Court Opinion

ID: 9793572
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:50:10.846178+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:06:06.407174
License: Public Domain

WREN, Judge,
specially concurring.
I have searched in vain for a legal premise upon which to dissent from this bizarre result. The privacy of the phone has been infringed by an uninvited ear and a suspected murderer goes free; and all without the slightest hint of any police misconduct. The exclusion required by this invidious statute offends every fiber of my being and I therefore join in the opinion simply because I have no other course. Never have I felt more strongly the need to right a wrong or more strongly the lack of tools to do it with.
Notwithstanding the obvious guilt of the appellee-defendant to the crime of murder this Court has struck down evidence that plainly makes it impossible to ever convict him. Admittedly, the terminology of 18 U.S.C.A. § 2515 compelled the suppression order, but the statute can in no way withstand an assault from the direction of common sense. This case brings to public gaze a spectacle of the complete frustration of justice-suppression of truth in the search for truth. Only a system with limitless patience with irrationality could tolerate the fact that where there has been one wrong, the defendant’s, he will be punished; but where there have been two wrongs, the defendant’s and another’s, the defendant will go free.
Admittedly, eavesdropping is not ranked as one of the most learned or respected of professions. In fact it is the greatest of all invasions of privacy. It places a government agent in the bedroom, in the business conference, in the social hour, in the lawyer’s office and everywhere and anywhere a “bug” can be placed. The law must obviously be offended by violations of statutes *296designed to protect one’s privacy, but I find the proposition incredible that had the switchboard operators in this case made an “inadvertent” interception, such as in Flournoy v. Wren, where the motel operator was away from the switchboard filing papers when he answered a room call and could not immediately disconnect himself from the conversation; or as in Roberts v. State, Alaska, 453 P.2d 898 (1969), [Cert. denied 396 U.S. 1022, 90 S.Ct. 594, 24 L.Ed.2d 515 (1970), Reh. denied 397 U.S. 1059, 90 S.Ct. 1368, 25 L.Ed.2d 681 (1970)], where a housewife listened for a full ten minutes to a conversation over a party line which had been unknowingly connected to her private line, then the incriminating conversation would have been admissible. Moreover the eavesdropping here was not done for the purpose of gathering evidence for a criminal prosecution and, to that extent it also was completely inadvertent.
I find it even more incredible that Ms. Silva could monitor the telephone conversation for a short time to ascertain that an emergency call was actually being made, and that if the incriminating statements had been made during the monitoring, she could have continued to listen and the State could have used the entire conversation as evidence.
I agree that the constitutional right of privacy should not be diminished by the fact that the person involved also committed a crime, but defendant’s privacy here had already been invaded prior to the ruling on the motion to suppress. Full disclosure of the murder plot had previously been made by the eavesdropping operators to the grand jury, the police investigators, and to the court. Was anything salvaged or retained by thereafter standing law enforcement on its head by the exclusion of competent evidence that he was guilty of murder? The fact that a defendant’s rights are violated should not have a bearing on whether he committed a crime. Both matters should receive a full airing in the proper forum. No one was punished by throwing out the evidence and dropping the prosecution here except the public and justice. To me this case graphically illustrates what has become a cliché—“We use a shotgun to kill a fly.”
The “right of privacy”, like a chameleon, has a different color for every turning. Why cannot we examine the circumstances of its application in each case to determine whether the evidence should be suppressed? Such a procedure would produce no “Frankenstein Catalog of Horrors”. There is nothing magic about the word “constitutional”. Violations of constitutional rights, like any others, cover a spectrum from innocently trivial to deliberately terrible, and it is unreasonable to fail to recognize the difference. As Chief Justice Burger reasoned in his dissent in Bivens v. The Six Unknown F.B.I. Agents, 403 U.S. 388, 91 S.Ct. 1999, 29 L.Ed.2d 619 (1971), when he criticized the exclusionary rule of the Fourth Amendment:
“Freeing either a tiger or a mouse in a schoolroom is an illegal act, but no rational person would suggest that these two acts should be punished in the same way.” 403 U.S. at 419, 91 S.Ct. at 2016, 29 L.Ed.2d at 640.
