Hayes v. Florida (1985)

470 U.S. 811 (1985)

Vote: 8-0
Decision: Reversed
Majority: White, joined by Burger, Rehnquist, Stevens, and O’Connor
Concurrence: Brennan, joined by Marshall
Concurrence: Blackmun
Not Participating: Powell

JUSTICE WHITE delivered the opinion of the Court.

The issue before us in this case is whether the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, applicable to the States by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment, was properly applied by the District Court of Appeal of Florida … to allow police to transport a suspect to the station house for fingerprinting, without his consent and without probable cause or prior judicial authorization.

A series of burglary-rapes occurred in Punta Gorda, Florida, in 1980. Police found latent fingerprints on the doorknob of the bedroom of one of the victims, fingerprints they believed belonged to the assailant. The police also found a herringbone pattern tennis shoe print near the victim’s front porch. Although they had little specific information to tie petitioner Hayes to the crime … the investigators came to consider petitioner a principal suspect. They decided to visit petitioner’s home to obtain his fingerprints or, if he was uncooperative, to arrest him. They did not seek a warrant. …

Arriving at petitioner’s house, the officers spoke to petitioner on his front porch. When he expressed reluctance voluntarily to accompany them to the station for fingerprinting, one of the investigators explained that they would therefore arrest him. Petitioner, in the words of the investigator, then “blurted out” that he would rather go with the officers to the station than be arrested. While the officers were on the front porch, they also seized a pair of herringbone pattern tennis shoes in plain view.

Petitioner was then taken to the station house, where he was fingerprinted. When police determined that his prints matched those left at the scene of the crime, petitioner was placed under formal arrest. Before trial, petitioner moved to suppress the fingerprint evidence, claiming it was the fruit of an illegal detention. The trial court denied the motion and admitted the evidence without expressing a reason. Petitioner was convicted of the burglary and sexual battery committed at the scene where the latent fingerprints were found.

The District Court of Appeal of Florida … affirmed the conviction. … [A]lthough finding neither consent nor probable cause, the court held, analogizing to the stop-and-frisk rule of Terry v. Ohio (1968) that the officers could transport petitioner to the station house and take his fingerprints on the basis of their reasonable suspicion that he was involved in the crime.

The Florida Supreme Court denied review. … We granted certiorari to review this application of Terry and we now reverse.

We agree with petitioner that Davis v. Mississippi (1969) requires reversal of the judgment below. In Davis, in the course of investigating a rape, police officers brought petitioner Davis to police headquarters on December 3, 1965. He was fingerprinted and briefly questioned before being released. He was later charged and convicted of the rape. An issue there was whether the fingerprints taken on December 3 were the inadmissible fruits of an illegal detention. Concededly, the police at that time were without probable cause for an arrest, there was no warrant, and Davis had not consented to being taken to the station house. The State nevertheless contended that the Fourth Amendment did not forbid an investigative detention for the purpose of fingerprinting, even in the absence of probable cause or a warrant. We rejected that submission, holding that Davis’ detention for the purpose of fingerprinting was subject to the constraints of the Fourth Amendment and exceeded the permissible limits of those temporary seizures authorized by Terry v. Ohio, supra. This was so even though fingerprinting, because it involves neither repeated harassment nor any of the probing into private life and thoughts that often marks interrogation and search, represents a much less serious intrusion upon personal security than other types of searches and detentions. Nor was it a sufficient answer to the Fourth Amendment issue to recognize that fingerprinting is an inherently more reliable and effective crime-solving mechanism than other types of evidence such as lineups and confessions. The Court indicated that perhaps, under narrowly confined circumstances, a detention for fingerprinting on less than probable cause might comply with the Fourth Amendment, but found it unnecessary to decide that question. …

Here, as in Davis, there was no probable cause to arrest, no consent to the journey to the police station, and no judicial authorization for such a detention for fingerprinting purposes. Unless later cases have undermined Davis or we now disavow that decision, the judgment below must be reversed.

