Court Opinion

ID: 9426531
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:13.451233+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:01.529074
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
dissenting.
In a concurring opinion earlier this Term in Fisher v. United States, 425 U. S. 391, 414 (1976), I stated my view *485that the Fifth Amendment protects an individual citizen against the compelled production of testimonial matter that might tend to incriminate him, provided it is matter that comes within the zone of privacy recognized by the Amendment to secure to the individual “a private inner sanctum of individual feeling and thought.” Couch v. United States, 409 U. S. 322, 327 (1973). Accordingly, the production of testimonial material falling within this zone of privacy may not be compelled by subpoena. The Court holds today that the search and seizure, pursuant to a valid warrant, of business records in petitioner’s possession and containing statements made by the petitioner does not violate the Fifth Amendment. I can perceive no distinction of meaningful substance between compelling the production of such records through subpoena and seizing such records against the will of the petitioner. Moreover, I believe that the warrants under which petitioner’s papers were seized were impermissibly general. I therefore dissent.1
I
“There is no question that the records seized from petitioner’s offices and introduced against him were incriminating. Moreover, it is undisputed that some of these business records contain statements made by petitioner.” Ante, at 471. It also cannot be questioned that these records fall within the zone of privacy protected by the Fifth Amendment. Bellis v. United States, 417 U. S. 85, 87-88 (1974), squarely recognized that “[t]he privilege applies to the business records of the sole proprietor or sole prac*486titioner as well as to personal documents containing more intimate information about the individual’s private life.” The Court today retreats from this view. Though recognizing the value of privacy protected by the Fifth Amendment, see ante, at 477, and the “ 'right of each individual "to a private enclave where he may lead a private life,” ’ ” ante, at 476 n. 8, the Court declines, without adequate explanation, to include business records within that private zone comprising the mere physical extensions of an individual’s thoughts and knowledge. As I noted in Fisher, the failure to give effect to such a zone ignores the essential spirit of the Fifth Amendment: “[Business] records are at least an extension of an aspect of a person’s activities, though concededly not the more intimate aspects of one’s life. Where the privilege would have protected one’s mental notes of his business affairs in a less complicated day and age, it would seem that that protection should not fall away because the complexities of another time compel one to keep business records. Cf. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, 474 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).” 425 U. S., at 426-427 (BRENNAN, J.„ concurring in judgment).
As indicated at the outset, today’s assault on the Fifth Amendment is not limited to narrowing this view of the scope of privacy respected by it. The Court also sanctions circumvention of the Amendment by indulging an unjustified distinction between production compelled by subpoena and production secured against the will of the petitioner through warrant. But a privilege protecting against the compelled production of testimonial material is a hollow guarantee where production of that material may be secured through the expedient of search and seizure.
The matter cannot be resolved on any simplistic notion of compulsion. Search and seizure is as rife with *487elements of compulsion as subpoena. The intrusion occurs under the lawful process of the State. The individual is not free to resist that authority. To be sure, as the Court observes, “ [petitioner was present during the search of his law office and was free to move about,” ante, at 466, but I do not believe the Court means to suggest that petitioner was free to obstruct the investigators’ search through his files.2
And compulsion does not disappear merely because the individual is absent at the time of search and seizure. The door to one’s house, for example, is as much the individual’s resistance to the intrusion of outsiders as his personal physical efforts to prevent the same. To refuse recognition to the sanctity of that door and, more generally, to confine the dominion of privacy to the mind, compels an unconstitutional disclosure by denying to the individual a zone of physical freedom necessary for conducting one’s affairs. True to this principle, a value enshrined by the Fifth Amendment, the Court carefully observed in Couch that “actual possession of documents bears the most significant relationship to Fifth Amendment protections against governmental compulsions upon the individual accused of crime,” 409 U. S., at 333, and that “[w]e do indeed attach constitutional importance to possession, but only because of its close relationship to those personal compulsions and intrusions which the Fifth Amendment forbids.” Id., at 336 n. 20. Couch also plainly indicated that it is not necessary that *488there be actual possession in order to invoke Fifth Amendment limitations, for “situations may well arise where constructive possession is so clear or the relinquishment of possession is so temporary and insignificant as to leave the personal compulsions upon the accused substantially intact.” Id., at 333.3
Though the records involved in this case were clearly within petitioner’s possession or at least constructive possession, the Court avoids application of these principles and the values they protect by what I submit is a mischaracterization of Couch as concerned with the “possibility of compulsory self-incrimination by the principal’s implicit or explicit Testimony’ that the documents were those identified in the summons.” Ante, at 473 n. 7. Whether or not Couch was concerned with this possibility — and I believe that even under the most strained reading it was not — Couch was clearly concerned with whether production of documents in the possession of the accused's accountant pursuant to a summons directed to the accountant operated personally to compel the accused. It was in this regard that Couch recognized that “possession bears the closest relationship to the personal compulsion forbidden by the Fifth Amendment,” *489409 U. S., at 331, a matter with which the Court refuses to deal in its treatment of Couch.
