Winston v. Lee
Case Date: 05/06/1985
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Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753 (1985), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court, which held that a compelled surgical intrusion into an individual's body for evidence implicates expectations of privacy and security of such magnitude that the intrusion would be "unreasonable" under the Fourth Amendment, even if likely to produce evidence of a crime.
The reasonableness of surgical intrusions beneath the skin depends on a case-by-case approach, in which the individual's interests in privacy and security are weighed against society's interests in conducting the procedure to obtain evidence for fairly determining guilt or innocence. The appropriate framework of analysis for such cases is provided in Schmerber v. California (1966), which held that a State may, over the suspect's protest, have a physician extract blood from a person suspected of drunken driving without violating the suspect' Fourth Amendment rights.
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