None of our later cases have undercut the holding in Davis that transportation to and investigative detention at the station house without probable cause or judicial authorization together violate the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, some 10 years later, in Dunaway v. New York (1979) we refused to extend Terry v. Ohio, supra, to authorize investigative interrogations at police stations on less than probable cause. …

Nor are we inclined to forswear Davis. There is no doubt that, at some point in the investigative process, police procedures can qualitatively and quantitatively be so intrusive with respect to a suspect’s freedom of movement and privacy interests as to trigger the full protection of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.  And our view continues to be that the line is crossed when the police, without probable cause or a warrant, forcibly remove a person from his home or other place in which he is entitled to be. …

None of the foregoing implies that a brief detention in the field for the purpose of fingerprinting, where there is only reasonable suspicion not amounting to probable cause, is necessarily impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. …

… [T]his Term, we concluded that, if there are articulable facts supporting a reasonable suspicion that a person has committed a criminal offense, that person may be stopped in order to identify him, to question him briefly, or to detain him briefly while attempting to obtain additional information. …

We also do not abandon the suggestion in Davis and Dunaway [(1979)] that, under circumscribed procedures, the Fourth Amendment might permit the judiciary to authorize the seizure of a person on less than probable cause and his removal to the police station for the purpose of fingerprinting. We do not, of course, have such a case before us. …

As we have said, absent probable cause and a warrant, Davis v. Mississippi requires the reversal of the judgment of the Florida District Court of Appeal.

It is so ordered.

Excerpted by Jacob Staab

United States v. Dionisio (1973)

410 U.S. 1 (1973)

Vote: 7-3
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Stewart, joined by Burger, White, Blackmun, Powell, and Rehnquist
Concur/Dissent: Brennan
Dissent: Douglas
Dissent: Marshall

MR. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.

A special grand jury was convened … to investigate possible violations of federal criminal statutes. … In the course of its investigation, the grand jury received in evidence certain voice recordings. …

The grand jury subpoenaed approximately 20 persons, including the respondent Dionisio, seeking to obtain from them voice exemplars for comparison with the recorded conversations that had been received in evidence. … Dionisio and other witnesses refused … asserting that these disclosures would violate their rights under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

The Government then filed separate petitions in the United States District Court to compel Dionisio and the other witnesses to furnish the voice exemplars to the grand jury. The petitions stated that the exemplars were “essential and necessary” to the grand jury investigation. …

Following a hearing, the District Judge rejected the witnesses’ constitutional arguments and ordered them to comply with the grand jury’s request. He reasoned that voice exemplars, like handwriting exemplars or fingerprints, were not testimonial or communicative evidence. … The District Judge also found that there would be no Fourth Amendment violation, because the grand jury subpoena did not itself violate the Fourth Amendment, and the order to produce the voice exemplars would involve no unreasonable search and seizure. …

When Dionisio persisted in his refusal to respond to the grand jury’s directive, the District Court adjudged him in civil contempt and ordered him committed to custody until he obeyed the court order, or until the expiration of 18 months.

The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed. It agreed with the District Court in rejecting the Fifth Amendment claims, but concluded that to compel the voice recordings would violate the Fourth Amendment. …

In Davis [v. Mississippi (1969)], this Court held that it was error to admit the petitioner’s fingerprints into evidence … because they had been obtained during a police detention following a lawless wholesale roundup of the petitioner and more than 20 other youths. Equating the procedures followed by the grand jury in the present case to the fingerprint detentions in Davis, the Court of Appeals reasoned that

“[t]he dragnet effect here, where approximately twenty persons were subpoenaed for purposes of identification, has the same invidious effect on fourth amendment rights as the practice condemned in Davis.”

In view of a clear conflict between this decision and the one in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, we granted … certiorari. …

The Court of Appeals correctly rejected the contention that the compelled production of the voice exemplars would violate the Fifth Amendment. It has long been held that the compelled display of identifiable physical characteristics infringes no interest protected by the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. …

The Court of Appeals held that the Fourth Amendment required a preliminary showing of reasonableness before a grand jury witness could be compelled to furnish a voice exemplar, and that in this case the proposed “seizures” of the voice exemplars would be unreasonable because of the large number of witnesses summoned. … We disagree.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees that all people shall be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. … ” Any Fourth Amendment violation in the present setting must rest on a lawless governmental intrusion upon the privacy of “persons,” rather than on interference with “property relationships or private papers.” Schmerber v. California, [1966]. … In Terry v. Ohio [1968] the Court explained the protection afforded to “persons” in terms of the statement in Katz v. United States [1967] that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places,” and concluded that

“wherever an individual may harbor a reasonable ‘expectation of privacy,’ … The is entitled to be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”

Terry v. Ohio.

