Constitutional rights to privacy also give a defendant protection from illegal police raids on homes other than his own, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled recently.
The court made the ruling in reversing the conviction of Jesse W. Jeffers, Jr., on narcotics dealing charges.
Jeffers, 27, Negro, was found guilty in Judge Alexander Holtzoff’s court on testimony that police, without a search warrant, raided a room at the Dunbar Hotel and found 19 bottles of cocaine he allegedly had hidden there.
Jeffers lived elsewhere in the hotel, but the room was rented by relatives of his.
Setting a rare principle of law, the Appeals Court held evidence of the cocaine cache should have been excluded from the case because the police raid was illegal. It pointed out the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment specifically bans illegal searches of a defendant’s home, and said the principle should be enlarged to cover illegal raids on “premises that were not his.”
Judge E. Barrett Prettyman, in a dissent from the majority opinion, said “I do not see how an individual’s rights can be invaded by Government seizure of ... unstamped narcotics, not on the individual’s person or premises.”
He emphasized the case “is important in the enforcement of the narcotics laws.”
The curious part of the whole affair is that the defendant admitted the untaxed, unstamped dope was his. In fact, he demanded its return from the government.
In another of its feats of legal legerdemain, beyond the poor reasoning of a couple of reporters who didn’t graduate from Harvard Law, the august court said to the defendant in effect: “Possession of dope is illegal, so you can’t have it back, though you didn’t commit any crime when you had it before.”
Try and figure that one out.