Opinion ID: 1391108
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Constitutional Right To Suppression.

Text: It must be noted in the beginning that though the majority and I discuss the same subject-matter, we use different descriptive terms. The majority calls what we are talking about the Exclusionary Rule; I call it the Constitutional Right to Suppression. The difference in these two descriptive phrases points up the basic, substantive difference in the viewpoint of the majority and my viewpoint on this subject. I was a practicing lawyer in 1961 when the Supreme Court of the United States decided the landmark case of Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (81 SC 1684, 6 LE2d 1081, 84 ALR2d 933). I was convinced then, as I am now, that Mapp held that the Constitution conferred a constitutional right of suppression upon the victim of an unconstitutional seizure who was being criminally prosecuted in a state court. The plurality opinion in Mapp discussed Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616 (1886), Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383 (1914), and quoted from Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438 (1928). Referring to the Boyd case the Mapp plurality opinion said: Concluding, the court specifically referred to the use of the evidence there seized as `unconstitutional.' P. 647. In referring to the Weeks case the Mapp plurality opinion said: Thus, in the year 1914, in the Weeks case, this court `for the first time' held that `in a federal prosecution the Fourth Amendment barred the use of evidence secured through an illegal search and seizure.' P. 648. The Mapp plurality opinion quoted from Olmstead: The striking outcome of the Weeks case and those which followed it was the sweeping declaration that the Fourth Amendment, although not referring to or limiting the use of evidence in courts, really forbade its introduction if obtained by government officers through a violation of the Amendment. P. 649. Mapp then held: Today we once again examine Wolf's documentation of the right to privacy free from unreasonable state intrusion, and, after its dozen years on our books, are led by it to close the only courtroom door remaining open to evidence secured by official lawlessness and flagrant abuse of that basic right, reserved to all persons as a specific guarantee against that very same unlawful conduct. We hold that all evidence obtained by searches and seizures in violation of the Constitution is, by that same authority, inadmissible in a state court. Pp. 654, 655. Then at p. 660 the Mapp plurality opinion said: Having once recognized that the right to privacy embodied in the Fourth Amendment is enforceable against the states, and that the right to be secure against rude invasions of privacy by state officers is, therefore, constitutional in origin, we can no longer permit that right to remain an empty promise. Because it is enforceable in the same manner and to like effect as other basic rights secured by the Due Process Clause, we can no longer permit it to be revocable at the whim of any police officer who, in the name of law enforcement itself, chooses to suspend its enjoyment. Four Justices joined the Mapp plurality opinion, but a fifth Justice, Mr. Justice Black, plainly held in his concurrence that the Constitution required the rejection of the unconstitutionally seized evidence. Mr. Justice Black said that the evidence must be rejected on the basis of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the Boyd doctrine. Concluding his concurring opinion, he said: The court's opinion, in my judgment, dissipates the doubt and uncertainty in this field of constitutional law and I am persuaded, for this and other reasons stated, to depart from my prior views, to accept the Boyd doctrine as controlling in this state case and to join the court's judgment and opinion which are in accordance with that constitutional doctrine. P. 666. Mr. Justice Stewart concurred in the judgment of reversal effected by the plurality opinion and the concurring opinion of Mr. Justice Black, but he said: I express no view as to the merits of the constitutional issue which the court today decides. P. 672. His vote for reversal of the state court judgment was predicated on substantive due process required by the Fourteenth Amendment. Mr. Justice Harlan dissented, joined by Mr. Justice Frankfurter and Mr. Justice Whitaker. But in his dissenting opinion, Mr. Justice Harlan acknowledged that the reversal of the state court judgment by the plurality of four and Mr. Justice Black derives not from the `supervisory power' of this court over the federal judicial system, but from constitutional requirement. This is so because no one, I suppose, would suggest that this Court possesses any general supervisory power over the state courts. P. 678. Therefore, it seems to me that all nine members of the court acknowledged that the Mapp decision was dictated by Constitutional requirement. And if the Constitution requires the rejection of illegally seized evidence in a state criminal prosecution, the prosecuted party, if he was the victim of the unconstitutional seizure, has a right to