Court Opinion

ID: 9684020
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 13:44:42.607344+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:48.495863
License: Public Domain

PRITCHARD, Judge,
concurring.
I concur fully in the opinion of Turnage, J., in its holding that plaintiffs stated a cause of action for the tort of willful invasion of their privacy by defendant in entering their home for the purpose of removing telephones. What the dissenting opinion herein does is to grant defendant an absolute defense of a license to enter plaintiffs’ abode in violation of their well established right of privacy — the right to be free of physical intrusion into their premises. See the discussion of this right, Hofstadter and Horowitz, “The Right of Privacy,” § 9.1, p. 95, and the case examples there set forth. See also 77 C.J.S. Right of Privacy, § 1, et seq., p. 396, et seq.; and the numerous examples of “Privacy Inhering in the Place”, p. 31, et seq., “The Right to Privacy”, Dionisopoulos and Ducat.
Barber v. Time, Inc., 348 Mo. 1199, 159 S.W.2d 291 (1942), was a case involving violation of plaintiff’s right of privacy in the publishing of an article. The court went on to discuss that right, saying at page 294[6], “The basis of the right of privacy is the right to be let alone”, and the court further went on to say that the right grows out of a constitutional right, to be weighed against the defendant’s claim of the constitutional right of freedom of the press. See Corcoran v. Southwestern Bell Tel. Co., 572 S.W.2d 212 (Mo.App.1978), holding that there was no submissible case against Bell because there was no publication by it, but holding that a submissible case was made against defendant Corcoran upon the basis of intrusion upon seclusion, which requires no publication to establish the tort.
In the posture of this case, plaintiffs had the right of privacy, of seclusion, in their own home. The tariff provision which the dissent would hold grants a license (could it be an unlimited license?) to defendant to enter a private residence to remove an unpaid-for telephone, cannot supersede the private constitutional right to privacy in one’s abode. The right of defendant to enter a home to remove a telephone must be tempered upon reasonableness of time of entry, upon reasonable notification, and if permission to enter is denied, upon defendant’s resort to other remedies at law to secure to it the repossession of its property. Note the case of Fuentes v. Shevin, 407 U.S. 67, 92 S.Ct. 1983, 32 L.Ed.2d 556 (1972), holding that buyers under conditional sales contracts are entitled to notice and an opportunity to be heard before seizure of property in their possession, the Florida and Pennsylvania prejudgment replevin statutes (struck down), allowing summary seizure of a person’s possessions when no more than private gain is at stake. The matters postulated by plaintiffs’ pleadings require submission of the issue to the trier of the fact.
Weber v. Indiana Bell Telephone Company, 343 N.E.2d 786 (Ind.App.1976), relied upon in the dissent as creating a license to enter a subscriber’s premises, did not involve facts of entry without permission into one’s private residence, where it might be expected that one would be safe from intru*83sion, but only upon entry upon the land for the purpose of installing underground cable service to Weber’s telephone. The suit was brought in trespass and for negligence, not for the tort of invasion of privacy, and it is notable that the court remanded the case for a determination of the damages to the land, a situation not unlike plaintiffs’ claims for damages for the alleged willful invasion of their right of privacy of their abode. The Weber case is thus no authority for defendant’s summary exercise of a purported unlimited license to remove its telephones from the residences of unpaying subscribers.