As the Court made clear in Schmerber, supra, the obtaining of physical evidence from a person involves a potential Fourth Amendment violation at two different levels — the “seizure” of the “person” necessary to bring him into contact with government agents, and the subsequent search for and seizure of the evidence. In Schmerber, we found the … seizure of the blood sample from his body reasonable in light of the exigent circumstances. …

And in Terry, we concluded that neither the initial seizure of the person, an investigatory “stop” by a policeman, nor the subsequent search, a “pat-down” of his outer clothing for weapons, constituted a violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. The constitutionality of the compulsory production of exemplars from a grand jury witness necessarily turns on the same dual inquiry — whether either the initial compulsion of the person to appear before the grand jury or the subsequent directive to make a voice recording is an unreasonable “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

It is clear that a subpoena to appear before a grand jury is not a “seizure” in the Fourth Amendment sense, even though that summons may be inconvenient or burdensome. …

The compulsion exerted by a grand jury subpoena differs from the seizure effected by an arrest or even an investigative “stop” in more than civic obligation. …

This case is thus quite different from Davis v. Mississippi, supra, on which the Court of Appeals primarily relied. For, in Davis, it was the initial seizure — the lawless dragnet detention — that violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, not the taking of the fingerprints. …

This is not to say that a grand jury subpoena is some talisman that dissolves all constitutional protections. The grand jury cannot require a witness to testify against himself. It cannot require the production by a person of private books and records that would incriminate him. The Fourth Amendment provides protection against a grand jury subpoena duces tecum too sweeping in its terms “to be regarded as reasonable.”  Hale v. Henkel; cf. Oklahoma Press Publishing Co. v. Walling [1906]. …

But we are here faced with no such constitutional infirmities in the subpoena to appear before the grand jury or in the order to make the voice recordings. …

The Court of Appeals found critical significance in the fact that the grand jury had summoned approximately 20 witnesses to furnish voice exemplars. We think that fact is basically irrelevant. …

… Dionisio argues that the grand jury’s subsequent directive to make the voice recording was itself an infringement of his rights under the Fourth Amendment. We cannot accept that argument.

In Katz v. United States, supra, we said that the Fourth Amendment provides no protection for what “a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office. … ” The physical characteristics of a person’s voice, its tone and manner, as opposed to the content of a specific conversation, are constantly exposed to the public. Like a man’s facial characteristics, or handwriting, his voice is repeatedly produced for others to hear. No person can have a reasonable expectation that others will not know the sound of his voice. …

The required disclosure of a person’s voice is thus immeasurably further removed from the Fourth Amendment protection than was the intrusion into the body effected by the blood extraction in Schmerber.

“The interests in human dignity and privacy which the Fourth Amendment protects forbid any such intrusions on the mere chance that desired evidence might be obtained.”

Schmerber v. California. Similarly, a seizure of voice exemplars does not involve the “severe, though brief, intrusion upon cherished personal security,” effected by the “pat-down” in Terry — “surely … an annoying, frightening, and perhaps humiliating experience.” Terry v. Ohio. …

… [N]either the summons to appear before the grand jury nor its directive to make a voice recording infringed upon any interest protected by the Fourth Amendment. …

Since the Court of Appeals found an unreasonable search and seizure where none existed, and imposed a preliminary showing of reasonableness where none was required, its judgment is reversed and this case is remanded to that court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Excerpted by Jacob Staab

United States v. Wade (1967)

388 U.S. 218 (1967)

Vote: 5-4
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Brennan, joined by Clark (in full), joined in part Warren, Douglas, Fortas (all but Part I), Harlan, Stewart, and White (Parts I and III)
Concurrence: Clark
Concurrence/Dissent: Warren
Concurrence/Dissent Black
Concurrence/Dissent: Douglas
Concurrence/Dissent: White, joined by Harlan, Stewart
Concurrence/Dissent: Fortas, joined by Warren, Douglas

MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN delivered the opinion of the Court.

The question here is whether courtroom identifications of an accused at trial are to be excluded from evidence because the accused was exhibited to the witnesses before trial at a post-indictment lineup conducted for identification purposes without notice to, and in the absence of, the accused’s appointed counsel.

