Opinion ID: 1122734
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Admissibility of the evidence under federal law.

Text: (1a) Defendant's claim that admission of the intercepted conversation violates the Fourth Amendment cannot surmount the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Lanza v. New York (1962) 370 U.S. 139 [8 L.Ed.2d 384, 82 S.Ct. 1218]. The police surreptitiously recorded a visiting room conversation between Lanza and his jailed brother. Lanza later refused to answer questions based on the secret recording in a hearing before a legislative investigating committee. After upholding Lanza's conviction on independent grounds, the Supreme Court added that in any case Lanza could not rely on the Fourth Amendment in refusing to answer the committee's questions because the location of the recorded conversation, a jail visiting room, was not a protected area. The court stated that to say that a public jail is the equivalent of a man's `house' or that it is a place where he can claim constitutional immunity from search and seizure of his person, his papers, or his effects, is at best a novel argument. To be sure, the Court has been far from niggardly in construing the physical scope of Fourth Amendment protection. A business office is a protected area, and so may be a store. A hotel room, in the eyes of the Fourth Amendment, may become a person's `house,' and so, of course, may an apartment. An automobile may not be unreasonably searched. Neither may an occupied taxicab. Yet, without attempting either to define or to predict the ultimate scope of Fourth Amendment protection, it is obvious that a jail shares none of the attributes of privacy of a home, an automobile, an office, or a hotel room. In prison, official surveillance has traditionally been the order of the day. Though it may be assumed that even in a jail, or perhaps especially there, the relationships which the law has endowed with particularized confidentiality must continue to receive unceasing protection, there is no claimed violation of any such special relationship here. (Pp. 143-144 [8 L.Ed.2d at pp. 387-388]; fns. omitted.) [3] In 1967, however, Katz v. United States (1967) 389 U.S. 347 [19 L.Ed.2d 576, 88 S.Ct. 507], declared that the Fourth Amendment protects people not places.... [W]hat [a person] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected. (Pp. 351-352 [19 L.Ed.2d at p. 582].) Justice Harlan's explanation of this language has proved particularly influential. The cases, he stated, establish a two-fold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as `reasonable'. (P. 361 [19 L.Ed.2d at p. 588], conc. opn. of Harlan, J.) Because Lanza epitomized the protected areas type of analysis repudiated by Katz, commentators have questioned whether the earlier decision retains vitality. (See 3 La Fave, Search and Seizure (1978) § 10.9; Giannelli & Gilligan, Prison Searches and Seizures: Locking the Fourth Amendment Out of Correctional Facilities (1976) 62 Va.L.Rev. 1045.) Federal courts, however, have consistently followed Lanza and upheld admission of monitored conversations in jails or police stations. It still appears to be good law that so far as the Fourth Amendment is concerned, jail officials are free to intercept conversations between a prisoner and a visitor. This was the ruling in Lanza v. New York [citation] and it appears to have survived Katz v. United States [citation]. ( United States v. Paul (6th Cir. 1980) 614 F.2d 115, 116 [61 A.L.R. Fed. 816], cert. den. 446 U.S. 941; see United States v. Hearst (9th Cir.1977) 563 F.2d 1331, 1345, cert. den. 435 U.S. 1000, and cases there cited; Christman v. Skinner (2d Cir.1972) 468 F.2d 723, 726.) There are signs that the federal courts may move away from Lanza's total rejection of privacy in a jail or police station, and may ultimately adopt the De Lancie position limiting evesdropping to that required for institutional security. In Bonner v. Coughlin (1975) 517 F.2d 1311 [32 A.L.R.Fed. 585], certiorari denied 435 U.S. 932 [55 L.Ed.2d 529, 98 S.Ct. 1507], Justice Stevens, writing for the Seventh Circuit, stated that although the justifiable reasons for invading an inmate's privacy are both obvious and easily established[,] [w]e are persuaded ... that the surrender of privacy is not total and that some residuum meriting the protection of the Fourth Amendment survives the transfer into custody. (P. 1316.) And United States v. Hearst, supra, 563 F.2d 1331, described the post- Katz cases as permitting only [a]n intrusion by jail officials pursuant to a rule or policy with a justifiable purpose of imprisonment or prison security (p. 1345), but upheld the evidence in that case on the ground that [h]ere the government adequately established that its practice of monitoring and recording prisoner-visitor conversations was a reasonable means of maintaining prison security. (P. 1346.) Despite these precursors, no federal case has repudiated the Lanza dictum or excluded a jail or police station conversation from evidence. (See 3 La Fave, op. cit. supra, § 10.9, p. 418.) If occasional state court cases such as De Lancie take a different course, they do so on state, not federal, grounds. Bound in matters of federal law by the United States Supreme Court, which has never rejected its dictum in Lanza v. New York , and influenced by the decisions of the lower federal courts, we are impelled to conclude that the Lanza dictum continues to control in federal law. Under Lanza, the fact that neither defendant nor his brother was in custody does not advance defendant's claim. Lanza does not rest upon the concept that a prisoner loses civil rights upon arrest or conviction. (Lanza himself was a visitor at the jail, not an inmate.) The decision, instead, asserts that there is no right of privacy  in post- Katz terminology, no justifiable expectation of privacy  in detention facilities, regardless whether the particular defendant involved was detained or voluntarily present.