Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, on the matter of whether wiretapping of private telephone conversations, conducted by federal agents without a search warrant with recordings subsequently used as evidence, constituted a violation of the target’s rights under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that the constitutional rights of a wiretapping target have not been violated.
In an influential dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis stated that, "[The Founding Fathers] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment."
This decision was overturned by Katz v. United States in 1967.
Background
Seizure of evidence
Until 1914, the American judicial system largely followed the precepts of English common law on matters pertaining to the validity of introducing evidence in criminal trials. In most cases, the general philosophy was that the process to obtain the evidence had little to do with its admissibility in court. The only limiting factor was that police agents could not break the law when seizing the evidence.
In 1914, in the landmark case Weeks v. United States, the Supreme Court held unanimously that illegal seizure of items from a private residence was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and established the exclusionary rule that prohibits admission of illegally obtained evidence in federal courts. Because the Bill of Rights did not at the time extend to the states, such a prohibition applied only to federal agents and covered only federal trials. It was not until the Supreme Court ruling in Mapp v. Ohio (1961) that the exclusionary rule was extended to state law enforcement officers as well.
Olmstead's complaint
The Olmstead case included several petitioners, one of whom was Roy Olmstead, who challenged their criminal convictions, arguing that the use of evidence obtained from wiretapped private telephone conversations amounted to a violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. That decision was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Opinion of the court
Chief Justice William Howard Taft delivered the Opinion of the Court. Taft examined "perhaps the most important" precedent, Weeks v. United States, which involved a conviction for using the mail to transport lottery tickets. Taft wrote that per this precedent, the Fourth Amendment forbade the introduction of evidence in court if it had been obtained in violation of the amendment. This interpretation complies with the historical purpose of the Fourth Amendment, as it was intended to prevent the use of governmental force to search and seize a citizen’s personal property and effects. This passage was quoted by Timothy McVeigh at his 1997 trial for the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
In 2018, the "famous dissent" by Brandeis was cited affirmatively by the Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States for the proposition that the courts are obligated to ensure that the "progress of science" does not erode Fourth Amendment protections as "subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy... become available to the Government".
Impact
After his failed appeals, Roy Olmstead spent his 4-year prison sentence at the McNeil Island Correctional Institute in Washington State. He then became a carpenter. On December 25, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt granted him a full presidential pardon. Besides restoring his constitutional rights, the pardon remitted his court costs. Eventually, Olmstead became a well-known Christian Science practitioner who worked with prison inmates on an anti-alcoholism agenda until his death in 1966 at age 79.
In the year after Olmstead's death, the Supreme Court vacated his conviction via the Katz v. United States ruling, in which the nearly 40 year-old Olmstead precedent was overturned via a new interpretation of the Fourth Amendment as applicable "to certain areas or to tangible objects" beyond basic police searches of a suspect's home.
See also
- List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 277