Opinion ID: 349660
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Admission of the Tobin Tape

Text: 45 While in custody at the San Mateo County Jail, appellant was allowed to receive and talk with visitors. On September 20, 1975, two days after her arrest, one of her visitors was her childhood friend, Patricia Tobin. During the visit with Tobin, which took place in the jail's visiting room, appellant and Tobin communicated over a telephone-like intercommunication system while looking at each other through a bullet-proof glass window. Most of the conversation between the two was monitored and recorded through a switchboard-type device operated by a deputy sheriff. The deputy conducted this monitoring and recording pursuant to an established jail policy. As the supervisor of the jail testified: 46 We monitor selected cases and at random cases also, and record those plus manual monitoring to watch for security problems within our facility. 47 Officials at the jail had previously determined to record all of appellant's conversations with her visitors in accordance with the jail policy for very publicized cases or high security problems. 48 The jail supervisor delivered the recording of the conversation with Tobin (the Tobin tape) to the FBI and the prosecution. Appellant timely moved to suppress the tape, contending that it was made and delivered to the government in violation of the Fourth, Sixth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. The district court denied the motion, United States v. Hearst, 412 F.Supp. 888 (N.D.Cal.1976), and the government thereupon cross-examined both appellant and Tobin with respect to the taped conversation. In addition, portions of the transcript of the tape were read to the jury. 49 Appellant now makes a three-pronged attack on the government's use of the Tobin tape. First, she contends that the monitoring and recording of her conversations with visitors in the jail violated her Fourth Amendment rights. Second, she argues that, regardless of the constitutionality of the original monitoring and recording, the jail supervisor's delivery of the tape to the government and its subsequent use of the tape constitutes an independent violation of the Fourth Amendment. Finally, she argues that the government violated her Sixth Amendment right to counsel by surreptitiously making itself a party to (her) conversations and thereby deliberately eliciting incriminating statements made in the absence of counsel.
50 In Lanza v. New York, 370 U.S. 139, 82 S.Ct. 1218, 8 L.Ed.2d 384 (1962), the Supreme Court addressed a Fourth Amendment challenge to the electronic interception of a conversation between a jail prisoner and a visitor, Lanza. Unknown to the two, jail officials, by means of an electronic device installed in the visitors' room at the jail, had listened to and transcribed the conversation. The transcript was then delivered to a state legislative committee investigating possible corruption in the state parole system. Lanza was called before the committee where, after receiving immunity, he refused to answer a series of questions. Because of this refusal, he was convicted of a misdemeanor. Lanza attacked the conviction, charging that the interception of the conversation was violative of Fourth Amendment principles incorporated in the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and that the committee interrogation was based on information derived from the improper interception. Accordingly, he argued, it was a denial of due process to convict him for failing to answer the committee's questions. 51 Regarding Lanza's Fourth Amendment claim, the Supreme Court observed that 52 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 or 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. 53 Id. at 143, 82 S.Ct. at 1220-21 (footnotes omitted). 10 54 Because of the obvious similarity between the facts in Lanza and the facts surrounding the making of the Tobin tape, and in response to the district court's reliance on Lanza, appellant argues that the case no longer has precedential value. In appellant's view, the Supreme Court's decision in Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967), effectively overruled Lanza or at the very least significantly reduced its precedential value. In Katz, the Court held that the government's electronic interception of Katz's conversation in a phone booth violated the Fourth Amendment. Rejecting Katz's formulation of the issue whether the phone booth was a constitutionally protected area the Court stated that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. Id. at 351, 88 S.Ct. at 511. Appellant contends that it is this language that undercuts Lanza, with its discussion of private (business office, store, hotel room, house, car, and taxicab) and nonprivate (jail) places. See Lanza v. New York, supra, 370 U.S. at 143, 82 S.Ct. 1218. 