RUSSO v. BYRNE - 409 U.S. 1013 (1972)
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U.S. Supreme Court
RUSSO v. BYRNE , 409 U.S. 1013 (1972)
409 U.S. 1013
Anthony Joseph RUSSO, Jr., and Daniel Ellsberg
v.
William Matthew BYRNE, Jr., etc.
No. 72-307.
Supreme Court of the United States
November 13, 1972
On petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
Mr. Justice DOUGLAS, dissenting.
I regret that the Court does not take this occasion to lay down some further ground rules for the conduct of criminal cases involving electronic surveillance, in the sensitive area, which involves both the Fourth and the Sixth Amendments.
In Alderman v. United States, 394 U.S. 165, we laid down rules governing the district courts where there had been electronic surveillance of the defendant in a criminal case or where in other surveillance his words had been recorded. Alderman and its descendants made possible the conduct of criminal trials with fairness to all sides and with no disturbance to orderly proceedings.
The present case is one of several that have come across my desk this year involving not the surveillance of a
defendant in a criminal case but the surveillance of his lawyer.
It is time, I think, that we hold that the confidences of the lawyer- client relationship remain inviolate. It is also time that we set forth the prescribed procedures in an Alderman type of opinion.
The problems where the lawyer is involved seem to me to be as critical as those where the defendant's privacy under the Fourth Amendment is violated. [Footnote 1] The ruling [409 U.S. 1013 , 1015]
