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Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 2510', '§ 2511', '§ 2515', '§ 2511', '§ 2511', '§ 2511']

UNITED STATES V. WHITE, 401 U. S. 745 - Volume 401 - 1971 - Full Text - US Supreme Court Center - USSC Cases - Nolo
US Supreme Court Center > Volume 401 > UNITED STATES V. WHITE, 401 U. S. 745 (1971) > Full Text
The Court of Appeals read Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967), as overruling On Lee v. United States, 343 U. S. 747 (1952), and interpreting the Fourth Amendment to forbid the introduction of the agents' testimony in the circumstances of this case. Accordingly, the court reversed, but without adverting to the fact that the transactions at issue here had occurred before Katz was decided in this Court. In our view, the Court of Appeals misinterpreted both the Katz case and the Fourth Amendment and, in any event, erred in applying the Katz case to events that occurred before that decision was rendered by this Court. [Footnote 2]
Conceding that Hoffa, Lewis, and Lopez remained unaffected by Katz, [Footnote 3] the Court of Appeals nevertheless
343 U.S. at 343 U. S. 753-754. We see no indication in Katz that the Court meant to disturb that understanding of the Fourth Amendment or to disturb the result reached in the On Lee case, [Footnote 4] nor are we now inclined to overturn this view of the Fourth Amendment.
and that the situation in Lopez "is rationally indistinguishable." 373 U.S. at 373 U. S. 447. The reasons in support of those conclusions are set forth fully in the Lopez
There were prior decisions representing an opposed view. In On Lee v. United States, 343 U. S. 747, an
Monitoring, if prevalent, certainly kills free discourse and spontaneous utterances. Free discourse -- a First Amendment value -- may be frivolous or serious, humble or defiant, reactionary or revolutionary, profane or in good taste; but it is not free if there is surveillance. [Footnote 2/4]
R. Clark, Crime in America 287 (1970). Now that the discredited decisions in On Lee and Lopez are resuscitated and revived, must everyone live in fear that every word he speaks may be transmitted or recorded [Footnote 2/5] and later repeated to the entire world? I can
imagine nothing that has a more chilling effect on people speaking their minds and expressing their views on important matters. The advocates of that regime should spend some time in totalitarian countries and learn first-hand the kind of regime they are creating here. [Footnote 2/6]
Before turning to matters of precedent and policy, several preliminary observations should be made. We deal here with the constitutional validity of instantaneous third-party electronic eavesdropping, conducted by federal law enforcement officers, without any prior judicial approval of the technique utilized, but with the consent and cooperation of a participant in the conversation, [Footnote 3/1]
Moreover, as I shall undertake to show later in this opinion, the factors that must be reckoned with in reaching constitutional conclusions respecting the use of electronic eavesdropping as a tool of law enforcement are exceedingly subtle and complex. They have provoked sharp differences of opinion both within and without the judiciary, and the entire problem has been the subject of continuing study by various governmental and nongovernmental bodies. [Footnote 3/4]
Finally, given the importance of electronic eavesdropping as a technique for coping with the more deep-seated kinds of criminal activity, and the complexities that are encountered in striking a workable constitutional balance between the public and private interests at stake, I believe that the courts should proceed with specially measured steps in this field. More particularly, I think this Court should not foreclose itself from reconsidering doctrines that would prevent the States from seeking, independently of the niceties of federal restrictions as they may develop, solutions to such vexing problems, see Mapp v. Ohio, 37 U. S. 643 (1961), and Ker v. California, 374 U. S. 23 (1963), and see also Berger v. New York, 388 U. S. 41 (1967); Baldwin v. New York, 399 U. S. 66, 399 U. S. 117 (1970) (dissenting opinion); California v. Green, 399 U. S. 149, 399 U. S. 172 (1970) (concurring opinion). I also think that, in the adjudication of federal cases, the Court should leave ample room for congressional developments.