55 Post-Katz decisions of this circuit dealing with jailhouse searches and seizures, however, have treated Katz and Lanza as compatible. United States v. Dawson, 516 F.2d 796, 805 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 423 U.S. 855, 96 S.Ct. 104, 46 L.Ed.2d 80 (1975); United States v. Hitchcock, 467 F.2d 1107, 1108 (9th Cir. 1972), cert. denied, 410 U.S. 916, 93 S.Ct. 973, 35 L.Ed.2d 279 (1973). Further, these cases relied principally on Katz which unquestionably continues to have precedential value, in developing a rule that defeats appellant's Fourth Amendment claim in the present case: An intrusion by jail officials pursuant to a rule or policy with a justifiable purpose of imprisonment or prison security is not violative of the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Dawson, supra, 516 F.2d at 805-06; United States v. Savage, 482 F.2d 1371, 1373 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 415 U.S. 932, 94 S.Ct. 1446, 39 L.Ed.2d 491 (1973). Under this rule, a prisoner is not deprived of all Fourth Amendment protections; the rule recognizes, however, the government's weighty, countervailing interests in prison security and order. Cf. Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 404-14, 94 S.Ct. 1800, 40 L.Ed.2d 224 (1974). 11 56 Here the government adequately established that its practice of monitoring and recording prisoner-visitor conversations was a reasonable means of maintaining prison security. Indeed, appellant makes no very serious argument to the contrary. Rather, she focuses her arguments almost exclusively on the other end of the balance beam: the prisoner's interest in privacy. But once the government establishes that its intrusion is for  '(a) justifiable purpose of imprisonment or prison security,'  United States v. Dawson, supra, 516 F.2d at 806, citing United States v. Savage, supra, 482 F.2d at 1373, the Fourth Amendment question is essentially resolved in its favor. This approach is reflective of both the federal courts' broad hands-off attitude toward problems of prison administration, Procunier v. Martinez, supra, 416 U.S. at 404, 94 S.Ct. at 1807, and traditional notions regarding official surveillance of prisoners, Lanza v. New York, supra, 370 U.S. at 143, 82 S.Ct. 1218, with the concomitant reduction in reasonable prisoner expectations of privacy. United States v. Hitchcock, supra, 467 F.2d at 1108. 57 One further consideration in the present case reinforces our conclusion that the monitoring and recording of prisoner-visitor conversations was reasonable and therefore not violative of the Fourth Amendment. In Procunier v. Martinez, supra, 416 U.S. 396, 94 S.Ct. 1800, 40 L.Ed.2d 224, the Supreme Court was confronted with a First Amendment challenge to mail censorship brought by California prisoners. The Court did not prohibit all censorship. Rather, it recognized the weighty governmental interests in prison security and order and prisoner rehabilitation and permitted censorship that both furthered one of those interests and was no broader than necessary to accomplish its purpose. 58 In reaching its conclusion, the Court observed: 59 Perhaps the most obvious example of justifiable censorship of prisoner mail would be refusal to send or deliver letters concerning escape plans or containing other information concerning proposed criminal activity, whether within or without the prison. Similarly, prison officials may properly refuse to transmit encoded messages. Other less obvious possibilities come to mind . . . . 60 Id. at 413, 94 S.Ct. at 1811. It would be anomalous indeed to permit prison officials to intercept written correspondence between prisoners and outsiders in an effort to ferret out escape plans or other criminal activity, while at the same time prohibiting the interception of oral communications between prisoners and visitors conducted for essentially the same purposes: prison security and order. Yet this is practically what appellant urges. We do not believe that the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment require such an artificial distinction.
