Court Opinion

ID: 9419999
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:28.426101+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:21.628002
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Jackson,
dissenting.
This case calls upon the Court to say whether any right to search a home is conferred on officers by the fact that within that home they arrest one of its inhabitants. The law in this field has not been made too clear by our previous decisions. I do not criticize the officers involved in this case, because this Court’s decisions afford them no clear guidance.
The Fourth Amendment first declares in bold broad terms: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . .” Our trouble arises because this sentence leaves debatable what particular searches are unreasonable ones. Those who think it their duty to make searches seldom agree on this point with those who find it in their interest to frustrate searches.
The Amendment, having thus roughly indicated the immunity of the citizen which must not be violated, goes on to recite how officers may be authorized, consistently with the right so declared, to make searches: “. . . and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing *196the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Here endeth the command of the forefathers, apparently because they believed that by thus controlling search warrants they had controlled searches. The forefathers, however, were guilty of a serious oversight if they left open another way by which searches legally may be made without a search warrant and with none of the safeguards that would surround the issuance of one.
Of course, a warrant to take a person into custody is authority for taking into custody all that is found upon his person or in his hands. Some opinions have spoken in generalities of this right to search such property incidentally to arrest of the person as including whatever was in the arrested person’s “possession.”
Repeated efforts have been made to expand this search to include all premises and property in constructive possession by reason of tenancy or ownership. While the language of this Court sometimes has been ambiguous, I do not find that the Court heretofore has sustained this extension of the incidental search. Go-Bart Importing Co. v. United States, 282 U. S. 344; United States v. Lefkowitz, 285 U. S. 452. In this respect, it seems to me, the decision of today goes beyond any previous one and throws a home open to search on a warrant that does not in any respect comply with the constitutional requirements of a search warrant and does not even purport to authorize any search of any premises.
The decision certainly will be taken, in practice, as authority for a search of any home, office or other premises if a warrant can be obtained for the arrest of any occupant and the officer chooses to make the arrest on the premises. It would seem also to permit such search incidentally to an arrest without a warrant if the circumstances make such arrest a lawful one. It would also appear to sane*197tion a search of premises even though the arrest were for the most petty of misdemeanors. It leaves to the arresting officer choice of the premises to be searched insofar as he can select the place among those in which the accused might be found where he will execute the warrant of personal arrest. Thus, the premises to be searched are determined by an officer rather than by a magistrate, and the search is not confined to places or for things “particularly described” in a warrant but, in practice, will be as extensive as the zeal of the arresting officer in the excitement of the chase suggests. Words of caution will hedge an opinion, but they are not very effective in hedging searches.
The difficulty with this problem for me is that once the search is allowed to go beyond the person arrested and the objects upon him or in his immediate physical control, I see no practical limit short of that set in the opinion of the Court — and that means to me no limit at all.
I am unable to suggest any test by which an incidental search, if permissible at all, can in police practice be kept within bounds that are reasonable. I hear none. I do not agree with other Justices in dissent that the intensity of this search made it illegal. It is objected that these searchers went through everything in the premises. But is a search valid if superficial and illegal only if it is thorough? It took five hours on the part of several officers. But if it was authorized at all, it can hardly become at some moment illegal because there was so much stuff to examine that it took overtime. It is said this search went beyond what was in “plain sight.” It would seem a little capricious to say that a gun on top of a newspaper could be taken but a newspaper on top of a gun insulated it from seizure. If it were wrong to open a sealed envelope in this case, would it have been right if the mucilage failed to stick? The short of the thing is that we cannot say *198that a search is illegal or legal because of what it ends in. It is legal or illegal because of the conditions in which it starts.
I cannot escape the conclusion that a search, for which we can assign no practicable limits, on premises and for things which no one describes in advance, is such a search as the Constitution considered “unreasonable” and intended to prohibit.
In view of the long history of abuse of search and seizure which led to the Fourth Amendment, I do not think it was intended to leave open an easy way to circumvent the protection it extended to the privacy of individual life. In view of the readiness of zealots to ride roughshod over claims of privacy for any ends that impress them as socially desirable, we should not make inroads on the rights protected by this Amendment. The fair implication of the Constitution is that no search of premises, as such, is reasonable except the cause for it be approved and the limits of it fixed and the scope of it particularly defined by a disinterested magistrate. If these conditions are necessary limitations on a court’s power expressly to authorize a search, it would seem that they should not be entirely dispensed with because a magistrate has issued a warrant which contains no express authorization to search at all.
Of course, this, like each of our constitutional guaranties, often may afford a shelter for criminals. But the forefathers thought this was not too great a price to pay for that decent privacy of home, papers and effects which is indispensable to individual dignity and self-respect. They may have overvalued privacy, but I am not disposed to set their command at naught.