On Lee involved circumstances virtually identical to those now before us. There, Government agents enlisted the services of Chin Poy, a former friend of Lee, who was suspected of engaging in illegal narcotics traffic. Poy was equipped with a "minifon" transmitting device which enabled outside Government agents to monitor Poy's conversations with Lee. In the privacy of his laundry, Lee made damaging admissions to Poy which were overheard by the agents and later related at trial. Poy did not testify. Mr. Justice Jackson, writing for five Justices, held the testimony admissible. Without reaching the question of whether a conversation could be the subject of a "seizure" for Fourth Amendment purposes, as yet an unanswered if not completely open question, [Footnote 3/5] the
It is, of course, true that the opinion in On Lee drew some support from a brief additional assertion that "eavesdropping on a conversation, with the connivance of one of the parties" raises no Fourth Amendment problem. 343 U.S. at 343 U. S. 754. But surely it is a misreading of that opinion to view this unelaborated assertion as a wholly independent ground for decision. At the very least, this
By 1963, when we decided Lopez v. United States, 373 U. S. 427, four members of the Court were prepared to pronounce On Lee and Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438 (1928), dead. [Footnote 3/8] The pyre, they reasoned, had been stoked by decisions like Won Sun v. United States, 371 U. S. 471 (1963), which, on the one hand, expressly brought verbal communication within the sweep of the Fourth Amendment, [Footnote 3/9] and, on the other, reinforced
Although the Court's decision in Lopez is cited by the Government as a reaffirmation of On Lee, it can hardly be thought to have nurtured the questionable rationale of that decision or its much-criticized ancestor, Olmstead. To the discerning lawyer Lopez could only give pause, not comfort. While the majority opinion, of which I was the author, declined to follow the course favored by the dissenting and concurring Justices by sounding the death knell for Olmstead and On Lee, our holding, despite an allusion to the absence of "an unlawful . . . invasion of a constitutionally protected area," 373 U.S. at 373 U. S. 438-439, was bottomed on two premises: the corroborative use that was made of the tape recordings, which increased reliability in the factfinding process, and the absence of a "risk" not fairly assumed by petitioner. The tape recording was made by a participant in the conversation and the opinion emphasized this absence of a third-party intrusion, expressly noting that there was no "electronic eavesdropping on a private conversation which government agents could not otherwise have overheard." 373 U.S. at 373 U. S. 440. [Footnote 3/10] As I point out in 401 U. S. S. 777� of this opinion, it is one thing to subject the average citizen to the risk that participants in a conversation with him will subsequently divulge its contents to another, but quite a different matter to foist upon him the risk that unknown third parties may be simultaneously listening in.
Certainly if Osborn, Warden, and Camara did not plainly draw into question the vigor of earlier precedents, Berger v. New York, 388 U. S. 41, did, and expunged any remnants of former doctrine which might have been
388 U.S. at 388 U. S. 56, quoting from Osborn v. United States, 385 U. S. 323, 385 U. S. 329 n. 7. Nor did the Court waver in resolve in the face of respondent's dire prediction that "neither a warrant nor a statute authorizing eavesdropping can be drawn so as to meet the Fourth Amendment's requirements." [Footnote 3/14] It
In Camara, the Court brought under the Fourth Amendment administrative searches that had once been thought to be without its sweep. In doing so, the opinion emphasized the desirability of establishing in advance those circumstances that justified the intrusion into a home and submitting them for review to an independent assessor, [Footnote 3/16] principles that this Court has always deemed to be at the core of Fourth Amendment protections. [Footnote 3/17]
In bringing such searches within the ambit of the warrant requirement, Camara rejected the notion that the "less hostile" nature of the search relegated this invasion of privacy to the "periphery" of Fourth Amendment concerns. 387 U.S. at 387 U. S. 530. The central consideration was, the Court concluded, that these administrative actions, no less than the typical search, involved government officials in an invasion of privacy, and that it was against the possible arbitrariness of invasion that the Fourth Amendment with its warrant machinery was meant to guard. Berger and Katz built, as noted earlier, on Osborn v. United States, supra, and Camara, and gave further expression to the principle. [Footnote 3/18] It was not enough that government agents acted with restraint, for reasonableness must in the first instance be judged in a detached realm. [Footnote 3/19]
