Source: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mapp_v._Ohio/Dissent_Harlan
Timestamp: 2019-03-19 14:54:40
Document Index: 664193004

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 2905', '§ 2905', '§ 2184', '§ 2', '§ 2905', '§ 2905']

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Mapp v. Ohio/Dissent Harlan
81318Mapp v. Ohio — Dissenting Opinion
From the Court's statement of the case, one would gather that the central, if not controlling, issue on this appeal is whether illegally state-seized evidence is Constitutionally admissible in a state prosecution, an issue which would, of course, face us with the need for reexamining Wolf. However, such is not the situation. For, although that question was indeed raised here and below among appellant's subordinate points, the new and [p673] pivotal issue brought to the Court by this appeal is whether § 2905.34 of the Ohio Revised Code, making criminal the mere knowing possession or control of obscene material, [1] and under which appellant has been convicted, is consistent with the rights of free thought and expression assured against state action by the Fourteenth Amendment. [2] That was the principal issue which was decided by the Ohio Supreme Court, [3] which was tendered by appellant's Jurisdictional Statement, [4] and which was briefed [5] and argued [6] in this Court. [p674]
The action of the Court finds no support in the rule that decision of Constitutional issues should be avoided wherever possible. For, in overruling Wolf, the Court, instead of passing upon the validity of Ohio's § 2905.34, has simply chosen between two Constitutional questions. Moreover, I submit that it has chosen the more difficult and less appropriate of the two questions. The Ohio statute which, as construed by the State Supreme Court, punishes knowing possession or control of obscene material, irrespective of the purposes of such possession or control (with exceptions not here applicable) [7] and irrespective of whether the accused had any reasonable opportunity to rid himself of the material after discovering that it was obscene, [8] surely presents a Constitutional [p676] question which is both simpler and less far-reaching than the question which the Court decides today. It seems to me that justice might well have been done in this case without overturning a decision on which the administration of criminal law in many of the States has long justifiably relied.
The occasion which the Court has taken here is in the context of a case where the question was briefed not at all and argued only extremely tangentially. The unwisdom of overruling Wolf without full-dress argument [p677] is aggravated by the circumstance that that decision is a comparatively recent one (1949) to which three members of the present majority have at one time or other expressly subscribed, one, to be sure, with explicit misgivings. [9] I would think that our obligation to the States, on whom we impose this new rule, as well as the obligation of orderly adherence to our own processes would demand that we seek that aid which adequate briefing and argument lends to the determination of an important issue. It certainly has never been a postulate of judicial power that mere altered disposition, or subsequent membership on the Court, is sufficient warrant for overturning a deliberately decided rule of Constitutional law.
At the heart of the majority's opinion in this case is the following syllogism: (1) the rule excluding in federal criminal trials evidence which is the product of an illegal search and seizure is "part and parcel" of the Fourth Amendment; (2) Wolf held that the "privacy" assured against federal action by the Fourth Amendment is also protected against state action by the Fourteenth Amendment, and (3) it is therefore "logically and constitutionally necessary" that the Weeks exclusionary rule should also be enforced against the States. [10]
Thus, even in a case which presented simply the question of whether a particular search and seizure was constitutionally "unreasonable" — say in a tort action against state officers — we would not be true to the Fourteenth Amendment were we merely to stretch the general principle of individual privacy on a Procrustean bed of federal precedents under the Fourth Amendment. But, in this instance, more than that is involved, for here we are reviewing not a determination that what the state police did was Constitutionally permissible (since the state court quite evidently assumed that it was not), but a determination that appellant was properly found guilty of conduct which, for present purposes, it is to be assumed the State could Constitutionally punish. Since there is not the slightest suggestion that Ohio's policy is "affirmatively to sanction . . . police incursion into privacy," (338 U.S. at 28), compare Marcus v. Search Warrants, post, p. 717, what the Court is now doing is to impose [p680] upon the States not only federal substantive standards of "search and seizure", but also the basic federal remedy for violation of those standards. For I think it entirely clear that the Weeks exclusionary rule is but a remedy which, by penalizing past official misconduct, is aimed at deterring such conduct in the future.
An approach which regards the issue as one of achieving procedural symmetry or of serving administrative convenience surely disfigures the boundaries of this Court's functions in relation to the state and federal courts. Our role in promulgating the Weeks rule and its extensions in such cases as Rea, Elkins, and Rios [11] was quite a different one than it is here. There, in implementing the Fourth Amendment, we occupied the position of a tribunal having the ultimate responsibility for developing the standards and procedures of judicial administration within the judicial system over which it presides. Here, we review state procedures whose measure is to be taken not against the specific substantive commands of the Fourth Amendment, but under the flexible contours of the Due Process Clause. I do not believe that the Fourteenth Amendment empowers this Court to mould state remedies effectuating the right to freedom from "arbitrary intrusion by the police" to suit its own notions of how things should be done, as, for instance, the California Supreme Court did in People v. Cahan, 44 Cal.2d 434, 282 P.2d 905, with reference to procedures in the California courts, or as this Court did in Weeks for the lower federal courts.
