Court Opinion

ID: 9428041
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:22:37.516327+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:11.370671
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Marshall,
with whom Me. Justice Brennan joins, dissenting.
The vials of pills found in Vanessa Cox’s purse and petitioner’s admission that they belonged to him established his guilt conclusively. The State concedes, as it must, that the search of the purse was unreasonable and in violation of the Fourth Amendment, see Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U. S. 85 (1979), and the Court assumes that the detention which led to the search, the seizure, and the admissions also violated the Fourth Amendment, ante, at 106. Nevertheless, the Court upholds the conviction. I dissent.
I
The Court holds first that petitioner may not object to the introduction of the pills into evidence because the unconstitutional actions of the police officers did not violate his personal Fourth Amendment rights. To reach this result, the Court holds that the Constitution protects an individual against unreasonable searches and seizures only if he has “a ‘legitimate expectation of privacy’ in the area searched.” Ante, at 104. This holding cavalierly rejects the fundamental principle, unquestioned until today, that an interest in either the place searched or the property seized is sufficient to invoke the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Court’s examination of previous Fourth Amendment cases begins and ends — as it must if it is to reach its desired conclusion — with Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U. S. 128 (1978). Contrary to the Court’s assertion, however, Rakas did not establish that the Fourth Amendment protects individuals against unreasonable searches and seizures only if they have a privacy interest in the place searched. The question before the Court in Rakas was whether the defendants could estab*115lish their right to Fourth Amendment protection simply by showing that they were “legitimately on [the] premises” searched, see Jones v. United States, 362 U. S. 257, 267 (1960), Overruling that portion of Jones, the Court held that when a Fourth Amendment objection is based on an interest in the place searched, the defendant must show an actual invasion of his personal privacy interest. The petitioners in Bakas did not claim that they had standing either under the Jones automatic standing rule for persons charged with possessory offenses, which the Court overrules today, see United States v. Salvucci, ante, p. 83, or because their pos-sessory interest in the items seized gave them “actual standing.” No Fourth Amendment claim based on an interest in the property seized was before the Court, and, consequently, the Court did not and could not have decided whether such a claim could be maintained. In fact, the Court expressly disavowed any intention to foreclose such a claim (“This is not to say that such [casual] visitors could not contest the lawfulness of the seizure of evidence or the search if their own property were seized during the search,” 439 U. S., at 142, n. 11), and suggested its continuing validity (“[Petitioners’ claims must fail. They asserted neither a property nor a possessory interest in the automobile, nor an interest in the ;property seized,” id., at 148 (emphasis supplied)).
The decision today, then, is not supported by the only case directly cited in its favor.* Further, the Court has ignored *116a long tradition embodying the opposite view. United States v. Jeffers, 342 U. S. 48 (1951), for example, involved a seizure of contraband alleged to belong to the defendant from a hotel room occupied by his two aunts. The Court rejected the Government’s argument that because the search of the room did not invade Jeffers’ privacy he lacked standing to suppress the evidence. It held that standing to object to the seizure could not be separated from standing to object to the search, for “[t]he search and seizure are . . . incapable of being untied.” Id., at 52. The Court then concluded that Jeffers “unquestionably had standing ... unless the contraband nature of the narcotics seized precluded his assertion, for purposes of the exclusionary rule, of a property interest therein.” Ibid, (emphasis supplied).
Similarly, Jones v. United States, supra, is quite plainly premised on the understanding that an interest in the seized property is sufficient to establish that the defendant “himself was the victim of an invasion of privacy.” 362 U. S., at 261. The Court observed that the “conventional standing requirement,” id., at 262, required the defendant to “claim either to have ovmed or possessed the seized property or to have had a substantial possessory interest in the premises searched,” id., at 261 (emphasis supplied). The Court relaxed that rule for defendants charged with possessory offenses because “[t]he same element . . . which has caused a dilemma, i. e., that possession both convicts and confers standing, eliminates any necessity for a preliminary showing of an interest in the premises searched or the property seized, which ordinarily is *117required when standing is challenged.” Id., at 263 (emphasis supplied). Instead, “[t]he possession on the basis of which petitioner is to be and was convicted suffices to give him standing,” id., at 264.
Simmons v. United States, 390 U. S. 377 (1968), proceeded upon a like understanding. The Court there reiterated that prior to Jones “a defendant who wished to assert a Fourth Amendment objection was required to show that he was the owner or possessor of the seized property or that he had a possessory interest in the searched premises.” 390 U. S., at 389-390 (emphasis supplied). Jones had changed that rule only with respect to defendants charged with possessory offenses, so the defendant Garrett, who was charged with armed robbery, had to establish standing; Because he was not “legitimately on [the] premises” at the time of the search, see Jones, supra, at 267, “[t]he only, or at least the most natural, way in which he could found standing to object to the admission of the suitcase was to testify that he was its owner.” 390 U. S., at 391 (footnote omitted). See also Brown v. United States, 411 U. S. 223, 228 (1973); Mancusi v. DeForte, 392 U. S. 364, 367 (1968).
The Court’s decision today is not wrong, however, simply because it is contrary to our previous cases. It is wrong because it is contrary to the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” The Court’s reading of the Amendment is far too narrow. The Court misreads the guarantee of security “in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” to afford protection only against unreasonable searches and seizures of persons and places.
The Fourth Amendment, it seems to me, provides in plain language that if one’s security in one’s “effects” is disturbed by an unreasonable search and seizure, one has been the victim of a constitutional violation; and so it has always been *118understood. Therefore the Court’s insistence that in order to challenge the legality of the search one must also assert a protected interest in the premises is misplaced. The interest in the item seized is quite enough to establish that the defendant’s personal Fourth Amendment rights have been invaded by the government’s conduct.
