Opinion ID: 4527707
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Federal Silver Platter Doctrine

Text: Although the United States Supreme Court hinted at the existence of an exclusionary remedy for violations of the Fourth Amendment as early as the nineteenth century, see Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886), the High Court definitively adopted the exclusionary rule in Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914): If letters and private documents can thus be seized and held and used in evidence against a citizen accused of an offense, the protection of the 4th Amendment, declaring his right to be secure against such searches and seizures, is of no value, and, so far as those thus placed are concerned, might as well be stricken from the Constitution. Id. at 393. Thus, in all federal criminal prosecutions, federal courts were to exclude evidence that the government obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. However, the Supreme Court had not yet applied the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the states via the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Id. at 398 (“[T]he 4th Amendment is not directed to individual misconduct of [state] officials. Its limitations reach the Federal government and its agencies.”), overruled by Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25, 27-28 (1949). In refusing to subject state courts to the constraints of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court created what came to be known as the “silver platter” doctrine. In Weeks, [J-40-2019] [MO: Baer, J.] - 2 some of the evidence presented by the prosecution in federal court was obtained by state law enforcement officials. And while the Court suppressed evidence that federal authorities acquired in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Court wrote that “[a]s to the papers and property seized by the [state] policement [sic], it does not appear that they acted under any claim of Federal authority such as would make the amendment applicable to such unauthorized seizures.” Weeks, 232 U.S. at 398. Thus, in future federal prosecutions, state law enforcement could obtain evidence in violation of the Fourth Amendment and present that evidence to federal officials on a “silver platter” to use in federal court. With Prohibition coming into effect, local and federal authorities increasingly had concurrent jurisdiction over particular crimes. See Wayne A. Logan, Dirty Silver Platters: The Enduring Challenge of Intergovernmental Investigative Illegality, 99 IOWA L. REV. 293, 299-300 (2013). Federal law enforcement officers figured out that they could easily bypass the exclusionary rule by relying upon local police investigating the same crimes. See id. at 300 (quoting Thomas Dewey as stating that “as a Federal prosecutor we had to rely on the evidence procured by the unhampered police of the State of New York”). Realizing that it had a problem on its hands, the Supreme Court attempted to lay down a rule to adjudicate what level of involvement by federal authorities necessitated application of the Fourth Amendment in a federal prosecution. In a way, the Court created a form of agency analysis, though not one based upon traditional agency law. In Byars v. United States, 273 U.S. 28 (1927), the Court found that “mere participation in a state search of one who is a federal officer does not render it a federal undertaking.” Id. at 32. However, the Court instructed trial courts to “be vigilant to scrutinize the attendant facts with an eye to detect and a hand to prevent violations of the Constitution by circuitous and indirect methods.” Id.; see also id. at 33-34 (warning that violations of the Fourth [J-40-2019] [MO: Baer, J.] - 3 Amendment should not be “impaired by judicial sanction of equivocal methods, which, regarded superficially, may seem to escape the challenge of illegality but which, in reality, strike at the substance of the constitutional right”). Byars itself involved a federal agent who “participate[d] as a federal enforcement officer” in a state investigation. Id. at 32. The Court concluded that this rendered the search “in substance and effect . . . a joint operation of the local and federal officers,” and, thus, suppression was warranted. Id. at 33. The next term, the Supreme Court went even further. In Gambino v. United States, 275 U.S. 310 (1927), only state law enforcement officials were present “at the time of the arrest and search.” Id. at 316. But the Court found that evidence from that search must be suppressed because “[t]he wrongful arrest, search, and seizure were made solely on behalf of the United States.” Id. This ruling came despite the fact that the state “troopers were not shown to have acted under the directions of the federal officials in making the arrest and seizure.” Id. It was enough that a federal prosecution took place, effectively “ratif[ying] . . . the arrest, search, and seizure made by the [state] troopers on behalf of the United States.” Id. 317. The Court was sure to distinguish Gambino from other cases in which evidence obtained by state law enforcement officials was not suppressed because Gambino, again, involved a seizure “made solely for the purpose of aiding the United States in the enforcement of its laws.” Id.1 In 1949, the Supreme Court applied the protections of the Fourth Amendment to state prosecutions in Wolf, but did not incorporate the corresponding exclusionary rule. 1 Notably, the Supreme Court also made this ruling even though “[t]he record . . . d[id] not show that the relation between the state troopers and the federal agencies for prohibition enforcement was called by counsel to the attention of the court.” Gambino, 275 U.S. at 319. The Court nonetheless suppressed the evidence because “the conviction . . . rest[ed] wholly upon evidence obtained by invasion of [the defendants’] constitutional rights.” Id. [J-40-2019] [MO: Baer, J.] - 4 Wolf, 338 U.S. at 27-28, 33. In an opinion handed down the same day, the Court punted on the question of whether the silver platter doctrine should be overturned and instead applied Byars and its progeny. See Lustig v. United States, 338 U.S. 74, 79 (1949) (plurality) (“Where there is participation on the part of