Finally, it is said that the overruling of Wolf is supported by the established doctrine that the admission in evidence of an involuntary confession renders a state conviction constitutionally invalid. Since such a confession may often be entirely reliable, and therefore of the greatest relevance to the issue of the trial, the argument continues, this doctrine is ample warrant in precedent that the way evidence was obtained, and not just its relevance, is constitutionally significant to the fairness of a trial. I believe this analogy is not a true one. The "coerced confession" rule is certainly not a rule that any illegally obtained statements may not be used in evidence. I would suppose that a statement which is procured during [p684] a period of illegal detention, McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332, is, as much as unlawfully seized evidence, illegally obtained, but this Court has consistently refused to reverse state convictions resting on the use of such statements. Indeed, it would seem the Court laid at rest the very argument now made by the majority when, in Lisenba v. California, 314 U.S. 219, a state-coerced confession case, it said (at 235):
It may be assumed [that the] treatment of the petitioner [by the police] . . . deprived him of his liberty without due process, and that the petitioner would have been afforded preventive relief if he could have gained access to a court to seek it.
In conclusion, it should be noted that the majority opinion in this case is, in fact, an opinion only for the judgment overruling Wolf, and not for the basic rationale by which four members of the majority have reached that result. For my Brother BLACK is unwilling to subscribe to their view that the Weeks exclusionary rule derives from the Fourth Amendment itself (see ante, p. 661), but joins the majority opinion on the premise that its end result can be achieved by bringing the Fifth Amendment to the aid of the Fourth (see ante pp. 662-665). [12] On that score I need only say that whatever the validity of [p686] the "Fourth-Fifth Amendment" correlation which the Boyd case (116 U.S. 616) found, see 8 Wigmore, Evidence (3d ed.1940), § 2184, we have only very recently again reiterated the long-established doctrine of this Court that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination is not applicable to the States. See Cohen v. Hurley, 366 U.S. 117.
^ . The material parts of that law are quoted in note 1 of the Court's opinion. Ante, p. 643.
^ . In its note 3, ante, p. 646, the Court, it seems to me, has turned upside down the relative importance of appellant's reliance on the various points made by him on this appeal.
^ . See 170 Ohio St. 427, 166 N.E.2d 387. Because of the unusual provision of the Ohio Constitution requiring "the concurrence of at least all but one of the judges" of the Ohio Supreme Court before a state law is held unconstitutional (except in the case of affirmance of a holding of unconstitutionality by the Ohio Court of Appeals), Ohio Const., Art. IV, § 2, the State Supreme Court was compelled to uphold the constitutionality of § 2905.34 despite the fact that four of its seven judges thought the statute offensive to the Fourteenth Amendment.
^ . Respecting the "substantiality" of the federal questions tendered by this appeal, appellant's Jurisdictional Statement contained the following:
The Federal questions raised by this appeal are substantial for the following reasons:
The Ohio Statute under which the defendant was convicted violates one's sacred right to own and hold property, which has been held inviolate by the Federal Constitution. The right of the individual
^ . The appellant's brief did not urge the overruling of Wolf. Indeed, it did not even cite the case. The brief of the appellee merely relied on Wolf in support of the State's contention that appellant's conviction was not vitiated by the admission in evidence of the fruits of the alleged unlawful search and seizure by the police. The brief of the American and Ohio Civil Liberties Unions, as amici, did, in one short concluding paragraph of its argument, "request" the Court to reexamine and overrule Wolf, but without argumentation. I quote in full this part of their brief:
This case presents the issue of whether evidence obtained in an illegal search and seizure can constitutionally be used in a State criminal proceeding. We are aware of the view that this Court has taken on this issue in Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25. It is our purpose by this paragraph to respectfully request that this Court reexamine this issue and conclude that the ordered liberty concept guaranteed to persons by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment necessarily requires that evidence illegally obtained in violation thereof, not be admissible in state criminal proceedings.
^ . Counsel for appellant on oral argument, as in his brief, did not urge that Wolf be overruled. Indeed, when pressed by questioning from the bench whether he was not, in fact, urging us to overrule Wolf, counsel expressly disavowed any such purpose.
^ . The Ohio Supreme Court, in its construction of § 2905.34, controlling upon us here, refused to import into it any other exceptions than those expressly provided by the statute. See note 7, supra. Instead, it held that "If anyone looks at a book and finds it lewd, he is forthwith, under this legislation, guilty. . . ."
^ . See Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. at 39-40; Irvine v. California, 347 U.S. 128, 133-134, and at 138-139. In the latter case, decided in 1954, Mr. Justice Jackson, writing for the majority, said (at p. 134): "We think that the Wolf decision should not be overruled, for the reasons so persuasively stated therein." Compare Schwartz v. Texas, 344 U.S. 199, and Stefanelli v. Minard, 342 U.S. 117, in which the Wolf case was discussed and in no way disapproved. And see Pugach v. Dollinger, 365 U.S. 458, which relied on Schwartz.
^ . Actually, only four members of the majority support this reasoning. See pp. 685-686, infra.
^ . Rea v. United States, 350 U.S. 214; Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206; Rios v. United States, 364 U.S. 253.
^ . My Brother STEWART concurs in the Court's judgment on grounds which have nothing to do with Wolf.
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