United States v. Wallace Tiernan Co

• Citation: 336 U.S. 793,69 S.Ct. 824,93 L.Ed. 1042
• Decision Date: 02 May 1949
• Docket Number: No. 416,416
• Parties: UNITED STATES v. WALLACE & TIERNAN CO., Inc., et al
• Court: United States Supreme Court

336 U.S. 793

69 S.Ct. 824

93 L.Ed. 1042

UNITED STATES

v WALLACE & TIERNAN CO., Inc., et al.

No. 416.

Argued March 29, 1949.

Decided May 2, 1949.

Appeal from the United States District Court for Rhode Island.

Mr. Arnold Raum, of Washington, D.C., for appellant.

Mr. Charles H. Tuttle, of New York City, for appellees.

Mr. Justice BLACK delivered the opinion of the Court.

The basic question here is whether the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures bars the United States from utilizing certain documentary evidence in this civil anti-trust proceeding instituted in the United States District Court of Rhode Island. Subsidiary procedural questions involve the doctrine of res judicata.¹ We proceed at once to consideration of the important basic question since for reasons later given we reject the subsidiary res judicata contentions.

First. Whether the Government has a right to utilize the documentary evidence in this civil proceeding can be best understood by an immediate reference to this Court's holding in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 51 U.S. 385, 40 S.Ct. 182, 183, 64 L.Ed. 319, 24 A.L.R. 1426. Appellees here contend that the Silverthorne holding is a complete and permanent bar to the Government's introduction of the documents as evidence, to the use of the documents to obtain other evidence, or for any other purpose.

The facts in the Silverthorne case as found by this Court were these: The Silverthornes having been indicted were arrested at their homes early in the morning and detained in custody for some hours. While so detained Government officers 'without a shadow of authority' went to the office of their company and made a clean sweep of all the books, papers and documents found there. 'All the employees were taken or directed to go to the office of the District Attorney of the United States to which also the books, &c., were taken at once.' The District Court ordered all books, etc., returned on a finding that the search and seizure violated the constitutional rights of the parties. Photographs and copies of the papers having been made, a new indictment was returned based upon the knowledge thus obtained. Subpoenas were then issued calling for production of the original papers. Upon refusal to produce, one of the Silverthornes was imprisoned for contempt.

This Court viewed the whole performance of the unlawful search and seizure of the Silverthorne books and papers as an 'outrage,' planned or at least retified by the Government. Under these circumstances it was held that the Government was neither entitled to use the original documents nor any knowledge obtained from the originals, the photostats, or the copies. The rule announced was that evidence or knowledge 'gained by the Government's own wrong' is not merely forbidden to be 'used before the court but that it shall not be used at all.' Other cases in this Court have applied the same rule.² It is an extraordinary sanction, judicially imposed, to limit searches and seizures to those conducted in strict compliance with the commands of the Fourth Amendment.

In the case before us, however, United States officers did not go to the appellees' offices and seize their documents. Officers served a court subpoena on appellees calling on them to produce certain designated documents for use in a grand jury investigation. Appellees challenged the subpoena on the ground that it was so broad and sweeping as to constitute an unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. The District Court at all times has rejected this contention, and appellees do not urge it here. Thus it cannot be thought that the form of the subpoena or the method of its en- forcement constitutes even a 'constructive' search or seizure barred as 'unreasonable' by the Fourth Amendment. Oklahoma Press Pub. Co. v. Walling, 327 U.S. 186, 202—208, 66 S.Ct. 494, 502—505, 90 L.Ed. 614, 166 A.L.R. 531. And up to this point nothing that happened in this case is even remotely analogous to the situation that evoked this Court's condemnation in the Silverthorne case. But the District Court found and appellees here urge that subsequent developments in this case call for application of the Silverthorne rule. Those developments were as follows:

The grand jury before which the documents were produced returned a indictment against appellees and others charging violations of §§ 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.³ Shortly after we decided Ballard v. United States, 329 U.S. 187, 67 S.Ct. 261, 91 L.Ed. 181, the District Court on motion of appellees dismissed the indictment on the ground that the court practice of intentionally and systematically excluding women from the grand jury panel rendered the grand jury an illegally constituted body. On the same day the court granted appellees' motion for return of the previously impounded documents. Later the court ordered the Government to return a number of photostats that had been made of the original documents. In an opinion discussing return of the photostats the District Court reaffirmed its belief that the (76 F.Supp. 215, 217) 'subpoenas did not violate the Fourth Amendment and the Government was entitled to have the documents produced for presentation to a legal grand jury.' The court held, however, that 'when the grand jury turned out to be illegally constituted and the indictment was dismissed * * * the subpoenas amounted to unreasonable searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment * * *.'