61 In her argument that the Fourth Amendment prohibits interagency or intergovernmental use of evidence originally seized in a constitutionally valid manner, appellant relies primarily on our decision in Bubis v. United States, 384 F.2d 643 (9th Cir. 1967). That case, however, is poor authority for her novel argument. There, the telephone company suspected that Bubis was using a multi-frequency signal generator to circumvent the company's automatic record-keeping equipment and thereby avoid long-distance charges. As part of its investigation, the company connected monitoring equipment to his telephone line. During the first few days of the monitoring, the company learned that Bubis was indeed using a frequency generator; it also overheard conversations that sounded like gambling. The monitoring continued for over three months, after which time the company reported its suspicions regarding the gambling operations to the federal government. A grand jury subpoenaed the tape recordings and indicted. On the basis of the recordings, Bubis was convicted of federal gambling offenses. Relying solely on our construction of the applicable federal statute, we reversed, holding that the telephone company's interception was broader than necessary. Regarding the telephone company's disclosure of Bubis' conversations to the federal government, we stated in dictum that the statute also prohibited that. Id. at 648 n.5. 62 In our view, Bubis has no bearing on our resolution of appellant's Fourth Amendment challenge to intergovernmental use of the Tobin tape. First, the holding in Bubis was that the interception was invalid because the telephone company extended its intrusion too long; any statement concerning the lawfulness of disclosure following a lawful interception was gratuitous and unnecessary to the decision. Second, our decision involved no constitutional analysis; it simply interpreted and applied a statutory provision governing the communications industry. 63 No independent reason appears why the Fourth Amendment should be construed to prohibit the intergovernmental exchange of the Tobin tape that occurred here. We decline to mutate the prohibitions of the Fourth Amendment, which deal with government-instigated searches and seizures, into a code of regulations governing interagency transfer of evidence legitimately in government control. But cf. United States v. Birrell, 470 F.2d 113 (2d Cir. 1972). Here, we have already held that the appellant-Tobin conversation was seized in a manner not inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment. Accordingly, we reject appellant's argument that the transfer of the Tobin tape was constitutionally impermissible. 12
64 Appellant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel argument is based upon Massiah v. United States, 377 U.S. 201, 84 S.Ct. 1199, 12 L.Ed.2d 246 (1964). Massiah and a codefendant were indicted on a federal narcotics charge. After retaining his own lawyer, Massiah pleaded not guilty and was released on bail. The codefendant was also released on bail and soon thereafter decided to cooperate with the government agents who were continuing the investigation of Massiah's narcotics activities. A police agent installed a radio transmitter under the seat of the codefendant's car and then suggested to him that he induce Massiah to enter the car and talk about the case. Massiah did so and his monitored and recorded incriminating statements were used at his trial. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction, holding that Massiah was denied the basic protections of that (Sixth Amendment) guarantee when there was used against him at his trial evidence of his own incriminating words, which federal agents had deliberately elicited from him after he had been indicted and in the absence of his counsel. Id. at 206, 84 S.Ct. at 1203. 65 The obvious problem with applying Massiah to the facts surrounding the making of the Tobin tape is the absence of any governmental effort to elicit incriminating statements from appellant. There is no suggestion that Tobin, at government direction, engaged appellant in the conversation later used against her. Appellant argues, however, that the Court in Massiah held that deliberate, secret listening 13 sufficed as the prohibited deliberate elicitation of incriminating statements. Interrogation, in appellant's view, is not required by Massiah. 66 This interpretation of Massiah must fail. The Supreme Court in Brewer v. Williams, 430 U.S. 387, 97 S.Ct. 1232, 51 L.Ed.2d 424 (1977), recently interpreted Massiah in a manner directly opposed to appellant's contention. In Brewer, the Court stated in unambiguous terms that no such constitutional protection (of the right to assistance of counsel at the time the defendant made the incriminatory statements) would have come into play if there had been no interrogation. Id. at 400, 97 S.Ct. at 1240. Relevant to appellant's argument that by secretly listening to incriminating statements the government violated the rights defined in Massiah, the Court stated: That the incriminating statements were elicited surreptitiously in the Massiah case, and otherwise here, is constitutionally irrelevant. . . . Rather, the clear rule of Massiah is that once adversary proceedings have commenced against an individual, he has a right to legal representation when the government interrogates him. Id. at 400-01, 97 S.Ct. at 1240 (emphasis added; citations omitted). Thus, under Massiah, as interpreted by Brewer, there was no violation of appellant's Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of counsel because there was no interrogation of her either formally or surreptitiously by the government.