Opinion ID: 2543833
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Development of a Balancing Test

Text: We now turn to a discussion of the test that must be applied to determine the circumstances in which law enforcement officials will be permitted to use a search warrant to obtain a bookstore's customer purchase records. The facts of this case are unusual. The parties have cited, and our independent research discloses, only one previous case where a court has considered the constitutionality of law enforcement attempts to gain access to the purchase records of a bookstore customer. Although that case, In re Grand Jury Subpoena to Kramerbooks & Afterwords Inc., 26 Med. L. Rptr. 1599 (D.D.C. 1998) (hereinafter Kramerbooks ), arose in the context of investigative subpoenas, not a search warrant, we find it to be instructive as to the test that should be applied in this case because it addresses and balances the same competing concerns presented here. [21] Kramerbooks involved subpoenas issued by the Office of Independent Counsel to two bookstores. Id. at 1599. The subpoenas sought book purchase records related to a particular customer under investigation, Monica Lewinsky. Id. Similar to this case, the bookstores claimed that their revelation of book purchase records would have a chilling effect on the exercise of their customers' First Amendment rights. Id. at 1600. The Kramerbooks court determined, as we do for search warrants, that the subpoenas directed to innocent bookstores implicate First Amendment concerns. Id. The court then briefly considered a Supreme Court case involving a grand jury subpoena and the First Amendment right to freedom of the press, Branzburg v. Hayes. [22] Id. at 1600-01. Because Branzburg was not dispositive of the issues presented, the Kramerbooks court turned to federal circuit court cases involving collisions between governmental investigative efforts and the First Amendment. Id. at 1601. The court imported the standard applied in those cases to the bookstore context. Thus, the court held that, in order to demonstrate the enforceability of the subpoena, the government must show: (1) a compelling interest in or need for the information sought; and (2) a sufficient connection between the information sought and the criminal investigation. Id. The court then ordered the special prosecutor to submit documents explaining how this test was satisfied for the OIC subpoenas at issue. Id. The balancing test used by the Kramerbooks court is similar to that used by the numerous courts that have addressed situations where government action has implicated fundamental speech rights. Specifically, courts have recognized that a very high level of review, referred to as strict scrutiny or exacting scrutiny is to be undertaken when government action collides with First Amendment rights. [23] See, e.g., Playboy Entm't Group, 529 U.S. at 813, 120 S.Ct. 1878; Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 64-65, 96 S.Ct. 612, 46 L.Ed.2d 659 (1976) (This type of scrutiny is necessary even if any deterrent effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights arises, not through direct government action, but indirectly as an unintended but inevitable result of the government's conduct in requiring disclosure.). This heightened standard is necessary because governmental action that burdens the exercise of First Amendment rights compromises the core principles of an open, democratic society. In order to withstand strict scrutiny, the government must have some compelling interest at stake. See, e.g., Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Comm., 372 U.S. 539, 546, 83 S.Ct. 889, 9 L.Ed.2d 929 (1963). Anything less will not justify an abridgement of fundamental speech rights. Beverly v. United States, 468 F.2d 732, 748 (5th Cir.1972) (It is simply a statement of long recognized horn-book principles of constitutional law to say that no government, either state or federal, may encroach upon First Amendment rights without the demonstration of a compelling interest.). Courts have also required the government to demonstrate a substantial connection between the government's action and the interest the government seeks to further. See, e.g., Buckley, 424 U.S. at 64, 96 S.Ct. 612; Gibson, 372 U.S. at 546, 83 S.Ct. 889. While this prong of the test has been phrased differently by different courts, its import is the same in every case. Id. The government must not do anything that abridges fundamental rights unless the government's action bears the appropriate connection to its compelling government interest, and this connection must be both direct and significant. Further, when government action implicates fundamental expressive rights, courts have imposed a few other requirements that must be met in order for the government action to withstand strict scrutiny. For instance, courts commonly require that government action be no broader than necessary to advance its compelling interest. See, e.g., Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U.S. 479, 488, 81 S.Ct. 247, 5 L.Ed.2d 231 (1960); Bursey, 466 F.2d at 1083 (stating that the government must show that the incidental infringement upon First Amendment rights is no greater than is essential to vindicate its subordinating interests). That is, government action must not chill the exercise of fundamental expressive rights any more than absolutely necessary to advance the government's interest. This requirement is frequently referred to as the least restrictive means requirement. See, e.g., Buckley, 424 U.S. at 68, 96 S.Ct. 612. The balancing test described above addresses the competing concerns implicated when governmental action directly or incidentally abridges constitutionally protected speech rights. It has been used in