''Berger v. New York'', 388 U.S. 41 (1967), was a

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

decision invalidating a New York law under the Fourth Amendment, because the statute authorized electronic eavesdropping without required procedural safeguards.

Background

Under New York Code of Criminal Procedure § 813-a, police obtained an ex parte order to bug the office of

attorney Attorney may refer to: * Lawyer ** Attorney at law, in some jurisdictions * Attorney, one who has power of attorney * ''The Attorney'', a 2013 South Korean film See also * Attorney general, the principal legal officer of (or advisor to) a gove ...

Ralph Berger. Based on evidence obtained by the

surveillance Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as c ...

, Berger was convicted of conspiracy to bribe a public official. The statute allowed electronic eavesdropping for up to two months upon a standard of "a reasonable ground to believe that evidence of a crime may be thus obtained." Further two-month extensions of the original order could be granted if investigators made a showing that such surveillance would be in the public interest. The statute required neither notice to the person surveilled nor any justification of such secrecy. The communications sought did not have to be described with any particularity; surveillance requests had to identify only the person targeted and the phone number to be tapped. Finally, the statute did not require a return on the warrant, so law enforcement officers did not have to account to a judge for their use of evidence gathered.

Opinion of the Court

In an opinion written by

Justice Justice, in its broadest sense, is the principle that people receive that which they deserve, with the interpretation of what then constitutes "deserving" being impacted upon by numerous fields, with many differing viewpoints and perspective ...

Tom C. Clark Thomas Campbell Clark (September 23, 1899June 13, 1977) was an American lawyer who served as the 59th United States Attorney General from 1945 to 1949 and as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1949 to 1967. Clark ...

, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that section 813-a violated the Fourth Amendment, made enforceable against the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, because it lacked "adequate judicial supervision ndprotective procedures." Notably, the Court invalidated the law on its face rather than as applied to the petitioner. The Court likened such an indiscriminate grant of authority to search for any evidence of any crime to a

general warrant A writ of assistance is a written order (a writ) issued by a court instructing a law enforcement official, such as a sheriff or a tax collector, to perform a certain task. Historically, several types of writs have been called "writs of assistance ...

, a tool used by British authorities in colonial America that the Fourth Amendment was enacted to outlaw. The Court held that conversations are protected by the Fourth Amendment, and that the use of electronic devices to capture conversations thus constituted a "search." This holding predates by several months the more famous case of ''

Katz v. United States ''Katz v. United States'', 389 U.S. 347 (1967), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court redefined what constitutes a "search" or "seizure" with regard to the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ...

'', which extended Fourth Amendment protection to a conversation in a public phone booth based on the speaker's

reasonable expectation of privacy Expectation of privacy is a legal test which is crucial in defining the scope of the applicability of the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is related to, but is not the same as, a ''right to privacy ...

Legacy

Academic Colin Agur argues that ''Berger'', along with ''Katz v. United States'', were responses by the Court to police and government abuse of telephone surveillance. ''Berger'', specifically, limited police wiretapping when it struck down the New York statute for being overly broad.

References

External links

*{{caselaw source , case = ''Berger v. New York'', {{ussc, 388, 41, 1967, el=no , googlescholar = https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7370572188907228701 , justia =https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/41/ , loc =http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep388/usrep388041/usrep388041.pdf , oyez =https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/615 United States Supreme Court cases United States Supreme Court cases of the Warren Court United States Fourth Amendment case law Privacy of telecommunications United States privacy case law 1967 in United States case law Legal history of New York (state) 1967 in New York (state)