The prisoner, Frank DeForte, was one of several labor union officials on Long Island who had been convicted of racketeering-related charges connected to a scheme in which they attempted to monopolize the jukebox market in the New York Metropolitan area.
DeForte's second, arguing as he had at trial and on his state appeal, that the search of his desk violated his reasonable expectation of privacy and thus his Fourth Amendment rights, was the one the Supreme Court heard.
Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote for the majority that under the Court's recent holding in Katz v. United States, DeForte had a reasonable expectation of privacy over the papers he kept at work even though they were not his personal property and he shared the office with his co-defendants.
For most of American history the Fourth Amendment's requirement that the people "be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" was taken to apply strictly only to their physical bodies and real property they had an ownership interest in.
In Jones v. United States, a drug prosecution where the defendant had challenged the use of evidence taken during a search of an apartment he had access to, the Court had extended the Fourth Amendment's protections to anyone "legitimately on the premises".
In Mapp v. Ohio, the Court extended the exclusionary rule under which evidence obtained unconstitutionally cannot be used at trial, to state as well as federal prosecutions,[7] greatly increasing the cases of alleged Fourth Amendment violations it was asked to review.
The committee and its large staff devoted much of their attention to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), where Jimmy Hoffa had been allegedly working with organized crime figures to unseat Dave Beck as union head.
District attorneys around New York began their own investigations into allegations that Local 266 was trying to intimidate employers into allowing the Teamsters to represent their employees instead of other unions they already had collective bargaining agreements with.
They challenged the original seizure of the papers by the district attorney's office as unconstitutional, and argued the long deliberations without sleep had improperly coerced the jury and tainted the result.
He criticized the trial judge for failing to anticipate that the jury might need to spend the night in a hotel, but found that the lack of sleep had not unduly affected its verdict.
[26] Jones had presented a defendant with a quandary: if he had, as case law up to that point required, claimed a possessory interest in the seized narcotics in order to suppress them, he would also have been incriminating himself, in violation of his rights under the Fifth Amendment.
The Court resolved the issue by holding that in cases where mere possession of the property in question was the offense alleged, defendants need not have to admit to such ownership to challenge the admissibility of such evidence, and that they only had to demonstrate they were legitimately on the premises where the search occurred.
The defendant, a Southern California bookmaker, had been convicted of gambling charges based largely on recordings of his end of conversations made by a bug on the outside of the telephone booth he had conducted his business from.
Finally, there was Katz, which "also makes it clear that capacity to claim the protection of the Amendment depends not upon a property right in the invaded place, but upon whether the area was one in which there was a reasonable expectation of freedom from governmental intrusion", Harlan wrote, echoing his concurrence in that case.
Nor was the subpoena constitutionally equivalent to a search warrant, under which the seizure would have been allowed, since it was issued by the district attorney's office and not subject to independent judicial review as the Fourth Amendment required.
Silverthorne did not consider the issue since the documents were accepted as belonging to the corporation or one of its officers, and the "legitimately on premises" rule from Jones was created to resolve the dilemma it posed with the Fifth Amendment.
In 1979 the Fourth Circuit held in United States v. Torch that the mere fact of a defendant's occasional work-related use of a warehouse searched did not establish a privacy expectation.
[53] United States v. Judd, decided by the Fifth Circuit in 1989, upheld a district court ruling that a corporate official's role in preparing seized records did not establish a privacy interest if those documents were kept in a separate office.
The defendant's co-ownership of the bank and the presence of the incriminating documents did not give rise to a reasonable privacy expectation, the court held, since they were kept in another employee's office and they would have been subject to routine review by federal regulators.
"[A] photograph placed in a desk or a letter posted on an employee bulletin board," for instance, were personal items that nevertheless became part of the workplace context by virtue of that placement.
She quoted the Court's holding in Connick v. Myers, a case involving the First Amendment rights of public employees, that "government offices could not function if every employment decision became a constitutional matter".
As part of an FBI child pornography sting operation, the defendant, James Anderson, had been sent what he had been led to believe were videotapes of children with sexually explicit content (they were actually blank).
[71] Concerned that he would realize law enforcement was involved when he discovered the tapes were blank and destroy other evidence that might be present, the agents decided exigent circumstances existed and forced their way into the building.
[73][note 10] Kelly argued in dissent that the majority's logic would have extended Anderson's expectation of privacy to the entire office suite he had chosen to isolate himself and watch his videos.
The Fourth Circuit found the remote search of an employee computer valid in another child-porn case, United States v. Simons, since the Internet use policy defeated any expectation of privacy.
In response, the original panel withdrew its first opinion and issued a newer, longer one, acknowledging as the first had not the "seminal" importance of Mancusi in establishing an employee's expectation of privacy at work.
The motion failed to attract enough votes, but 11 judges dissented, arguing that office politics at Frontline and statements in the record made it unclear whether there was or could have been consent, and that even if there was that was not enough to overcome Ziegler's privacy rights.
Anthony Kennedy wrote a lengthy majority opinion that concluded the audit of the pagers was reasonably work-related, and declined to establish any new standards for Internet privacy since the technology was still "in flux" and social expectations around it were insufficiently settled.
Eleventh Circuit judge Frank Hull similarly said Quon had "a marked lack of clarity" when withdrawing and reissuing a previous panel decision controversially holding that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy over the contents of e-mail.
Michele Morris, an Akron, Ohio, employment lawyer, believes both the nexus and totality tests have proved deficient at protecting privacy at work, and in so doing undermined what the Court sought to accomplish in Mancusi.