Opinion ID: 456179
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Present law on fifth amendment rights of the custodian of corporate records.

Text: 19 Normally a corporate representative or agent cannot claim a fifth amendment privilege against producing corporate documents, regardless of whether they contain information incriminating him or were written by him, and regardless of whether the corporation is large or small. Bellis v. United States, 417 U.S. 85, 88-89, 100, 94 S.Ct. 2179, 2182-84, 2189, 40 L.Ed.2d 678 (1974); In re Grand Jury Subpoenas Duces Tecum, 722 F.2d 981, 986 (2d Cir.1983). The reason for this is that the corporation itself has no fifth amendment privilege, Curcio v. United States, 354 U.S. 118, 122, 77 S.Ct. 1145, 1148, 1 L.Ed.2d 1225 (1957); Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43, 74, 26 S.Ct. 370, 379, 50 L.Ed. 652 (1906), and the only way to prevent the corporation from shielding its records from a subpoena is to prevent individual corporate representatives from exercising such a privilege with respect to corporate records. 20 In view of the inescapable fact that an artificial entity can only act to produce its records through its individual officers or agents, recognition of the individual's claim of privilege with respect to the financial records of the organization would substantially undermine the unchallenged rule that the organization itself is not entitled to claim any Fifth Amendment privilege, and largely frustrate legitimate governmental regulation of such organizations. Mr. Justice Murphy put it well: 21 The scope and nature of the economic activities of incorporated and unincorporated organizations and their representatives demand that the constitutional power of the federal and state governments to regulate those activities be correspondingly effective. The greater portion of evidence of wrongdoing by an organization or its representatives is usually to be found in the official records and documents of that organization. Were the cloak of the privilege to be thrown around these impersonal records and documents, effective enforcement of many federal and state laws would be impossible. The framers of the constitutional guarantee against compulsory self-disclosure, who were interested primarily in protecting individual civil liberties, cannot be said to have intended the privilege to be available to protect economic or other interests of such organizations so as to nullify appropriate governmental regulations. [United States v. White, 322 U.S. 694, 700, 64 S.Ct. 1248, 1252, 88 L.Ed. 1542 (1944) (citations omitted).] 22 Bellis v. United States, 417 U.S. at 90-91, 94 S.Ct. at 2184-85. 23 In certain limited circumstances, however, an individual may have a fifth amendment privilege against being personally compelled to produce corporate documents. As explained in Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 96 S.Ct. 1569, 48 L.Ed.2d 39 (1976), the act of producing documents may constitute personal testimony conceding the document's existence, their possession or control, or the fact that the one producing them believes them to be the documents described in the subpoena. When this testimony would be self-incriminating, one has a personal fifth amendment privilege to refuse to comply with a subpoena requesting production. This privilege, though, protects a person only against being incriminated by his own compelled testimonial communications. Id. at 409, 96 S.Ct. at 1580. It does not protect an individual from being incriminated by a third party's testimonial act of producing records, id., including acts by a third party which is a corporation. 24 When a corporation is asked to produce records, some individual, of course, must act on the corporation's behalf. Usually this will not create any self-incrimination problem, for an employee who produces his corporation's records would not be attesting to his personal possession of them but to their existence and possession by the corporation. In re Grand Jury Subpoenas Duces Tecum, 722 F.2d at 986. Yet even if the situation is unusual and a corporation's custodian of records would incriminate himself if he were to act to produce the company's records, this still does not relieve the corporation of its continuing obligation to produce the subpoenaed documents. United States v. Barth, 745 F.2d 184, 189 (2d Cir.1984), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 105 S.Ct. 1356, 84 L.Ed.2d 378 (1985). In such a situation the corporation must appoint some other employee to produce the records, and if no existing employee could produce records without incriminating himself by such an act, then the corporation may be required to produce the records by supplying an entirely new agent who has no previous connection with the corporation that might place him in a position where his testimonial act of production would be self-incriminating. Id. There simply is no situation in which the fifth amendment would prevent a corporation from producing corporate records, for the corporation itself has no fifth amendment privilege. See id. 25 In the present case the district court specifically excluded any grand jury target from having to produce the records, and it provided that the corporation itself could select an employee to produce them. Under existing law this effectively removes any danger that the custodian making the present appeal will have to incriminate himself by an act of producing records. The corporate records in the present case may in fact constitute evidence linking the custodian to crimes, but production of that evidence in the manner limited by the district court would not be compelled testimony of the custodian himself. In short, the custodian cannot claim the fifth amendment privilege to protect records belonging to the corporation, and he himself is not being required to testify through any personal act of production. 26