Kaiser v. New York

1969-05-05

Headline: Court upheld a conviction based on pre‑Katz non‑trespassory wiretap recordings, allowing prosecutors to use those intercepted phone calls while later Fourth Amendment and federal interception rules apply only prospectively.

Holding: The Court affirmed the conviction, holding that non‑trespassory wiretap evidence recorded before Katz was admissible and that federal interception exclusionary rules did not bar its use because those rules were applied only prospectively.

Real World Impact:

Allows prosecutors to use pre‑Katz, non‑trespassory wiretap recordings in trials.
Defendants with phone taps before Katz may not get evidence excluded.
Later privacy rules apply only to recordings made after those decisions.

Topics: wiretapping and privacy, criminal evidence, phone surveillance, search and seizure

Summary

Background

A man convicted in New York in 1966 of conspiracy to extort, attempted extortion, and coercion challenged the use of two taped telephone calls at his trial. The calls, made in 1964 from outside New York to an associate in a Manhattan bar, were recorded by a device attached to the building’s central phone wires under a warrant issued under New York’s § 813‑a. The state courts upheld the conviction, and the Supreme Court agreed to review whether those taped conversations could be used at trial.

Reasoning

The central question was whether the recorded calls were barred by new Fourth Amendment and federal interception rules announced after the recordings were made. The Court explained that earlier law treated non‑intrusive wiretaps differently until Katz changed the rule, but another decision (Desist) made Katz apply only prospectively. Because the wiretapping here happened before Katz and involved no physical entry into a private space, the Court held the recordings were admissible. The Court also said the federal ban on intercepted communications (§ 605) and the later case extending that ban to states (Lee) were applied only prospectively, so § 605 did not force exclusion of the evidence at this trial. The Court rejected a separate due‑process claim about the prosecutor’s remarks as not raising a substantial federal question.

Real world impact

This ruling lets prosecutors use non‑trespassory phone recordings made before Katz and before the states were bound by the § 605 exclusionary rule. It means privacy rules announced later do not automatically undo older convictions; future cases and recordings after those decisions remain governed by the new rules.

Dissents or concurrances

Some Justices disagreed: Justice Harlan would have applied the later Katz/Berger approach and reversed, and Justice Black agreed in result for his prior reasons; Justice Douglas also dissented.