United States v. Carroll

• Decision Date: 22 December 1971
• Docket Number: Crim. No. 1261-71.
• Citation: 337 F. Supp. 1260
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America v. Ronald Lloyd CARROLL et al.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Columbia

337 F. Supp. 1260

UNITED STATES of America v. Ronald Lloyd CARROLL et al.

Crim. No. 1261-71.

United States District Court, District of Columbia.

December 22, 1971.

Mark Richards, Asst. U. S. Atty., for the United States.

Edgar Brenner, Thomas J. McGrew, Arnold & Porter, Washington, D. C., for defendants; James C. Lang, Sneed & Waddel, Tulsa, Okl., of counsel.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

GESELL, District Judge.

Defendants are indicted under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510, et seq.

This title presents a number of thorny interpretive questions. The instant case involves an inconsequential partial overhearing through a connecting hotel room door of a competitor's vulgar salesman and has apparently been chosen by the Department of Justice as a vehicle for resolving some of the latent ambiguities of the statute. In an earlier decision the Court interpreted "wire interception," and the charges of wire interception were dismissed. Memorandum Opinion dated October 15, 1971.^* Now both parties press for a further interpretation to resolve the application of the statute to interception of "oral communications" under the facts of this case.

Normally, such determination would await trial. In this instance, however, all pertinent facts have now been stipulated and no purpose is served by going forward with a trial if the Court concludes on this renewed motion to dismiss that the case will have to be taken from the jury as a matter of law at the conclusion of the evidence.

The facts as now developed present quite a simple story. While attending a convention in Washington, D. C., defendant Carroll, an employee of John Roberts, Inc., registered in room M-794 of the Sheraton-Park Hotel without any knowledge of who was in the adjacent room, M-790. In fact, M-790 was being utilized by a business competitor, Herff-Jones Co., as a hospitality suite for the convention. The rooms were connected by a door which was closed and locked but which did not prevent conversations in the hospitality suite from being heard by the unassisted ear in the defendant Carroll's room. During both the morning and the afternoon of April 20, 1971, Carroll recorded conversations emanating from room M-790. At least one conversation recorded was part of a business telephone conversation from the hospitality suite. Carroll made the recordings by using a Channelmaster cassette-type recorder with a standard microphone. This device is an inexpensive model generally available to the public and no more sensitive than the human ear. The text of the recording, which was imperfect, incomplete and full of incoherent jokes, is in the record, as is a photograph of a scale model constructed by the FBI to show the layout and other features of the adjoining rooms.

Carroll and John Roberts, Inc., stand indicted for the interception of oral communications in violation of Title III of the Act. The company and two other individuals were charged with using, disclosing, and endeavoring to use and disclose these intercepted conversations. All defendants are charged with conspiring to intercept, to use and to disclose the oral communications.

In order for the interception of an oral communication to constitute an offense under the statute, three elements must be established. First, there must be a willful "interception," defined as the "aural acquisition of the contents of any ... oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device," 18 U.S.C. § 2510(4). Second, the oral communication must be uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that such communication is not subject to interception, 18 U.S.C. § 2510(2). And, third, the communication must be "under circumstances justifying such expectation that the communication is not subject to interception." Id. It is the third element on which the motion to dismiss focuses in this case.

The facts being undisputed, the Court is called upon to specify the factors that must be taken into account in determining whether the circumstances justified an expectation of privacy. Several possible tests for evaluating the circumstances are available.

The first test would be, in effect, whether the speaker reasonably believes that his words cannot be intercepted even though he may be mistaken in this belief. The legislative history, however, is clear that the speaker's "subjective intent ... is not necessarily the controlling factor." If the subjective intent of the speaker were the determining factor, the criminal liability of the recorder of the conversation would depend upon the subjective belief of the speaker, assuming the speaker had a belief and assuming further that it was not an unreasonable belief. As to this, the recorder would have neither actual knowledge nor, in many cases, any readily available means of knowledge. If this were the test, the guilt or innocence of a defendant might well hinge upon whether another party, the speaker, actually knew that his words spoken at a certain decibel level could be heard through a connecting door or otherwise. This test is too subjective and too arbitrary to serve as a standard...