Opinion ID: 299629
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Inapplicability of the Authorities Relied on by the Dissent

Text: 43 Our dissenting colleague invokes Vale v. Louisiana, supra, Taylor v. United States, 25 Katz v. United States, 26 and James v. United States, supra, in support of his view of what was reasonable for the two police officers in the circumstances of the case at bar. With all due respect to his analysis, we think our dissenting colleague's reliance upon these cases as determinative of this appellant's case is misplaced. Our own decision in James we have already discussed. We now turn to the three Supreme Court cases to show why they do not apply to Wright's situation here. 44 In Vale v. Louisiana, supra, the rationale of the opinion is heavy with emphasis on the strict protection to be accorded to a dwelling by the Fourth Amendment and, of course, it is the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, etc., which is protected, houses apparently meaning dwelling, and being the only structure mentioned in the Fourth Amendment. A garage is not a house, nor is it a dwelling or home. We suggest that a garage is perhaps deserving of more strict protection than an open field a hundred yards from a home, perhaps as much or more than an automobile for housing which the garage is constructed, depending upon its location and use, but certainly the protection afforded is something less than that afforded the dwelling involved in Vale. 45 The dissent is somewhat misleading when it states [t]he police did here precisely what the officers had done in Vale.  What the officers did may look similar, but the knowledge the officers possessed to justify what they did is quite different. A major distinction between Vale's case and that of Wright here is that the police officers in Vale never had the narcotics illegally seized in the house in view, plain or otherwise. Vale was arrested standing on his front steps, and the subsequent search of his house was thought to be justified as incident to that arrest. While it may be possible to justify the seizure in the case at bar as the product of a search incident to arrest, we have not sustained it on that ground, but on two separate grounds, only one of which was peripherally involved in Vale, i. e., the necessity to prevent the removal or destruction of evidence. 46 Nor is Taylor v. United States, supra, appropos of the case at bar. First, in that case, no plain view of stolen goods or contraband was relied upon to support the seizure of Taylor's liquor in his garage. As the dissent says, the agents saw many cardboard cases which they thought probably contained jars of liquor (emphasis supplied). For all the agents saw, the cases could have contained cans of tomato soup. 47 Secondly, the prohibition agents had over a considerable period [received] numerous complaints concerning the use of Taylor's garage for making illicit liquor but had made no effort to obtain a warrant for making a search. As the dissent quotes the Supreme Court, They had abundant opportunity [to obtain a warrant]    there was no probability of material change in the situation   . Not so here, where part of the stolen auto parts had already been loaded and appellant and his two confederates were obviously engaged in spiriting away the fruits of the crime. 48 Thirdly, in Taylor the agents had to break a fastening on a door to enter. Here the officer walked in through the open door of the garage. 49 Under the circumstances in Taylor, the Court found the agents' act of physically breaking into the garage to be an exploratory search undertaken with the hope of securing evidence upon which to indict and convict [Taylor]. Here Officer Huffstutler's act of entering Wright's garage was not to search it for evidence on which to convict him, but rather to seize stolen property (the transmission) that he had previously lawfully observed therein. As was said in Carroll v. United States, 27 upon which the decision in Taylor principally relied: 50 The search for and seizure of stolen or forfeited goods, or goods liable to duties and concealed to avoid the payment thereof, are totally different things from a search for and seizure of a man's private books and papers for the purpose of obtaining information therein contained, or of using them as evidence against him. The two things differ toto coelo. In the one case, the government is entitled to the possession of the property; in the other it is not. The seizure of stolen goods is authorized by the common law; and the seizure of goods forfeited for a breach of the revenue laws, or concealed to avoid the duties payable on them, has been authorized by English statutes for at least two centuries past; and the like seizures have been authorized by our own revenue acts from the commencement of the government. 28 51 Katz v. United States, supra, is likewise inapposite to the case at bar, for it dealt entirely with protection of audible communication under the Fourth Amendment, 29 and was, at least in part, formulated in reaction to the prospect of wholesale unwarranted buggings by the police. The decision, of course, is famous for its pronouncement that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. 30 But that pronouncement is immediately followed by the statement What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection, 31 and highly significant to the case at bar, citing as an example the plain view case of United States v. Lee, 32 in which it was held not to be an illegal search where the Coast Guard played a spotlight on petitioner's boat at night, disclosing on the deck several cartons of illicit liquor. 52 What Katz does broadly hint at is a basic principle that the Fourth Amendment protects from invasion by the police the actions and conversations that the ordinary individual would reasonably expect to be strictly private and free from perception by others, regardless of their locale. Thus, the remarks that: 53 One who occupies [a telephone booth], shuts the door behind him, and pays the toll that permits him to place a call is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world. To read the Constitution more narrowly is to ignore the vital role that the public telephone has come to play in private communication. 33 54 and, 55 The Government's activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitioner's words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted a search and seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. 34 56 But even under this basic principle, the appellant cannot prevail. For it cannot be said that his actions in storing the stolen transmission — which, no doubt, he would like to have kept hidden — in a garage having a nine-inch gap between the doors were calculated to keep his possession of it strictly private and free from perception by others any more than the petitioner in Lee, supra, could have expected the presence at night of the contraband liquor on the deck of his boat to be so. 57 The dissent (see note 1) appears to read Katz as if this decision ruled out the plain view doctrine — without even discussing it. But subsequent to Katz (1967) the Supreme Court reaffirmed the plain view doctrine in Harris (1968) and Chimel (1969), as we did en banc in Dorman (1970). 58 Of some relevance to the eventual seizure of the stolen transmission, the Court in Katz did say, [O]nce it is recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects people — and not simply areas — against unreasonable searches and seizures, it becomes clear that the reach of that Amendment cannot turn upon the presence or absence of a physical intrusion into any given enclosure. 35 This rationale would validate the physical intrusion of Officer Huffstutler into the garage following his plain view of the stolen property. 59 Basically, Fourth Amendment search and seizure questions turn, or should turn, upon a concept of reasonableness under the circumstances. Reasonableness has received many definitions in the thousands of cases arising under the Fourth Amendment. We consider and define the police conduct here as reasonable, and therefore the conviction is 60 Affirmed.