invoke the Mapp constitutional requirement. I realize that the opponents of the constitutional right to suppression declared by Mapp have, ever since the rendition of that declaration, attempted to belittle the constitutional right by calling it an evidentiary rule of exclusion enforced by the courts for deterrent purposes, or a suppression doctrine, or a rule that is judicially implied and applied. These efforts totally ignore the fact that in Mapp five Justices held that the Constitution required suppression. And it is my view that to abolish the Mapp constitutional requirement, Mapp must be overruled. Chief Justice Burger in his dissenting opinion in Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U. S. 388 (1971), said: The exclusionary rule has also been justified on the theory that the relationship between the Self-Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Fourth Amendment requires the suppression of evidence seized in violation of the latter. [Cits.] Even ignoring, however, the decisions of this court that have held that the Fifth Amendment applies only to `testimonial' disclosures, United States v. Wade, 388 U. S. 218, 221-223 (1967); Schmerber v. California, 384 U. S. 757, 764 and n. 8 (1966), it seems clear that the Self-Incrimination Clause does not protect a person from the seizure of evidence that is incriminating. P. 414. This argument completely ignores the fact that Mr. Justice Black, the tipper of the constitutional scale in Mapp, dissented in both Wade and Schmerber, his position being that the evidence procured in those two cases was both testimonial and communicative evidence. Wade at p. 245 (opinion of Black, J.). This argument also ignores the fact that Mr. Justice Black's position was: The Fifth Amendment in and of itself directly and explicitly commands its own exclusionary rule  a defendant cannot be compelled to give evidence against himself. Cooledge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 498 (opinion of Black, J.). Also, the Chief Justice in his Bivens dissent indicated that in order to abandon what he calls the suppression doctrine it would be necessary for the court to overrule Weeks and Mapp. And it is clear that he, at that time, did not propose to do so. He said: To overrule Weeks and Mapp, even assuming the court was now prepared to take that step, could raise yet new problems. Bivens, pp. 420, 421 (Burger, C. J., dissenting). Mr. Justice Harlan, also an opponent of the constitutional requirement declaration of Mapp, indicated in his concurring opinion in Cooledge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443 (1971), that to overhaul the law of search and seizure it would be necessary to overrule Mapp. He said: I would begin this process of reevaluation by overruling Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961), and Ker v. California, 374 U. S. 23 (1963). P. 490. United States v. Calandra, 414 U. S. 338 (1974), was a grand jury case, not a criminal prosecution against the victim of an unconstitutional seizure. Calandra did not overrule Mapp. Mr. Justice Powell, the author of Calandra seems to me to have said that what he calls the exclusionary rule would not be extended to a grand jury investigation, but that it would be maintained and enforced in a federal or state criminal prosecution against the victim of the unconstitutional seizure. I must confess that I am at a loss to understand how the Supreme Court of the United States can promulgate and enforce a rule of evidence in the judicial systems of the fifty states. I do not understand that the Supreme Court has supervisory power over the state judicial systems that it does over the lower federal courts. And neither do I understand how a quasi-constitutional rule of deterrence can be promulgated by the Supreme Court and enforced in the courts of the fifty states. If the Supreme Court of the United States has that power, our federal system, as we have heretofore known it, has been drastically altered, and we now have a unitary system in which the United States Supreme Court can utter and enforce evidentiary rules or deterrent policies of admission or exclusion. In Ker v. California, 374 U. S. 23, 31, the Supreme Court of the United States said: Mapp, however, established no assumption by this court of supervisory authority over state courts. If Mapp did not establish an evidentiary rule of exclusion, what did it do? My answer is that Mapp enforced a right of suppression accorded to a seizure-victim by the Constitution. Mapp has not yet been overruled. I think it held that the Constitution conferred a right of suppression upon the victim of an unconstitutional seizure being criminally prosecuted in a state court. My position on this subject is approved, affirmed, buttressed, and improved upon by one of the finest efforts of legal scholarship that I have ever encountered. See Schrock and Welsh, Up from Calandra: The Exclusionary Rule as a Constitutional Requirement, 59 Minn. L. Rev. 251 (December, 1974). I would hold that this high school student, the respondent here, had a constitutional right to suppress the evidence seized from him in an unconstitutional manner by the school official.