Mancusi v. DeForte

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1968 U.S. Supreme Court case

1968 United States Supreme Court case

Mancusi v. DeForte, 392 U.S. 364 (1968), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court on privacy and the Fourth Amendment . It originated in the lower courts as United States ex rel. Frank DeForte, appellant v. Vincent R. Mancusi, Warden of Attica Prison, Attica, New York, appellee, a petition for a writ of _habeas corpus _ by a prisoner who had exhausted all his state appeals. By a 6–3 margin the Court affirmed the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit 's reversal of a district court denial of the petition.

The prisoner, Frank DeForte, was one of several labor union officials on Long Island who had been convicted of racketeering -related charges connected to a scheme in which they attempted to monopolize the jukebox market in the New York Metropolitan area . Early in the investigation, local prosecutors had issued a _subpoena duces tecum _ for records from the union officials. When they refused to comply, the prosecutors went to the union offices themselves and seized the records from the officials' desks themselves. DeForte had been present and voiced his objections. The state later admitted the action was illegal but the documents, which formed the bulk of the case against the officials, were not suppressed at trial. Both the state's appellate court and the New York State Court of Appeals sustained the verdict, and all the defendants went to prison. There they began filing habeas petitions to the federal courts. The first, alleging that the court's orders to the jury to continue deliberating after they had done so for almost 24 hours and twice asked for a break constituted coercion, was denied.

DeForte's second, arguing as he had at trial and on his state appeal, that the search of his desk violated his reasonable expectation of privacy and thus his Fourth Amendment rights, was the one the Supreme Court heard. Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote for the majority that under the Court's recent holding in _Katz v. United States _, DeForte had a reasonable expectation of privacy over the papers he kept at work even though they were not his personal property and he shared the office with his co-defendants. Nor did the subpoena authorize the prosecutor to act as he might with a search warrant , since the subpoena was not subject to independent judicial review before its execution. In dissent , Hugo Black , who had also dissented in Katz, said he could not find why the Court chose to depart from previous holdings that documents in the possession of one's employer enjoyed no Fourth Amendment protection, and was misreading the cases it relied on.

The case is seen as a seminal case in privacy law, since it extended it for the first time to a non-residential space. Lower courts have used it to guide them in distinguishing Fourth Amendment claims into the present day. The Supreme Court has, in later holdings, extended it to include public employees during administrative investigations and considered its application in the context of modern telecommunications.

Background of the case

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For most of American history the Fourth Amendment 's requirement that the people "be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" was taken to apply strictly only to their physical bodies and real property they had an ownership interest in. Advances in communications technology at the start of the Information Age would challenge that. In the 1928 case _Olmstead v. United States _ the Court upheld a bootlegging conviction that relied solely on transcripts of telephone conversations that had been obtained through warrantless wiretapping of the defendants' telephone lines, an action illegal under Washington state law. The majority held that since the Prohibition agents had not actually trespassed on the bootleggers' property to place the wiretaps, the Fourth Amendment had not been violated, and that the language of the amendment in any event referred only to material things. One of the dissenting justices, Louis Brandeis , wrote a frequently quoted opinion arguing that the Fourth Amendment protected not just those rights associated with property but "the right to be let alone", speculating that future technological advances might be yet more intrusive.

In the ensuing decades the Olmstead majority's holding began to seem more and more inadequate. Telephone use became more widespread, and the public grew concerned over the idea that anyone, not just the government, could listen into private and intimate conversations which once took place only in person. Improvements in audio recording technology meant that such intrusions were possible without a human actually present. This led Congress to pass anti-wiretapping statutes which still allowed law enforcement to listen in with the telephone company's permission, since those companies were the lawful owners of the wires and switches where the wiretapping could take place.

The Warren Court was the first to recognize that the traditional application of the Fourth Amendment to property one owned had its shortcomings. In _Jones v. United States _, a drug prosecution where the defendant had challenged the use of evidence taken during a search of an apartment he had access to, the Court had extended the Fourth Amendment's protections to anyone "legitimately on the premises".

A line of cases in the area of reproductive freedom had also entertained and eventually adopted the idea that personal privacy in that area was protected independently of the premises of a dwelling. In _Mapp v. Ohio _, the Court extended the exclusionary rule under which evidence obtained unconstitutionally cannot be used at trial, to state as well as federal prosecutions, greatly increasing the cases of alleged Fourth Amendment violations it was asked to review.

Underlying prosecution

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In the late 1950s, allegations of racketeering activities by some labor unions led the U.S. Senate to create a Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management to investigate. It soon became known as the Labor Rackets Committee or the McClellan Committee, after its chair, John McClellan of Arkansas. Chief committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy was frequently criticized for apparent disregard of witnesses' constitutional rights. The committee and its large staff devoted much of their attention to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), where Jimmy Hoffa had been allegedly working with organized crime figures to unseat Dave Beck as union head. It feared that if Hoffa led the Teamsters, the union would have enough power to disrupt the U.S. economy.

The committee had focused on some of the paper locals Hoffa had purportedly created to stack votes in his favor during the leadership election.

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