Court Opinion

ID: 9424645
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:12:13.146404+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:51.597901
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Burger,
dissenting in. part and concurring in part.
I join the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice White and in Parts II and III of Mr. Justice Black’s concurring and dissenting opinion. I also agree with most of what is said in Part I of Mr. Justice Black’s opinion, but I am not prepared to accept the proposition that the Fifth Amendment requires the exclusion of evidence *493seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment. I join in Part III of Mr. Justice Stewart’s opinion.
This case illustrates graphically the monstrous price we pay for the exclusionary rule in which we seem to have imprisoned ourselves. See my dissent in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ante, p. 411.
On the merits of the case I find not the slightest basis in the record to reverse this conviction. Here again the Court reaches out, strains, and distorts rules that were showing some signs of stabilizing, and directs a new trial which will be held more than seven years after the criminal acts charged.
Mr. Justice Stone, of the Minnesota Supreme Court, called the kind of judicial functioning in which the Court indulges today “bifurcating elements too infinitesimal to be split.”