Your House & Mine

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. . . .

Ever since the Fourth Amendment was ratified, the question has been argued: When is a search reasonable? Last week the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 decision, drew a shaky line. The case was that of George Harris, a petty criminal of Oklahoma City. FBI agents had warrants for his arrest for suspected forgery. They seized him in his four-room apartment, then searched the whole apartment for two concealed checks. They never found them. Instead, after five hours' search, they found a well-concealed envelope marked "personal papers," which contained eight notices of classification and eleven draft registration cards. The charges of forgery were dropped and Harris was tried and convicted for illegal possession of the draft cards. His lawyers appealed, pleading that the evidence had been obtained by illegal search.

A majority of the Justices took an empirical view. The test of reasonableness, wrote Chief Justice Vinson, varied with each case. A search for objects connected with a crime was legal in certain circumstances. In this case, the search was reasonable. It had to be intensive because of the small size of the objects searched for. The search was made "in good faith" and not as a pretext for looking for something else. The draft cards were seized legally.

The Odious General Warrant. Dissents were violent. Wrote Justice Murphy: "The Court today has resurrected and approved, in effect, the use of the odious general warrant or writ of assistance." Most crimes, he pointed out, have connected with them some small object, and a search for it inevitably becomes a general exploratory ransacking.

A legal search warrant, since it must specify what is to be searched for and seized, "is not only unnecessary; it is a hindrance." As for the officers' good faith, "history has shown good police intentions to be inadequate safeguards for the precious rights of man."

Only objects "in plain sight," three dissents thought, could logically be seized. This did not satisfy Justice Jackson. He would rigidly limit the search to the body of the person arrested. Said Jackson: "It would seem a little capricious to say that a gun on top of a newspaper could be taken but a newspaper on top of a gun insulated it from seizure."

Justice Frankfurter was caustic: "If only the Harrises were involved, one might be brutally indifferent. ... [But] what is involved far transcends the fate of some sordid offender. . . . How can there be freedom of thought or freedom of speech or freedom of religion if the police can, without warrant, search your house and mine from garret to cellar merely because they are executing a warrant of arrest? . . . Yesterday the justifying document was an illicit ration book, tomorrow it may be some suspect piece of literature."

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