Court Opinion

ID: 9423801
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:09:06.850381+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:46.116061
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Harlan,
whom Mr. Justice White joins,
dissenting.
Congress has ample power to proscribe any particular use of intercepted telephone conversations. The question here is simply whether § 605 of the Communications Act proscribes basing state criminal convictions on such interceptions. This statutory question does not involve any constitutional exclusionary rule, cf. Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643, or the supervisory power of this Court over the lower federal courts, cf. Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383.
More than 15 years ago, in Schwartz v. Texas, 344 U. S. 199, this Court decided that § 605 did not render state convictions based on such interceptions invalid. Although arguments can be made that this decision was incorrect, the matter is hardly without difficulty. It is not at all obvious that a statute which by its terms prohibits only interception and divulgence of conversations, meant also to prohibit state-court reliance on the perfectly probative evidence gained thereby.*
*389It disserves the proper relation between this Court and Congress to change the long-standing interpretation of a federal statute in the absence of much more convincing evidence than is here adduced that the Court originally mistook what Congress intended. The importance of the principle of stare decisis of course varies with the nature of the question. It is at its highest in a case such as the present: Congress has considered the wiretapping problem many times, each time against what it naturally assumed to be a stable background of statute law. To vary that background with the inclinations of members of this Court is to frustrate orderly congressional consideration of statutory problems. I would therefore adhere to Schwartz.
Since the Court does not reach petitioners’ further contention that the interception violated their constitutional rights, I am content to dissent from the Court’s determination of the statutory question and not to express views that would, at this stage, be academic.

Nardone v. United States, 302 U. S. 379, established that divul-gence of intercepted communications in court was a violation of § 605. The Court went on to hold that a federal conviction resulting from such a violation was itself improper. The Court did not, however, make it clear whether the Act required that result by its own force or the Court was simply imposing that result by virtue of its supervisory power.