federal officers it is not necessary to consider what would be the result if the search had been conducted entirely by State officers.”). In Lustig, a plurality of the Court found that a federal law enforcement officer’s participation in a state investigation was sufficient to invoke suppression in federal court. Although the federal officer did not participate in the investigation from the beginning or perform the actual search, the Court found that “[t]o differentiate between participation from the beginning of an illegal search and joining it before it had run its course, would be to draw too find a line in the application of the prohibition of the Fourth Amendment.” Id. at 78 (plurality). “The crux of [the Byars] doctrine is that a search is a search by a federal official if he had a hand in it; it is not a search by a federal official if evidence secured by state authorities is turned over to the federal authorities on a silver platter.” Id. at 78-79 (plurality); see also id. at 79 (plurality) (“The fact that state officers preceded [the federal officer] in breach of the rights of privacy does not negative the legal significance of this collaboration in the illegal enterprise before it had run its course.”). Even with these attempts to clarify when the level of cooperation was sufficient to invoke the protections of the Fourth Amendment, the doctrine was a mess. One commentator has described Byars as “rais[ing] more questions than it answered.” James W. Diehm, New Federalism and Constitutional Criminal Procedure: Are We Repeating the Mistakes of the Past?, 55 MD. L. REV. 223, 227 (1996). “Not surprisingly, subsequent decisions were confusing and, in many cases, contradictory.” Id. After Wolf, the writing was on the wall. The disjunction between incorporation of the Fourth Amendment and [J-40-2019] [MO: Baer, J.] - 5 the silver platter doctrine could not last. See Hanna v. United States, 260 F.2d 723, 726 (D.C. Cir. 1958). In 1960, the Supreme Court stepped in and overturned the silver platter doctrine. The Court found that the doctrine had “engender[ed] practical difficulties,” and “difficult and unpredictable . . . application[s] to concrete cases.” Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206, 211, 212 (1960). With regard to the “recurring question” of determining the level of federal involvement, lower “federal courts did not find themselves in complete harmony, nor even internally self-consistent.” Id. at 212. Given these difficulties, the Court invoked its “supervisory power over the administration of criminal justice in federal courts,” id. at 216, and found that “[t]o the victim” of the Fourth Amendment violation “it matters not whether his constitutional right has been invaded by a federal agent or by a state officer.” Id. at 215. A violation was a violation, and federal courts could not permit the introduction of evidence in violation of the Fourth Amendment, no matter its source. Finally, the Supreme Court made this ruling even as it was in the midst of shifting its rationale for the underlying exclusionary rule. Originally, the exclusionary rule was conceived as an integral part of the Fourth Amendment itself. See Silverthorne Lumber Co., Inc. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385, 392 (1920) (Holmes, J.) (finding that attempts to use information gleaned from an illegal search “reduces the Fourth Amendment to a form of words”); see also Tom Quigley, Comment, Do Silver Platters Have a Place in StateFederal Relations? Using Illegally Obtained Evidence in Criminal Prosecutions, 20 ARIZ. ST. L.J. 285, 296 (1988) (“Clearly, the Silverthorne Court based exclusion solely on the [F]ourth [A]mendment.”). But things began to change in Wolf, where the Supreme Court called the rule “an effective way of deterring unreasonable searches,” Wolf, 338 U.S. at 31, importing a new reason for the exclusionary rule. See also Gerald H. Galler, The Exclusion of Illegal State [J-40-2019] [MO: Baer, J.] - 6 Evidence in Federal Courts, 49 J. CRIM. L. CRIMINOLOGY & POLICE SCI. 455, 457 n.8 (195859) (“Until the Wolf case the federal exclusion rule was treated in the federal courts as being an integral part of the [F]ourth [A]mendment and not a rule of evidence enacted to enforce it.”). Similarly, in Elkins, the Court wrote that “[t]he rule is calculated to prevent, not to repair. Its purpose is to deter—to compel respect for the constitutional guaranty in the only effectively available way—by removing the incentive to disregard it.” Elkins, 364 U.S. at 217. And the High Court’s seminal decision in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), applying the exclusionary rule to state prosecutions, recognized the same. Id. at 656; but see id. at 650 (calling the exclusionary rule “part and parcel of the Fourth Amendment’s limitations upon federal encroachment of individual privacy”); Elkins, 364 U.S. at 222 (writing that “another consideration” was “the imperative of judicial integrity”). 2 Thus, even as the Supreme Court began to adopt a deterrence (rather than privacy) rationale for the exclusionary rule, it still found that a bright-line decree— forbidding all evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, no matter the sovereign identity of the law enforcement officer—was the appropriate way to enforce the Fourth Amendment’s protections in federal prosecutions. The federal silver platter doctrine was dead, and the High Court has never revived it. 2 As we now know, the United States Supreme Court would later abandon completely all other reasons for the exclusionary rule and solely rely upon deterrence of police misconduct. United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 348 (1974) (“In sum, the rule is a judicially created remedy designed to safeguard Fourth Amendment rights generally through its deterrent effect, rather than a personal constitutional right of the party aggrieved.”); id. at 356 (Brennan, J., dissenting) (“This downgrading of the exclusionary rule to a determination whether its application in a particular type of proceeding furthers deterrence of future police misconduct reflects a startling misconception, unless it is a purposeful rejection, of the historical objective and purpose of the rule.”). [J-40-2019] [MO: Baer, J.] - 7