Couch only reflects the view of a long line of decisions explicitly recognizing that the seizure of private papers may violate the Fifth Amendment. As early as Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 633 (1886), the Court was “unable to perceive that the seizure of a man’s private books and papers to be used in evidence against him is substantially different from compelling him to be a witness against himself.” Though the Court in Boyd held that compelling a person to be a witness against himself was tantamount to an unreasonable search and seizure, it never required a search and seizure to be independently unreasonable in order that it violate the Fifth Amendment. And though the several decisions which have found a Fifth Amendment violation stemming from a search and seizure all involved unreasonable search and seizures, it has never been established, contrary to the Court’s assertion, ante, at 472, that the unlawfulness of the search and seizure is necessary to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Gouled v. United States, 255 U. S. 298 (1921), though also involving a Fourth Amendment violation, makes it clear that the illegality of the search and seizure is not a prerequisite for a Fifth Amendment violation. Under Gouled, a Fifth Amendment violation exists because the “[accused] is the unwilling source of the evidence,” id., at 306, a matter which does not depend on the illegality vel non of the search and seizure.4
Until today, no decision by this Court had held that the seizure of testimonial evidence by legal process did *490not violate the Fifth Amendment. Indeed, with few exceptions,5 the indications were strongly to the contrary. See, e. g., United States v. Lefkowitz, 285 U. S. 452, 465-467 (1932); Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383, 397 (1914); Hale v. Henkel, 201 U. S. 43, 76 (1906).6 More *491recently, Schmerber y. California, 384 U. S. 757, 767 (1966), noted that the “values protected by the Fourth Amendment . . . substantially overlap those the Fifth Amendment helps to protect,” and clearly indicated that in considering whether to suppress seized evidence, a first inquiry is whether its testimonial nature, if any, precludes its introduction in evidence. See id., at 760-765. Subsequent to Schmerber, Warden v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 302-303 (1967), carefully observed that the items of clothing seized in that case were “not 'testimonial’ or 'communicative’ in nature, and their introduction therefore did not compel respondent to become a witness against himself in violation of the Fifth Amendment.” 7 These cases all reflect the root understanding of Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S., at 630: “It is not the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging of his drawers, that constitutes the essence of the offence [to the Fifth Amendment]; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty *492and private property .... [A]ny forcible and compulsory extortion of a man’s own testimony or of his private papers to be used as evidence to convict him of crime ..., is within the condemnation of [the Amendment]. In this regard the Fourth and Fifth Amendments run almost into each other.”
II
Even if a Fifth Amendment violation is not to be recognized in the seizure of petitioner’s papers, a violation of Fourth Amendment protections clearly should be, for the warrants under which those papers were seized were impermissibly general. General warrants are especially prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. The problem to be avoided is “not that of intrusion per se, but of a general, exploratory rummaging in a person’s belongings.” Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 467 (1971). Thus the requirement plainly appearing on the face of the Fourth Amendment that a warrant specify with particularity the place to be searched and the things to be seized is imposed to the end that “unauthorized invasions of The sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life’ ” be prevented. Berger v. New York, 388 U. S. 41, 58 (1967). “ ‘As to what is to be taken, nothing is left to the discretion of the officer executing the warrant.’ ” Stanford v. Texas, 379 U. S. 476, 485 (1965) (quoting Marron v. United States, 275 U. S. 192, 196 (1927)).
The Court recites these requirements, but their application in this case renders their limitation on unlawful governmental conduct an empty promise. After a lengthy and admittedly detailed listing of items to be seized, the warrants in this case further authorized the seizure of “other fruits, instrumentalities and evidence of crime at this [time] unknown.” App. A. 96, A. 115. The Court construes this sweeping authorization to be *493limited to evidence pertaining to the crime of false pretenses with respect to the sale of Lot 13T. However, neither this Court’s construction of the warrants nor the similar construction by the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland was available to the investigators at the time they executed the warrants. The question is not how those warrants are to be viewed in hindsight, but how they were in fact viewed by those executing them. The overwhelming quantity of seized material that was either suppressed or returned to petitioner is irrefutable testimony to the unlawful generality of the warrants.8 The Court’s attempt to cure this defect by post hoc judicial construction evades principles settled in this Court’s Fourth Amendment decisions. “The scheme of the Fourth Amendment becomes meaningful only when it is assured that at some point the conduct of those charged with enforcing the laws can be subjected to the more detached, neutral scrutiny of a judge Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1, 21 (1968). See Berger v. New York, supra, at 54; Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 13-14 (1948). It is not the function of a detached and neutral review to give effect to warrants whose terms unassailably authorize the far-reaching search and seizure of a person’s papers, especially where that has in fact been the result of executing those warrants.

