Opinion ID: 542297
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Making the Connection.

Text: 33 It remains only for us to link applicable law to undisputed fact. The district court ruled that plaintiff, in taking the call from Jackson and conversing with him on Smith's telephone, impliedly consented to the interception. Id. We think that this ruling was inevitable. Plaintiff had been unmistakably warned on a number of occasions that all incoming calls were being monitored. In light of so sweeping a warning, he continued to receive calls and talk unguardedly on Smith's personal line without the slightest hint of coercion or exigent circumstance. Plaintiff was free to use some other instrument; or since outgoing calls were not recorded, to return calls on Smith's telephone and thus avoid any unwanted eavesdropping. Given the circumstances prevailing, Campiti, 611 F.2d at 393, it seems altogether clear that plaintiff knowingly agreed to the surveillance. Amen, 831 F.2d at 378. His consent, albeit not explicit, was manifest. No more was required. See Willoughby, 860 F.2d at 19-20 (consent implied from inmates' telephone use after repeated actual and constructive notice); Amen, 831 F.2d at 379; Bonanno, 487 F.2d at 658-59. 34 Plaintiff asserts that our earlier decision in Campiti, 611 F.2d 387, is to the contrary. The assertion is bootless. In Campiti, we applied a clear error standard, Fed.R.Civ.P. 52(a), and upheld the district court's refusal to imply consent from evidence showing that a prison inmate should have known his call would probably be monitored. 611 F.2d at 393. But there, whatever suspicions might have taken wing, no general warnings had been given: although convicts commonly expected their calls to be monitored, [t]here were no regulations at [the prison] informing inmates that telephone calls might be monitored. Id. at 390. And when monitoring occurred, the telltale, known to all inmates, was the close physical presence of an eavesdropping corrections officer. Id. Campiti elected to speak at a time when no officer was physically present, unaware that his jailers were listening on an extension telephone in another room. Id. 35 Griggs-Ryan, of course, cannot plausibly posit a claim of deficient notice similar to the claim which succeeded in Campiti. Smith's blanket admonishment left no room for plaintiff to wonder whether Jackson's call would be intercepted. There was no practice known to plaintiff which might have led him reasonably to believe that the call was beyond the scope of the admonishment. There was no discernible circumstance at the particular moment that might have led him reasonably to believe that this call was an exception to the all incoming calls recorded rule or that the monitoring of it would be less than total. In short, Griggs-Ryan, unlike Campiti, had considerably more than a mere expectation that his call might, or probably would, be monitored. In the face of express notice, it cannot be gainsaid that plaintiff impliedly consented to what later transpired. 36 Plaintiff's heavy reliance on Watkins, 704 F.2d 577, is similarly mislaid. In that case, an employee resigned because of a dispute over a personal call received during working hours. She sued, asserting that the employer's monitoring policy made clear that personal calls would be monitored only for the time necessary to determine they were not business-related. Id. at 579. The district court granted summary judgment in the employer's favor, believing that Watkins had impliedly consented to the interception. The Eleventh Circuit disagreed, finding material issues of fact relative to the scope of the employer's preannounced monitoring policy. Id. at 585. The Watkins holding is easily reconciled with the decision below. 37 In Title III terms, consent is not necessarily an all or nothing proposition; it can be limited. Id. at 582. That is to say, the parameters of consent may be circumscribed depending on the subtleties and permutations inherent in a particular set of facts. Hence, a reviewing court must inquire into the dimensions of the consent and then ascertain whether the interception exceeded those boundaries. In the case before us, the scope of the implied permission ceded by plaintiff to the listener is constructed out of the same facts and circumstances as the existence of the consent itself. Phrased in slightly different terms, Smith's conduct on September 14 fell squarely within the parameters of what she had repeatedly told plaintiff to expect, and thus, fell squarely within the bounds of plaintiff's consent. Having persisted in using Smith's telephone to converse with callers in the face of unambiguous, unqualified notice that every incoming call would be monitored, plaintiff's consent necessarily encompassed every portion of every call he accepted on his landlady's line. The same was not true in Watkins. See id. at 581. This critical distinction destroys the parallel which Griggs-Ryan would have us draw. 38 Plaintiff's final fizgig, centering on the upshot of the state court suppression hearing, is equally unimpressive. It is true that the state court found plaintiff unaware that the call in question was being recorded. Even assuming, however, that the finding has evidentiary significance in a federal civil case involving persons not parties to the state criminal proceedings--a matter on which we do not opine--it is beside the present point. Whether a person is cognizant that a particular call is being recorded does not answer, or fully respond to, the question of whether the scope of consent previously granted was sufficiently expansive to cover a generalized practice of recording. See id.; cf. Simmons v. Southwestern Bell Tel. Co., 452 F.Supp. 392, 396 (W.D.Okla.1978) (where caller knew his calls were monitored, he had no reasonable expectation that [individual] calls would remain private), aff'd, 611 F.2d 342 (10th Cir.1979).