In order to implement a congressional policy to have the grand jury a 'truly representative' cross section of the community, we held in the Ballard case, supra, that exclusion of women from the grand jury required dismissal of an indictment. The effect of the District Court's holding here was to add to the Ballard requirement for dismissal of the indictment a further extraordinary sanction devised by this Court to prevent violations of the Fourth Amendment. For here there was no official culpability in issuance or service of the subpoena duces tecum. The sole ultimate reason for the District Court's application of the Silverthorne rule was that no women were on the grand jury, a circumstance that bears only a remote if not wholly theoretical relationship to search and seizure. We cannot agred that the Silverthorne rule requires such a result.

Aside from the limited extent to which the Fourth Amendment applies to the subpoena process, see Oklahoma Press Pub. Co. v. Walling, 327 U.S. 186, 66 S.Ct. 494, 90 L.Ed. 614, 166 A.L.R. 531, there are other reasons why the Silverthorne exclusionary rule should not be extended to the situation in this case. That rule stems from the Fourth Amendment. This Court has said that the Fourth Amendment command rests 'upon the desirability of having magistrates rather than police officers determine when searches and seizures are permissible and what limitations should be placed upon such activities.' Trupiano v. United States, 334 U.S. 699, 705, 68 S.Ct. 1229, 1232, 92 L.Ed. 1663; see also McDonald v. United States, 335 U.S. 451, 455—456, 69 S.Ct. 191, 193. The Silverthorne search and seizure was made without any authority from a magistrate. And the seizure was so sweeping in nature that it probably could not have been authorized by a search warrant. Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 393—394, 34 S.Ct. 341, 344 345, 58 L.Ed. 652, L.R.A.1915B, 834, Ann.Cas.1915C, 1177. The Silverthorne exclusionary rule as explained in that case and others is designed to safeguard the privacy of people, and to prevent seizure of their papers and property except in compliance with valid judicial process. As tersely stated in the Silverthorne case the rule's purpose is to prevent the Fourth Amendment from being reduced to 'a form of words.'

Only by engaging in the most exaggerated apprehensions can the action of the prosecuting officers in this case be considered a threat to the Fourth Amendment. They went to the court for their subpoena. The court approved it. There is no claim that the subpoena was obtained or served in an improper manner or that any Government officer committed a wrong in the way the documents were handled or returned. At least many of the documents were highly relevant to the serious mo opoly offenses charged against appellees. That there were no women on the grand jury did not contribute to any invasion of appellees' privacy. Dismissal of the indictment could not transform what had been proper official conduct into the type of conduct condemned in the Silverthorne and other cases.

It is true that a metaphysical argument can be made to support a strained analogy between the situation here and that in the Silverthorne and other cases. That argument is that the 'illegal' grand jury was only a 'so-called' grand jury, and that the considered judicial command for production of papers before it must be treated as though the court had ordered production of papers before a group of appellees' competitors. This argument has a superficial plausibility on the word level, but if out attention is directed to substance rather than symbols the speciousness of the argument is exposed.

Whatever injury appellees may have suffered resulted from the absence of women on the ground jury and that injury has been remedied by freeing appellees from prosecution under the indictment. Furthermore the search and seizure here, if such it can be called in any true sense, was not the kind that has prompted this Court to hold that the Government has by wrongful conduct of its officers forfeited all opportunity to make use of evidence unlawfully seized. We decline to extend the Silverthorne rule to such an extent. The Fourth Amendment, important as it is in our society, does not call for imposition of justicial sanctions where enforcing officers have followed the law with such punctilious regard as they have here. We hold that dismissal of the grand jury because no women were on it is no sufficient...