numerous factual and procedural contexts. [24] We modify the test only slightly to address the specific issues raised when law enforcement officials seek to seize an innocent, third-party bookstore's customer purchase records. We hold that law enforcement officials must demonstrate a sufficiently compelling need for the specific customer purchase record sought from the innocent, third-party bookstore. When considering generally applicable laws and regulations that implicate fundamental speech rights, it is logical to separate out two distinct steps: first, to consider the government's justification for the law and, second, to determine whether the law serves that purpose. In the context of criminal investigations, the two prongs run together. This is so because the law enforcement officials' need to investigate crime will almost invariably be a compelling one. Thus, the court must engage in a more specific inquiry as to whether law enforcement officials have a compelling need for the precise and specific information sought. Yet this more particularized showing captures the nexus requirement, normally considered separately from the government's interest. The second prong of the Kramerbooks test, that there be a sufficient connection between the criminal investigation and the information sought, is therefore duplicative of the first prong of the test because the government's need for the information sought cannot be compelling unless there exists a sufficient nexus between the investigation and the information sought. Here, the trial court recognized that strict scrutiny was the appropriate standard in this case and then applied a balancing test that considered four factors: (1) the government's interest in acquiring the information [25] ; (2) the nexus between the matter investigated and the material sought; (3) whether the information was available from another source; and (4) whether the intrusion was limited in scope so as to prevent exposure of other constitutionally protected materials. While the test that we use does not specifically include either the third or fourth prongs of the trial court's test, we believe that these factors are implicit in the balancing test that we develop. The law enforcement officials' need for the information sought cannot be compelling if there are reasonable alternate ways of conducting an investigation other than by seizing a customer's book purchase record. Officials must exhaust these alternatives before resorting to techniques that implicate fundamental expressive rights of bookstores and their customers. The fourth factor considered by the trial court, the breadth of the warrant, is also captured by the compelling need for the information sought test. When considering a search warrant, a court must separately consider each item that the law enforcement officials seek to obtain. For any particular expressive material sought, if the request is overly broad, then the law enforcement officials will not have a compelling need for that particular item. The ultimate question is whether the law enforcement need for the customer purchase record is sufficiently compelling to outweigh the harms caused by execution of the search warrant. We acknowledge that it is difficult to predict the extent of harm that would be caused by execution of any particular search warrant. However, we note that, in most situations, there is a lesser danger of harm to constitutionally protected interests when the customer purchase record is sought for reasons entirely unrelated to the contents of the materials purchased by the customer. The chilling effect that results from disclosure of customer purchase records occurs because of the general fear of the public that, if the government discovers which books it purchases and reads, negative consequences may follow. However, if the government seeks a purchase record to prove a fact unrelated to the content or ideas of the book, then the public's right to read and access these protected materials is chilled less than if the government seeks to discover the contents of the books a customer has purchased. For example, if the police were to find a book about baseball with a Tattered Cover price sticker on it in the vicinity of an illegal drug lab, and they wished to find out who purchased the baseball book in order to place that person at the scene of the crime, the harm to constitutional interests caused by forced disclosure of the Tattered Cover's book records might well be permissible under the balancing test we describe. [26] Similarly, if law enforcement officials seek to discover a book purchase record to disprove a suspect's alibi, on the theory that the bookstore record proves that the suspect was at the bookstore at a particular time, the contents of the books bought are not significantly at issue and the harm to the public caused by the seizure of the record is less than if the facts were otherwise. To summarize, we hold that our state constitution requires that the government, when it seeks to use a search warrant to discover customer book purchase records from an innocent, third-party bookstore, must demonstrate that it has a compelling need for the information sought. In determining whether law enforcement officials have met this standard, the court may consider various factors including whether there are reasonable alternative means of satisfying the asserted need and whether the search warrant is overly broad. The court must then balance the law enforcement officials' need for the bookstore record against the harm caused to constitutional interests by execution of the search warrant. This harm likely will be minimal if the law enforcement officials' reasons for wanting the book purchase record are entirely unrelated to the contents of the books.