The idea that a person cannot object to a search unless he can show an interest in the premises, even though he is the owner of the seized property, was squarely rejected almost 30 years ago in United States v. Jeffers, supra. There the Court stated:
“The Government argues . . . that the search did not invade respondent’s privacy and that he, therefore, lacked the necessary standing to suppress the evidence seized. The significant act, it says, is the seizure of the goods of the respondent without a warrant. We do not believe the events are so easily isolable. Rather they are bound together by one sole purpose — to locate and seize the narcotics of respondent. The search and seizure are, therefore, incapable of being untied. To hold that this search and seizure were lawful as to the respondent would permit a quibbling distinction to overturn a principle which was designed to protect a fundamental right.” Id., at 52.
When the government seizes a person’s property, it interferes with his constitutionally protected right to be secure in his effects. That interference gives him the right to challenge the reasonableness of the government’s conduct, including the seizure. If the defendant’s property was seized as the result of an unreasonable search, the seizure cannot be other than unreasonable.
In holding that the Fourth Amendment protects only those with a privacy interest in the place searched, and not those with an ownership or possessory interest in the things seized, the Court has turned the development of the law of search *119and seizure on its head. The history of the Fourth Amendment shows that it was designed to protect property interests as well as privacy interests; in fact, until Jones the question whether a person’s Fourth Amendment rights had been violated turned on whether he had a property interest in the place searched or the items seized. Jones and Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967), expanded our view of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment by recognizing that privacy interests are protected even if they do not arise from property rights. But that recognition was never intended to exclude interests that had historically been sheltered by the Fourth Amendment from its protection. Neither Jones nor Katz purported to provide an exclusive, definition of the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, as Katz recognized: “That Amendment protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all.” 389 U. S., at 350. Those decisions freed Fourth Amendment jurisprudence from the constraints of “subtle distinctions, developed and refined by the common law in evolving the body of private property law which, more than almost any other branch of law, has been shaped by distinctions whose validity is largely historical.” Jones, 362 U. S., at 266. Rejection of those finely drawn distinctions as irrelevant to the concerns of the Fourth Amendment did not render property rights wholly outside its protection, however. Not every concept involving property rights, we should remember, is “arcane.” Cf. ante, at 105.
In fact, the Court rather inconsistently denies that property rights may, by themselves, entitle one to the protection of the Fourth Amendment; but simultaneously suggests that a person may claim such protection only if his expectation of privacy in the premises searched is so strong that he may exclude all others from that place. See ante, at 105-106; Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U. S., at 149. Such a harsh threshold require*120ment was not imposed even in the heyday of a property rights oriented Fourth Amendment.
II
Petitioner also contends that his admission of ownership of the drugs should have been suppressed as the fruit of an unlawful detention. The state courts did not pass on that claim, and no factual record was developed which would shed light on the proper disposition of the claim. In such circumstances, it would be appropriate for us to defer to the state court and permit it to make the initial determination. Nevertheless, the majority proceeds to dispose of petitioner’s claim by concluding that, even if the detention was illegal, “petitioner’s statements were acts of free will unaffected by any illegality in the initial detention.” Ante, at 110. I disagree.
Petitioner’s admissions, far from being “spontaneous,” ante, at 108, were made in response to Vanessa Cox’s demand that petitioner “take what was his.” In turn, it is plain that her statement was the direct product of the illegal search of her purse. And that search was made possible only because the police refused to let anyone in the house depart unless they “consented” to a body search; that detention the Court has assumed was illegal. Under these circumstances petitioner’s admissions were obviously the fruit of the illegal detention and should have been suppressed.
III
In the words of Mr. Justice Frankfurter: “A decision [of a Fourth Amendment claim] may turn on whether one gives that Amendment a place second to none in the Bill of Rights, or considers it on the whole a kind of nuisance, a serious impediment in the war against crime.” Harris v. United States, 331 U. S. 145, 157 (1947) (dissenting opinion). Today amar 7 jority of 'the Court has substantially cut back the protection af- V forded by the Fourth Amendment and the ability of theS *121people to claim that protection, apparently out of concern lest the government’s ability to obtain criminal convictions be impeded. A slow and steady erosion of the ability of victims of unconstitutional searches and seizures to obtain a remedy for the invasion of their rights saps the constitutional guarantee of its life just as surely as would a substantive limitation. Because we are called on to decide whether evidence should be excluded only when a search has been “successful,” it is easy to forget that the standards we announce determine what government conduct is reasonable in searches and seizures directed at persons who turn out to be innocent as well as those who are guilty. I continue to believe that ungrudging application of the Fourth Amendment is indispensable to preserving the liberties of a democratic society. Accordingly, I dissent.

The Court invites the reader to “contrast” Jones v. United States, 362 U. S. 257 (1960), which it expressly overrules, and to “see” Simmons v. United States, 390 U. S. 377, 389-390 (1968). Ante, at 105, 104. The passage cited in Simmons contains the following language: “At one time, a defendant who wished to assert a Fourth Amendment objection was required to show that he was the owner or possessor of the seized property or that he had a possessory interest in the searched premises.” 390 U. S., at 389-390 (emphasis supplied). The Court in Simmons then observed that Jones had “relaxed” those standing requirements by holding that in a case charging a possessory offense “the Government is precluded from denying that the defendant has the requisite possessory interest to chai-*116lenge the admission of the evidence. . . 390 U. S., at 390. The Court also “contrasts” two other cases in connection with its subsidiary point that a “bailment” that is “precipitous” may not be enough to show that a person “took normal precautions to maintain his privacy.” Ante, at 105. The Court also cites Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967), as the source of the phrase “legitimate expectation of privacy.” But Katz did not purport to restrict the interest protected by the Fourth Amendment, see infra, at 119-120.