Court Opinion

ID: 9640996
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:20:31.813008+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:34.482075
License: Public Domain

ANDERSON, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) . I am unable to agree with the opinion of the majority or in its result; but I shall indulge in no elaborate statement of my views, or analysis of the authorities on which those views'are based. Briefly, I think the case falls within the rule laid down in Adams v. New York, 192 U. S. 585, 24 S. Ct. 372, 48 L. Ed. 575, and not under the doctrine of Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U. S. 385, 40 S. Ct. 182, 64 L. Ed. 319, Amos v. United States, 255 U. S. 313, 41 S. Ct. 266, 65 L. Ed. 654, and Gouled v. United States, 255 U. S. 298, 41 S. Ct. 261, 65 L. Ed. 647.
I cannot believe that Lee’s constitutional rights were infringed by the court’s admission of evidence of his arrest and the seizure of his motorboat partially loaded with alcohol at rum row on the high seas, in support of an indictment for conspiracy to smuggle alcohol. Whether this seizure was legal or illegal seems to me to be entirely immaterial. In either aspect, it was not unreasonable, and therefore unconstitutional. Carroll v. United States, 267 U. S. 132, 148, 149, 45 S. Ct. 280, 69 L. Ed. 543, 39 A. L. R. 790.
The • Supreme Court has never yet laid down the broad rule that evidence obtained by any illegal conduct of officials is therefore inadmissible. No such standard of purity of origin is practicable. It is only evidence obtained in disregard of the Fourth Amendment, and offered in derogation of the Fifth Amendment, that is excluded under the rule now relied upon. This distinction is clearly brought out in Agnello v. United States, 269 U. S. 20, 46 S. Ct. 4, 70 L. Ed. 145, where evidence obtained in breach of Agnello’s constitutional rights was held incompetent against him;. but, though obtained by illegal conduct, it was held competent as against the other defendants. Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 U. S. 465, 41 S. Ct. 574, 65 L. Ed. 1048, 13 A. L. R. 1159, is an emphatic assertion of the same general doctrine.
The majority opinion expresses dissent from the views of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the Underwriter Case. While, as already indicated, I doubt whether the question involved in the Underwriter Case is involved in the case now before ns, I desire to add that, as I understand the opinion in that case, I am in accord with it.