Just over 13 years ago, the Supreme Court considered the use of a drug-detection dog on a front porch in Florida v. Jardines, holding that a porch should be considered “part of the home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes” and that, therefore, officers should have secured a warrant before bringing the dog to the scene. At their next private conference, the justices will consider a petition for review that applies that 2013 ruling to a multi-unit apartment building, contending that the area immediately outside an apartment door should be treated like a porch under the Fourth Amendment.
The case, Johnson v. United States, originated in 2019, when a Narcotics Task Force in Washington County, Maryland, brought a drug-detection dog to Apartment 201 at an apartment complex called Greenwich Place. The man who lived in that apartment, Eric Tyrell Johnson, was believed to be involved in a drug trafficking operation, and police officers were working “to confirm – or dispel – those suspicions before seeking a search warrant for” his apartment.
With the permission of building management, police officers brought the drug-detection dog to the area immediately outside Johnson’s apartment, which “was recessed from the common hallway by approximately three and a half feet.” The dog “alerted to the odor of illegal drugs in the area of the lower door seam,” and the police cited this alert in their successful application for a warrant to search Johnson’s home. “The search uncovered a heroin-fentanyl powder mixture, a handgun, ammunition, cell phones, cash, and other items indicative of drug-dealing.”
In the resulting trial, Johnson attempted to have this evidence suppressed “as fruit of a Fourth Amendment violation.” He argued that the warrantless dog sniff was out of line with two past Supreme Court rulings: the front porch case noted above and Kyllo v. United States, in which the court held that police cannot use specialized investigative tools like thermal-imaging devices to scan the inside of a home without a warrant. The district court, however, denied Johnson’s motion to suppress, and “Johnson was convicted of drug- and gun-related offenses.”
In August 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision, holding that “dog sniffs are different” than thermal-imaging devices because they point to the presence of illegal drugs in a home without “expos[ing] noncontraband items that otherwise would remain hidden from public view.” And the area outside of an apartment door is different than a front porch, the 4th Circuit continued, because it’s “part of a common hallway, used regularly by other building residents and by building cleaning staff.”
In his petition to the Supreme Court, Johnson emphasized that the 4th Circuit’s ruling deepened a split between lower courts over whether using a drug-detection dog at the door of an apartment is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. Decisions like the 4th Circuit’s are “wrongheaded” and “threaten[] to deprive Americans who live in multi-unit dwellings, or in homes that abut a stress, of their Fourth Amendment rights just because they don’t live in detached houses,” Johnson wrote, noting that “approximately a quarter of all Americans live in multi-unit dwellings.”
In its response brief, the federal government asked the court to leave the 4th Circuit’s ruling against Johnson in place, contending that it correctly held that the Supreme Court’s past rulings on dog sniffs and the Fourth Amendment did not establish that the sniffing outside of his apartment door required a warrant. In analyzing whether the area outside an apartment door is comparable to a front porch, lower courts consider case-specific details, such as who has access to the space, wrote U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer. What mattered in Johnson’s case, Sauer continued, wasn’t that he lived in an apartment rather than a house, but that his apartment door entered onto a busy hallway “serving numerous units” that “was frequented by other tenants, non-resident visitors, and the building’s cleaning staff.” Given this, the dog sniffs did “not infringe any legitimate privacy interest” protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Johnson v. United States is scheduled to be considered by the justices for the first time at their private conference on Friday, April 17.