 Today’s decision is doubtless consistent with the recent trend of decisions to eviscerate Fourth Amendment protections. See, e. g., Texas v. White, 423 U. S. 67 (1975); United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435 (1976); United States v. Watson, 423 U. S. 411 (1976); United States v. Santana, ante, p. 38.

 There is no meaningful distinction between requiring petitioner in this ease to stand idly by while papers are extracted from his files and requiring the petitioner in Schmerber v. California, 384 U. S. 757 (1966), similarly to submit to the extraction of blood from his body. In either case, seizure is obtained by compulsion, yet in Schmerber, unlike here, Fifth Amendment limitations were recognized as applicable.

 Similarly, I recognized writing separately in Couch:
"[S]urely the availability of the Fifth Amendment privilege cannot depend on whether or not the owner of the documents is compelled personally to turn the documents over to the Government. If private, testimonial documents held in the owner’s own possession are privileged under the Fifth Amendment, then the Government cannot nullify that privilege by finding a way to obtain the documents without requiring the owner to take them in hand and personally present them to the Government agents. Where the Government takes private records from, for example, a safety deposit box against the will of the owner of the documents, the owner has been compelled, in my view, to incriminate himself within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment.” 409 TJ. S., at 337 n. (concurring).

 As the Court notes, ante, at 474, Goided also observed that there is no special sanctity in papers rendering them immune from search and seizure. 255 U. S., at 309. The observation, however, was hedged with qualifications, see ibid., and Gouled itself makes clear that this was only a general proposition inapplicable in the case of private papers. See id., at 306.

 The Court cites Marron v. United States, 275 U. S. 192 (1927), as one exception, that decision having permitted the seizure of business records during the search of an illegal liquor business. Marrón, however, provides little, if any, foundation for the Court’s view. Though erring in the light of subsequent eases, the Court there did not view the business records as private papers or testimonial evidence. Rather, the records were viewed merely as “a part of the outfit or equipment actually used to commit the offense.” Id., at 199. Moreover, the aspect. of Marrón upon which the Court relies was clearly overruled in United States v. Lefkowitz, 285 U. S. 452 (1932) — the ostensible effort in Lefkowitz to distinguish it from Marrón notwithstanding.
The Court also cites Abel v. United States, 362 U. S. 217 (1960), as supporting its position that private testimonial papers may be seized without violating the Fifth Amendment. The papers seized in that case, however, even if fairly characterizable as private and testimonial — a matter about which I have doubt — were not admitted for the purpose of utilizing their testimonial contents as evidence.
Finally, this Court’s wiretapping cases also lend little support to the Court’s position. Two of those cases expressly recognized the danger to Fifth Amendment rights posed by wiretapping. See Berger v. New York, 388 U. S. 41, 56, 62 (1967); Osborn v. United States, 385 U. S. 323, 329 n. 7 (1966). All cases permitting seizure have involved conversations between two or more parties under other than what could be considered confidential circumstances. Grave questions would be raised, however, where conversations are seized from the privacy of the home or where the conversations are between parties who speak at other than arm’s length. In such circumstances there is danger that the zone of privacy recognized by the Fifth Amendment will have been invaded. See Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, 471-479 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).

 Though one component of the rationale in these cases precluding the seizure of papers appears to be the “mere evidence” rule, which was repudiated in Warden v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294 (1967), they also *491view such seizures as tantamount to the compulsion of testimony, an unlawful act conceptually distinct from the once unlawful act of seizing mere evidence. United States v. Lefkowitz, supra, at 466-467, for example, reiterates Boyd’s condemnation of the compulsory extraction of a man’s private papers. Similarly, Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S., at 397, recognized that the seizure of a man’s papers was an offense because it constituted the compulsory production of private papers. Accordingly, the doctrinal demise of the “mere evidence” rule left untouched the principles of these cases respecting the Fifth Amendment. See Fisher v. United States, 425 U. S. 391, 420-422, n. 5 (1976) (Brennan, J., concurring in judgment).

 By further observing that “[t]his case thus does not require that we consider whether there are items of evidential value whose very nature precludes them from being the object of a reasonable search and seizure,” 387 U. S., at 303, Hayden, at the very least, clearly left open the question whether lawful seizure of testimonial evidence violated the Fifth Amendment.

 Testimony by investigators at the suppression hearing requested by the petitioner indicates that seizure of many of his papers occurred indiscriminately. See App. A. 155, A. 156.