The disparity between the error committed by the telephone operators and the windfall accorded the defendant by the exclusion is too obvious to merit comment. Moreover, suppression has done nothing to further the right of privacy. If that is its purpose then I submit that imposing upon the telephone operators the indirect sanction of exclusion of criminal evidence is nothing less than sophisticated nonsense. It in no way dissuades the private citizen from eavesdropping. To say that it does is to engage in not only fantasies but absurdities; especially when, as here, obtaining criminal evidence was not the purpose of eavesdropping in the first place. Not even in the complex and turbulent history of the exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment and Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961), has any court ever applied it to exclude evidence obtained by a private citizen. The stated reason for application of the exclusionary rule has always been to deter the police *297from using improper methods to obtain evidence. Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1976), 79 C.J.S. Search and Seizure § 5 c p. 783. In fact the great anomaly here is that the evidence would clearly be admissible under the Fourth Amendment, since the eavesdropping was in no way the product of government or police activity.
Any assertion that the exclusionary rule provisions are not intended to deter interceptions by private citizens, but are designed solely to prevent disclosure of the communication itself is to ignore the fact that § 2515 also excludes all “fruits” of improper eavesdropping. As the trial judge in this ease pointed out, full disclosure of the telephone conversation had to be made to her since the defendant’s motion to suppress was also directed to statements of other persons as poisoned fruit of the intercept. As she correctly noted, it was impossible for her to decide which statements were fruit and which were not without hearing the actual words which were spoken.
Moreover, the Senate Report accompanying the Wire Interception and Interception of Oral Communications Act stated as the purpose of the rule: “[I]t should serve to guarantee that the standards of the new chapter will sharply curtail the unlawful interception of wire and oral communications.” 1 In other words, the object is to deny to the perpetrator the fruits of his unlawful actions in both civil and criminal proceedings.
In spite of the plain language of the Act, it seems clear to me beyond cavil that Congress could not have intended the absurd result reached here. I submit that private rights will not atrophy by allowing such intercepted evidence to be introduced in a criminal court of law. Suppression in instances of non-police activity should be reserved for the civil courts. The remedy for unlawful intrusion by the private invader should be by tort action or criminal charges.2 It is a strange fruit indeed of an illegal intercept of a telephone call by a private citizen that proscribes evidence of murder. Ironically, it is to be noted that the Congressional Findings footnoted to Title 18, U.S.C.A. §§ 2510-2520, also comment on its purpose: “To safeguard the privacy of innocent persons . . . .” (Emphasis supplied).
I concede that safeguards are needed. Technological advances have produced remarkably sophisticated electronic devices of which the “cocktail olive” and “cufflink microphone” are illustrative. Progress is also being made toward utilizing a laser beam to pick up conversations within a room by focusing upon the glass of a window.
The public telephone plays a vital role in private communications, and surely the person placing the call is entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world. Today, however, Arizona must release a man charged with murder; not because it has deprived him of his constitutional right of privacy, but because in its haste to give force to distasteful eavesdropping Congress has adopted a bad statute.
I feel fully justified in saying, admittedly as pure obitur dictum, that I question the legislative wisdom in the passage of this Act. As stated by Judge McCord in his special concurrence in Horn v. State, 298 So.2d 194, 201 (Fla.App.1974), which involved an eavesdropping situation by a private citizen on an extension line under an identical Florida statute and a charge of murder: “I believe we would be impressed with the desirability of amending the statute in question . . . .”
To Judge McCord’s comment, I say, “Amen.”

. S.Rep. No. 1097, 9th Cong.2d Sess. 96 (1968), U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1968, p. 2185 to Title III-Chp. 119.

. Civil and criminal sanctions are imposed by 18 U.S.C.A. § 2511 and § 2520. It is noteworthy also, to point out here that “suppression of evidence” is noticeably absent from the wiretapping and eavesdropping legislation adopted in Arizona. Art. 15, Laws 1978, Ch. 126, Secs. 13-1051-13-1059 and in the Revised Criminal Code, effective October 1, 1978.