Opinion ID: 1895332
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Constitutional Challenges to Evidence Contained in Defendant's Personal Journals.

Text: Because we have upheld the admission of the 143-page personal journal against relevancy and character objections, it becomes necessary to consider constitutional challenges to its admissibility which were preserved in the district court. A. The search and seizure argument. On July 25, 1977, defendant inadvertently left the 143-page journal at Burger Palace, an eating establishment in Iowa City. Restaurant employees read portions of the journal and were alarmed by its contents. They called Iowa City police and informed them the journal evidenced an intent on the part of its author to cause injury or death to several persons. When defendant returned to Burger Palace later on the same day, he was stalled by employees and told he could pick up the journal the following morning. Meanwhile, unknown to defendant, the police took possession of the journal, read it and photocopied it. They later warned defendant's wife of potential danger. Defendant returned to Burger Palace the following morning, and the journal was returned to him. Apparently some time during the investigation of the Walker and Willits deaths, Iowa City police made a copy of defendant's journal available to agents of the Division of Criminal Investigation. The original journal was subsequently obtained from defendant's attorneys prior to trial by means of a subpoena duces tecum. Defendant contends that the seizure, reading and copying of the journal by the Iowa City police were in violation of his rights under the fourth amendment to the federal constitution and article I, section eight of the Iowa Constitution. We disagree. Given the public nature of the place where the journal was discovered and examined by the restaurant employees, we conclude that defendant's constitutional claims are no more meritorious than those rejected in State v. Flynn, 360 N.W.2d 762 (Iowa 1985). In Flynn business records of the defendant had been temporarily secreted on the grounds of a private golf club closed for the winter. The expectations of privacy at the location involved in Flynn may have been greater than defendant's expectations in the present case based upon the nature of the premises involved; yet, we found no fourth amendment violation. In the present case, the actions of the private citizens employed at the restaurant in reading the contents of defendant's journal involve no constitutional violations. Once they discovered the journal contained evidence of death threats apparently soon to be perpetrated, their action in communicating this information to authorities was entirely lawful. [3] Once the police were informed by private citizens of the evidentiary nature of the journal with respect to planned criminal activity, their seizure of the journal and the copying of its contents at the invitation of its possessor presents no ground for constitutional challenge. See State v. Campbell, 326 N.W.2d 350, 353 (Iowa 1982). Nor does the subsequent action of the Iowa City police in sharing information lawfully obtained with the Division of Criminal Investigation constitute a violation of either the federal or state constitution. B. The fifth amendment argument. Defendant also contends that, notwithstanding the holding in Andresen v. Maryland, 427 U.S. 463, 96 S.Ct. 2737, 49 L.Ed.2d 627 (1976), rejecting the continuing application of Boyd -type fifth amendment protections formerly accorded seizure of private books and papers, some lingering fifth amendment protection remains with regard to personal diaries. We disagree. The point is well made by Professor LaFave in his treatise on search and seizure. There, the writer states that [t]he papers seized in Andresen were, as the Court repeatedly took pains to point out, business records. . . . [T]hus it might be thought that the Court has not slammed the Fifth Amendment door shut entirely and notwithstanding Andresen the Court might on some later occasion hold that the Fifth Amendment does protect certain private papers which are more private than were Andresen's documents concerning the land sales. This, however, seems unlikely. Given the kind of analysis employed in Andresen, [n]o distinction can be drawn between business records and diaries. . . . [I]n all such cases the fact that evidence is obtained without requiring the accused to act or speak means `testimonial compulsion' is lacking. 1 W. LaFave Search and Seizure § 2.6, at 394 (1978) (quoting Note, Formalism, Legal Realism, and Constitutionally Protected Privacy Under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, 90 Harv.L.Rev. 945, 978 (1977)). Consistent with these views, we find no fifth amendment protection against the State's evidentiary use of defendant's personal journals. To the extent defendant seeks to predicate a similar suppression of evidence claim on the first amendment, we reach a similar conclusion. C. Self-incrimination through compulsory production. Defendant also contends his fifth amendment rights were violated as a result of the compelled production of the 143-page journal because the act of producing evidence in response to a subpoena has incriminatory communicative aspects apart from the contents of the papers produced. Had the subpoena been directed to defendant personally, he might have a valid argument on this issue based on discussion in Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 410, 96 S.Ct. 1569, 1581, 48 L.Ed.2d 39, 55-56 (1976). In the present case, however, the compelled production of the journal was exacted from defendant's attorneys. The fifth amendment protects against self-incrimination but not against incrimination through the acts of others. [4]