Court Opinion

ID: 9636779
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:42:37.395059+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:49.373160
License: Public Domain

EDGERTON, Associate Justice
(dissenting) .
By guaranteeing freedom from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” the *959Fourth Amendment “forbids every search that is unreasonable; it protects all, those suspected or known to be offenders as well as the innocent * * 1
The search of the house was unreasonable and therefore illegal. The house was a dwelling. Search of a dwelling without a warrant is never reasonable except when incidental to a lawful arrest.2 Search of this house was not incidental to any arrest either lawful or unlawful. The officers had no right3 to, and did not, break into the house in order to arrest McDonald. It does not even appear that they knew he was present. They broke and entered the house in order to make the illegal search they made. Instead of being incidental to the arrests the search led to the arrests.
The officers searched McDonald’s room before they entered it. Though it is “not a search to observe what is open to view” it is a search to open things to view and then observe them. The room and its contents were opened to view by forcible invasion of the house and corridor, and then observed from the corridor. This search of McDonald’s room was illegal, like the previous search of the other rooms and for the same reasons. If this had been otherwise what the officers saw might perhaps have justified them in entering the room, making the arrests, and seizing the property. But that is quite immaterial. Since the search was illegal it justified nothing. The arrests and seizures were as illegal as the search itself. “A search prosecuted in violation of the Constitution is not made lawful by what it brings to light,”4 and evidence obtained by unlawful search is not made admissible by arresting its owner.5 The government cannot “justify the arrest by the search and at the same time * * * justify the search by the arrest.” 6
It is true that in order to complain of an unlawful search and seizure one must have an interest in the place searched or the property seized. Appellant Washington had neither, for he was only a guest of appellant McDonald. But McDonald had both. He rented the room searched and he owned the property seized. He was of course entitled to use the corridor. In my opinion illegal search of the room by illegal invasion of the corridor was a plain violation of his constitutional right.7
The question is not whether officers may look in an unconventional way into another place, from a place in which they have a right to be and in which the person who complains has no" interest.8 The question is whether officers may look into a room from a place in which they have no right to be and in which the person who complains does have an interest; the corridor that is the only means of access to his room. A roomer’s constitutional right of privacy is a fiction that keeps the word of promise to the ear and breaks it to the hope unless it includes a right not to be spied upon by trespassers who force their way into his corridor. Yet the government contends that search by such such trespassers is reasonable and the court decides that it is not a search. Neither of these propositions is comprehensible to me. No doubt a roomer’s interest in a corridor is different from a householder’s. Probably the one may be called an easement and the other an estate, as the government suggests. But I know of no reason why this difference should be critical here. To hold that McDonald cannot complain because he is only a roomer perverts the letter as well as the spirit of the constitutional guaranty against unreasonable searches and creates a discrimination in civil rights that is out of place in a democratic society.

Go-Bart Importing Co. v. United States, 282 U.S. 344, 357, 51 S.Ct. 153, 158, 75 L.Ed. 374.

Agnello v. United States, 269 U.S. 20, 32-33, 46 S.Ct. 4, 70 L.Ed. 145, 51 A.L.R. 409.

Johnson v. United States, 68 S.Ct. 367.

Byars v. United States, 273 U.S. 28, 29, 47 S.Ct. 248, 71 L.Ed. 520.

Go-Bart Importing Co. v. United States, supra note 1; Taylor v. United States, 286 U.S. 1, 52 S.Ct. 466, 76 L. Ed. 951.

Johnson v. United States, supra [68 S.Ct. 370] note 3.

 Cf. Brown v. United States, 3 Cir., 83 F.2d 383; Waxman v. United States, 9 Cir., 12 F.2d 775, certiorari denied, 273 U.S. 716, 47 S.Ct. 108, 71 L.Ed. 855; Coon v. United States, 10 Cir., 36 F.2d 164.

That was the question in the Lee case on which the court relies.