The … bank … was robbed on September 21, 1964. … Wade was arrested on April 2, and counsel was appointed to represent him on April 26. Fifteen days later, an FBI agent, without notice to Wade’s lawyer, arranged to have the two bank employees observe a lineup made up of Wade and five or six other prisoners. … Both bank employees identified Wade. …

At trial, the two employees, when asked on direct examination if the robber was in the courtroom, pointed to Wade. The prior lineup identification was then elicited from both employees on cross-examination … Wade’s counsel moved for a judgment of acquittal or, alternatively, to strike the bank officials’ courtroom identifications on the ground that conduct of the lineup, without notice to and in the absence of his appointed counsel, violated his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and his Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of counsel. The motion was denied, and Wade was convicted. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the conviction … holding that, though the lineup did not violate Wade’s Fifth Amendment rights, “the lineup, held as it was, in the absence of counsel already chosen to represent appellant, was a violation of his Sixth Amendment rights. … “. We granted certiorari. … We reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals and remand to that court with direction to enter a new judgment vacating the conviction and remanding the case to the District Court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

. …

The fact that the lineup involved no violation of Wade’s privilege against self-incrimination does not, however, dispose of his contention that the courtroom identifications should have been excluded because the lineup was conducted without notice to, and in the absence of, his counsel. … [I]t is urged that the assistance of counsel at the lineup was indispensable to protect Wade’s most basic right as a criminal defendant — his right to a fair trial at which the witnesses against him might be meaningfully cross-examined.

The Framers of the Bill of Rights envisaged a broader role for counsel than under the practice then prevailing in England of merely advising his client in “matters of law,” and eschewing any responsibility for “matters of fact.”. …

This background is reflected in the scope given by our decisions to the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee to an accused of the assistance of counsel for his defense. When the Bill of Rights was adopted, there were no organized police forces as we know them today. … In contrast, today’s law enforcement machinery involves critical confrontations of the accused by the prosecution at pretrial proceedings where the results might well … reduce the trial itself to a mere formality. In recognition of these realities of modern criminal prosecution, our cases have construed the Sixth Amendment guarantee to apply to “critical” stages of the proceedings … The plain wording of this guarantee thus encompasses counsel’s assistance whenever necessary to assure a meaningful “defence.”

As early as Powell v. Alabama, [(1932)], we recognized that the period from arraignment to trial was “perhaps the most critical period of the proceedings … “, during which the accused “requires the guiding hand of counsel … “, if the guarantee is not to prove an empty right. That principle has since been applied to require the assistance of counsel at the type of arraignment — for example, that provided by Alabama — where certain rights might be sacrificed or lost. … The principle was also applied in Massiah v. United States [(1964)] where we held that incriminating statements of the defendant should have been excluded from evidence when it appeared that they were overheard by federal agents who, without notice to the defendant’s lawyer, arranged a meeting between the defendant and an accomplice turned informant. We said, quoting a concurring opinion in Spano v. New York [(1959)] that

“[a]nything less … might deny a defendant ‘effective representation by counsel at the only stage when legal aid and advice would help him.'”

In Escobedo v. Illinois [(1964)] … holding that the right to counsel was guaranteed at the point where the accused, prior to arraignment, was subjected to secret interrogation despite repeated requests to see his lawyer. We again noted the necessity of counsel’s presence if the accused was to have a fair opportunity to present a defense at the trial. …

Finally, in Miranda v. Arizona [(1966)] the rules established for custodial interrogation included the right to the presence of counsel. The result was rested on our finding that this and the other rules were necessary to safeguard the privilege against self-incrimination. …

Of course, nothing decided or said in the opinions in the cited cases links the right to counsel only to protection of Fifth Amendment rights. … It is central to that principle that, in addition to counsel’s presence at trial, the accused is guaranteed that he need not stand alone against the State at any stage of the prosecution, formal or informal, in court or out, where counsel’s absence might derogate from the accused’s right to a fair trial. …

In sum, the principle of Powell v. Alabama and succeeding cases requires that we scrutinize any pretrial confrontation of the accused to determine whether the presence of his counsel is necessary to preserve the defendant’s basic right to a fair trial. … It calls upon us to analyze whether potential substantial prejudice to defendant’s rights inheres in the particular confrontation and the ability of counsel to help avoid that prejudice.

