 (App. 1980). From the federal courts, the parties have only identified two unpublished District Court decisions dealing with media entry into homes, each of which upheld the search on unorthodox non-Fourth Amendment right to privacy theories. Moncrief v. Hanton, 10 Media L. Rptr. 1620 (ND Ohio 1984); Higbee v. Times-Advocate, 5 Media L. Rptr. 2372 (SD Cal. 1980). These cases, of course, cannot "clearly establish" that media entry into homes during a police ride-along violates the Fourth Amendment.
At a slightly higher level of generality, petitioners point to Bills v. Aseltine, 958 F. 2d 697 (CA6 1992), in which the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that there were material issues of fact precluding summary judgment on the question whether police exceeded the scope of a search warrant by allowing a private security guard to participate in the search to identify stolen property other than that described in the warrant. Id., at 709. Bills, which was decided a mere five weeks before the events of this case, did anticipate today's holding that police may not bring along third parties during an entry into a private home pursuant
3 See, e. g., Florida Publishing Co. v. Fletcher, 340 So. 2d 914, 919 (1976) (it " 'is a widespread practice of long-standing' " for media to accompany officers into homes), cert. denied, 431 U. S. 930 (1977); Zoglin, Live on the Vice Beat, Time, Dec. 22, 1986, p. 60 (noting "the increasingly common practice of letting TV crews tag along on drug raids").
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