Court Opinion

ID: 9769329
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 14:45:44.906623+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:36:57.398684
License: Public Domain

MOREMEN, Judge
(dissenting).
I believe the majority opinion correctly outlines the trend, so apparent from the recent opinions of the various courts, to permit the introduction of evidence obtained by means usually designated as wire tapping. The older cases were firm in the protection of a person’s privacy.
The doctrine of privacy, independent of constitutional guarantees, was advanced rather recently in the development of law— about seventy years ago. This doctrine arose, it seems, from the fact that the steady increase of the population of this country was accompanied, as it must always be, by a decrease in privacy because of a similar decrease in space.
We are now in a period when the population is increasing so fast that the phenomenon has been called “a population explosion.” It seems to me that if space which permits movement is progressively diminished by this increase in population the protection granted by the law should be increased so that at some periods in his day a person will have the feeling that he is alone and protected from sly molestation.
Although other reasons have been assigned, Section X of the Kentucky Constitution and the IV Amendment to the United States Constitution were primarily en*498acted, it seems to me, for the purpose of granting to a person one place where he would he at least temporarily secure from unwarranted intrusion. This recognition of a right to believe one is temporarily safe has long been a part of our law. Remember the right of sanctuary the church offered even to fugitive criminals in England and other European countries? Our most modern fallout shelters attest to the fact that everyone still desires the right to hope for survival and a place to hide.
The development in the electronic field has been such that one may sit in his living room and hear signals called in a football game two thousand miles away — and the quarterback is not wired for sound. The shotgun microphone which may pick up conversations from a distance of more than two hundred yards becomes more dangerous than the weapon for which it was named when it receives legal approval as a vehicle for transmission of evidence into court.
Where are the ancient safeguards of the oath and the solemnity of the occasion or the trappings of a formal courtroom which warn a witness that now the truth must be told ? Persons engaged in ordinary conversations are not too careful with their facts or even their ideas. If idle conversations are to be trapped, recorded and used against the communicants, no guaranty of truth is obtained.
That, however, does not worry me too much. My concern arises from the fact that we are abandoning a tenet of legal philosophy at a time when it is most needed. When the country is becoming so crowded that it is often difficult to determine where one large city ends and another begins, any concept which attempts to assure privacy should be cherished.
In Kentucky, in this case, we now have the right to retain the philosophy of the old cases which guarded the private rights of man. Instead we have opened the door to the eavesdropper. I believe that Justice Holmes was correct when he dismissed the whole manipulation as being “dirty business.”
I would certify the law contrary to that expressed by the majority.