The Government characterizes the lineup as a mere preparatory step in the gathering of the prosecution’s evidence, not different — for Sixth Amendment purposes — from various other preparatory steps, such as systematized or scientific analyzing of the accused’s fingerprints, blood sample, clothing, hair, and the like. We think there are differences which preclude such stages’ being characterized as critical stages at which the accused has the right to the presence of his counsel. Knowledge of the techniques of science and technology is sufficiently available, and the variables in techniques few enough, that the accused has the opportunity for a meaningful confrontation of the Government’s case at trial through the ordinary processes of cross-examination of the Government’s expert witnesses and the presentation of the evidence of his own experts. The denial of a right to have his counsel present at such analyses does not therefore violate the Sixth Amendment; they are not critical stages. …

But the confrontation compelled by the State between the accused and the victim or witnesses to a crime to elicit identification evidence is peculiarly riddled with innumerable dangers and variable factors which might … derogate from a fair trial. The vagaries of eyewitness identification are well known; the annals of criminal law are rife with instances of mistaken identification. …

The pretrial confrontation for purpose of identification may take the form of a lineup, also known as an “identification parade” or “showup,” as in the present case, or presentation of the suspect alone to the witness, as in Stovall v. Denno, [(1967)]. It is obvious that risks of suggestion attend either form of confrontation, and increase the dangers inhering in eyewitness identification. …

What facts have been disclosed in specific cases about the conduct of pretrial confrontations for identification illustrate both the potential for substantial prejudice to the accused at that stage and the need for its revelation at trial. …

The potential for improper influence is illustrated by the circumstances, insofar as they appear, surrounding the prior identifications in the three cases we decide today. … In the present case, the testimony of the identifying witnesses elicited on cross-examination revealed that those witnesses were taken to the courthouse and seated in the courtroom to await assembly of the lineup. The courtroom faced on a hallway observable to the witnesses through an open door. The cashier testified that she saw Wade “standing in the hall” within sight of an FBI agent. Five or six other prisoners later appeared in the hall. The vice-president testified that he saw a person in the hall in the custody of the agent who “resembled the person that we identified as the one that had entered the bank.”

. …

The few cases that have surfaced therefore reveal the existence of a process attended with hazards of serious unfairness to the criminal accused, and strongly suggest the plight of the more numerous defendants who are unable to ferret out suggestive influences in the secrecy of the confrontation. We do not assume that these risks are the result of police procedures intentionally designed to prejudice an accused. Rather, we assume they derive from the dangers inherent in eyewitness identification and the suggestibility inherent in the context of the pretrial identification. …

Insofar as the accused’s conviction may rest on a courtroom identification, in fact, the fruit of a suspect pretrial identification which the accused is helpless to subject to effective scrutiny at trial, the accused is deprived of that right of cross-examination which is an essential safeguard to his right to confront the witnesses against him. …

Since it appears that there is grave potential for prejudice, intentional or not, in the pretrial lineup, which may not be capable of reconstruction at trial, and since presence of counsel itself can often avert prejudice … the post-indictment lineup was a critical stage of the prosecution. … Thus, both Wade and his counsel should have been notified of the impending lineup, and counsel’s presence should have been a requisite to conduct of the lineup, absent an “intelligent waiver.”. …

In our view, counsel can hardly impede legitimate law enforcement … cannot help the guilty avoid conviction, but can only help assure that the right man has been brought to justice.

. …

We come now to the question whether the denial of Wade’s motion to strike the courtroom identification by the bank witnesses at trial because of the absence of his counsel at the lineup required, as the Court of Appeals held, the grant of a new trial at which such evidence is to be excluded. We do not think this disposition can be justified without first giving the Government the opportunity to establish by clear and convincing evidence that the in-court identifications were based upon observations of the suspect other than the lineup identification. … Since counsel’s presence at the lineup would equip him to attack not only the lineup identification, but the courtroom identification as well, limiting the impact of violation of the right to counsel to exclusion of evidence only of identification at the lineup itself disregards a critical element of that right. …

On the record now before us, we cannot make the determination whether the in-court identifications had an independent origin. This was not an issue at trial, although there is some evidence relevant to a determination. That inquiry is most properly made in the District Court. …

