Court Opinion

ID: 8885850
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 21:50:10.657506+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:06:54.761514
License: Public Domain

FAIRCHILD, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
One of appellant’s arguments was that the warrant failed to fulfill the fourth amendment requirement that the things to be seized be “particularly” described. The majority decision is based on a different ground, and I assume, for the present purpose, that the warrant was sufficient in this respect. I also assume the appealability of the order.
In Warden v. Hayden (1967), 387 U.S. 294, 303, 87 S.Ct. 1642, the Supreme Court found it unnecessary to “consider whether there are items of evidential value whose very nature precludes them from being the object of a reasonable search and seizure.” In order to suppress the evidence in this case, it would be necessary to decide both that such class does exist, and that the business and professional records seized from appellant are within it.
Such a class would be difficult to define whether one were basing its existence on the policy underlying the fourth amendment or the fifth. Judge Friendly ‘ suggested in United States v. Bennett (2d Cir., 1969), 409 F.2d 888 “that an approach geared to the objective of the Fourth Amendment to secure privacy would seem more promising than one based on the testimonial character of what is seized.” He also noted that Katz v. United States (1967), 389 U.S. 347, 354, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576, authorized warrants for limited surveillance of telephone communications, but that such communications, like papers, would often be “testimonial.”
Assuming, however, that there is a class of papers so intimately confidential and so much a part of personhood that they ought to enjoy a superlative privacy and be protected from seizure upon an adequately grounded warrant, it does not seem to me that the records in question here have the required character. They appear to have been maintained for business and professional purposes, with the knowledge and assistance of employees, and the manner in which they were allegedly kept and used, made them, in a sense, instrumentalities of the tax evasion offense claimed.