Wendee Long v. Texas

Texas’s wiretap statute, like its federal counterpart and numerous other states’, criminalizes the recording of communications if the speaker has a legitimate expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. This Court has held that, in making that determination, courts are to consider “people, not places,” Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 361 (1967), and “the totality of the circumstances.” Grady v. North Carolina, 135 S. Ct. 1368, 1371 (2015). But in this case, in considering whether an adult male high-school basketball coach had a legitimate expectation of privacy when he was coaching teenage girls in a public-school locker room, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals fixated solely on the coach’s location. Did the Court of Criminal Appeals thus decide an important question of federal law in a way that conflicts with the relevant decisions of this Court? (i)