The judgment of the Court of Appeals is vacated, and the case is remanded to that court with direction to enter a new judgment vacating the conviction and remanding the case to the District Court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Excerpted by Jacob Staab

Kirby v. Illinois (1972)

406 U.S. 682 (1972)

Vote: 5-4
Decision: Affirmed
Plurality: Stewart, joined by Burger, Blackmun, and Rehnquist
Concurrence: Burger
Concurrence: Powell
Dissent: Brennan, joined by Douglas and Marshall
Dissent: White

MR. JUSTICE STEWART announced the judgment of the Court and an opinion in which THE CHIEF JUSTICE, MR. JUSTICE BLACKMUN, and MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST join.

In United States v. Wade and Gilbert v. California[, both (1967)], this Court held

“that a post-indictment pretrial lineup at which the accused is exhibited to identifying witnesses is a critical stage of the criminal prosecution; that police conduct of such a lineup without notice to and in the absence of his counsel denies the accused his Sixth [and Fourteenth] Amendment right to counsel and calls in question the admissibility at trial of the in-court identifications of the accused by witnesses who attended the lineup.”

Gilbert v. California. Those cases further held that no “in-court identifications” are admissible in evidence if their “source” is a lineup conducted in violation of this constitutional standard. “Only a per se exclusionary rule as to such testimony can be an effective sanction,” the Court said. … In the present case, we are asked to extend the Wade-Gilbert per se exclusionary rule to identification testimony based upon a police station showup that took place before the defendant had been indicted or otherwise formally charged with any criminal offense.

… [A] man named Willie Shard reported to the Chicago police that the previous day two men had robbed him … of a wallet containing … traveler’s checks and a Social Security card. … [T]wo police officers stopped the petitioner and … Ralph Bean. … When asked for identification, the petitioner produced a wallet that contained three traveler’s checks and a Social Security card, all bearing the name of Willie Shard. … When asked to explain his possession of Shard’s property, the petitioner … told the officers that he had won them in a crap game. The officers then arrested the petitioner and Bean and took them to a police station.

Only after arriving at the police station … did the arresting officers learn of the Shard robbery. A police car … picked up Shard and brought him to the police station. Immediately upon entering the room in the police station where the petitioner and Bean were seated at a table, Shard positively identified them as the men who had robbed him. … No lawyer was present in the room, and neither the petitioner nor Bean had asked for legal assistance, or been advised of any right to the presence of counsel.

More than six weeks later, the petitioner and Bean were indicted for the robbery of Willie Shard. … [A]t the trial, Shard testified as a witness for the prosecution. … The jury found both defendants guilty, and the petitioner’s conviction was affirmed on appeal. … The Illinois appellate court held that the admission of Shard’s testimony was not error … holding that the Wade-Gilbert per se exclusionary rule is not applicable to pre-indictment confrontations.

We granted certiorari, limited to this question.

We note at the outset that the constitutional privilege against compulsory self-incrimination is in no way implicated here. The Court emphatically rejected the claimed applicability of that constitutional guarantee in Wade. …

. …

It follows that the doctrine of Miranda v. Arizona has no applicability whatever to the issue before us; for the Miranda decision was based exclusively upon the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. …

The Wade-Gilbert exclusionary rule, by contrast, stems from … the guarantee of the right to counsel contained in the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. … [I]t is to the decisions construing that guarantee that we must look in determining the present controversy.

In a line of constitutional cases … it has been firmly established that a person’s Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment right to counsel attaches only at or after the time that adversary judicial proceedings have been initiated against him. …

This is not to say that a defendant in a criminal case has a constitutional right to counsel only at the trial itself. … [T]he point is that … all of those cases have involved points of time at or after the initiation of adversary judicial criminal proceedings — whether by way of formal charge, preliminary hearing, indictment, information, or arraignment.

. …

The initiation of judicial criminal proceedings is far from a mere formalism. It is the starting point of our whole system of adversary criminal justice. …

It is this point, therefore, that marks the commencement of the “criminal prosecutions” to which alone the explicit guarantees of the Sixth Amendment are applicable. …

In this case, we are asked to import into a routine police investigation an absolute constitutional guarantee historically and rationally applicable only after the onset of formal prosecutorial proceedings. We decline to do so. …

. …

The judgment is affirmed.

Excerpted by Jacob Staab