The plurality opinion seeks to erase the crucial distinction between the facts before us and these holdings by the following reasoning: if A can relay verbally what is revealed to him by B (as in Lewis and Hoffa), or record and later divulge it (as in Lopez), what difference does it make if A conspires with another to betray B by contemporaneously transmitting to the other all that is said? The contention is, in essence, an argument that the distinction between third-party monitoring and other undercover techniques is one of form, and not substance. The force of the contention depends on the evaluation of two separable but intertwined assumptions: first, that there is no greater invasion of privacy in the third-party situation, and, second, that uncontrolled consensual surveillance in an electronic age is a tolerable technique of law enforcement, given the values and goals of our political system. [Footnote 3/21]
Authority is hardly required to support the proposition that words would be measured a good deal more carefully and communication inhibited if one suspected his conversations were being transmitted and transcribed. Were third-party bugging a prevalent practice, it might well smother that spontaneity -- reflected in frivolous, impetuous, sacrilegious, and defiant discourse that liberates daily life. [Footnote 3/23] Much off-hand exchange is easily forgotten,
and one may count on the obscurity of his remarks, protected by the very fact of a limited audience, and the likelihood that the listener will either overlook or forget what is said, as well as the listener's inability to reformulate a conversation without having to contend with a documented record. [Footnote 3/24] All these values are sacrificed by
I reach these conclusions notwithstanding seemingly contrary views espoused by both Congress and an American Bar Association study group. [Footnote 3/25] Both the ABA
study and Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, 82 Stat. 212, 18 U.S.C. § 2510 et seq. (1964 ed., Supp. V), appear to reflect little more than this Court's prior decisions. Indeed, the comprehensive provisions of Title III are evidence of the extent of congressional concern with the impact of electronic surveillance on the right to privacy. This concern is further manifested in the introductory section of the Senate Committee Report. [Footnote 3/26] Although § 2511(2)(c) exempts consensual and participant monitoring by law enforcement agents from the general prohibitions against surveillance without prior judicial authorization and makes the fruits admissible in court, see § 2515, congressional malaise with such conduct is evidenced by the contrastingly limited endorsement of consensual surveillance carried out by private individuals. [Footnote 3/27] While individual Congressmen expressed concern about and criticized the provisions for unsupervised consensual electronic surveillance contained in § 2511, [Footnote 3/28] the Senate Committee Report comment, to the effect that "[i]t [§ 2511(2)(c)] largely reflects existing law," S.Rep. No. 1097, 90th Cong., 2d Sess., 994 (1968), followed by citations to On Lee and Lopez, [Footnote 3/29] strongly suggests that the provisions represent not intractable approval of these practices, but rather an intention to adopt these holdings and to leave to the courts the task of determining their viability in
Because this case is here on direct review, even were the issues squarely controlled by Katz, I would unhesitatingly apply here the rule there adopted, for the reasons first expressed in my dissent in Desist, 394 U.S. at 394 U. S. 256, and elaborated in my separate opinion in Mackey
Ante at 401 U. S. 749. As I have already shown, one need not cite Katz to demonstrate the inability of On Lee to survive recent developments without at least substantial reformulation. To hold, then, that a mere citation of Katz, or drawing upon the philosophical underpinnings of that case in order to employ a general constitutional approach in tune with that of the decisions of this Court, conflicts with the holding of Desist is to let this obsession with prospectivity run riot.
See ABA Project, supra, n. 4. The commentary states at the outset: "This standard reflects the prevailing law." The drafters apparently take as their starting point the risk analysis approach, relying on cases holding that contents of letters may be revealed where otherwise lawfully obtained. Stroud v. United States, 251 U. S. 15 (1919); Ex parte Jackson, 96 U. S. 727, 96 U. S. 737 (1878); see also Blakey & Hancock, A Proposed Electronic Surveillance Control Act, supra, n. 4, at 663, n. 11. The various state provisions are set forth in Greenawalt, supra, n. 4, at 207-211.
Indeed, the plain thrust of Title III appears to be to accommodate the holdings of Berger and Katz, and provides considerable reassurance to me in adopting the views expressed herein which would doubtless, without more, cast a cloud upon the constitutionality of § 2511. Since the Title III question has been neither briefed nor argued, as this case arose prior to its enactment, I would expressly reserve judgment should it prove upon further study that Congress had an affirmative intention to restrict warrant requirements to nonconsensual surveillance. We would then have to face the question, summarily dealt with in another context in Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U. S. 641, 384 U. S. 651 n. 10 (1966), what deference should be given a congressional determination that certain procedures not plainly violations of due process, should be permitted. See Greenawalt, supra, n. 4, at 232 n. 207. Whether Congress may place restrictions on bugging by local law enforcement not mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment is also an unanswered question. See Spritzer, supra, n. 15, at 177 n. 46.