Opinion ID: 1687725
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: State Constitutional Question

Text: Petitioners also challenge the district court's conclusion that the Florida Constitution provides a right of disclosural privacy. Petitioners argue that neither the plain language of the constitution nor the cases cited by the district court support its holding that a state constitutional right of disclosural privacy exists. More specifically, they say that all of the cases relied upon by the district court deal either with tort law, the narrowly defined federal constitutional right of privacy, or involve specific constitutional or statutory guarantees to associate freely or to be free from unwarranted governmental searches and seizures  none of which provide the requisite authority needed to find a state constitutional right of disclosural privacy. Respondents, in reply, argue that both article I, section 9, [2] and article I, section 12, [3] of the Florida Constitution guarantee a right of disclosural privacy. We conclude that there is no support in the language of any provision of the Florida Constitution or in the judicial decisions of this state to sustain the district court's finding of a state constitutional right of disclosural privacy. We find no decisions, save for the one now under review, which have ever interpreted article I, section 9, the due process provision, as providing a right of disclosural privacy, and there is nothing in the wording of this section that persuades us that such an interpretation is correct. The district court's reliance on article I, section 12, the search and seizure provision, is also misplaced in that a reading of the complete section clearly indicates that the reference to interception of private communications was meant to apply only in the context of the law of search and seizure. This section deals only with the collection of information and not with its dissemination. The only privacy interest secured is a person's interest in being secure from unwarranted governmental intrusion, the same protection afforded by the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court's enunciation in Katz v. United States of the limited scope of the privacy interest protected by the fourth amendment is persuasive in our interpretation of article I, section 12. The First District's citation of our decisions in In Re Grand Jury Investigation, 287 So.2d 43 (Fla. 1973); Hagaman v. Andrews, 232 So.2d 1 (Fla. 1970); and Cason v. Baskin, 155 Fla. 198, 20 So.2d 243 (1944), as supporting its conclusion that a state constitutional right of disclosural privacy exists, is misplaced because none of these cases provide the needed authority for such a holding. Our decision in Cason did not entail any constitutionally protected right of privacy. Rather, it dealt with the alleged invasion of the plaintiff's common law right of privacy. In Hagaman, we said nothing about a constitutional right of disclosural privacy; the only privacy right referred to was an asserted right of associational privacy. In In Re Grand Jury Investigation, we did say that there is a constitutional right of privacy, but our words must be kept in their proper context. In that case, we were concerned only with suppression of the contents of intercepted wire or oral communications, and our reference obviously was directed to the privacy interest secured by the fourth amendment and article I, section 12, to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures. Any possible confusion arising from these prior cases should have been dispelled by our later decision in Laird v. State, 342 So.2d 962 (Fla. 1977), wherein it was made clear that Florida has no general state constitutional right of privacy.