United States v. Dionisio

410 U.S. 1, 93 S. Ct. 764, 35 L. Ed. 2d 67, 1973 U.S. LEXIS 110
CourtSupreme Court of the United States
DecidedJanuary 22, 1973
Docket71-229
StatusPublished
Cited by1,409 cases

This text of 410 U.S. 1 (United States v. Dionisio) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of the United States primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Dionisio, 410 U.S. 1, 93 S. Ct. 764, 35 L. Ed. 2d 67, 1973 U.S. LEXIS 110 (1973).

Opinion

Mr. Justice Stewart

delivered the opinion of the Court.

A special grand jury was convened in the Northern District of Illinois in February 1971, to investigate possible violations of federal criminal statutes relating to gambling. In the course of its investigation, the grand jury received in evidence certain voice recordings that had been obtained pursuant to court orders. 1

*3 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. Each witness was advised that he was a potential defendant in a criminal prosecution. Each was asked to examine a transcript of an intercepted conversation, and to go to a nearby office of the United States Attorney to read the transcript into a recording device. The witnesses were advised that they would be allowed to have their attorneys present when they read the transcripts. Dionisio and other witnesses refused to furnish the voice exemplars, 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, and that they would “be used solely as a standard of comparison in order to determine whether or not the witness is the person whose voice was intercepted . . . .”

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, and that consequently the order to produce them would *4 not compel any witness to testify against himself. 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 within the proscription of that Amendment:

“The witnesses are lawfully before the grand jury pursuant to subpoena. The Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure applies only where identifying physical characteristics, such as fingerprints, are obtained as a result of unlawful detention of a suspect, or when an intrusion into the body, such as a blood test, is undertaken without a warrant, absent an emergency situation. E. g., Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U. S. 721, 724-728 (1969); Schmerber v. California, 384 U. S. 757, 770-771 (1966).” 2

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. 3

The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed. 442 F. 2d 276. It agreed with the District Court in rejecting the Fifth Amendment claims, 4 but concluded that to compel the voice recordings would violate the Fourth Amendment. In the court's view, the grand *5 jury was “seeking to obtain the voice exemplars of the witnesses by the use of its subpoena powers because probable cause did not exist for their arrest or for some other, less unusual, method of compelling the production of the exemplars.” Id., at 280. The court found that the Fourth Amendment applied to grand jury process, and that “under the fourth amendment law enforcement officials may not compel the production of physical evidence absent a showing of the reasonableness of the seizure. Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U. S. 721 . . . .” Ibid.

In Davis this Court held that it was error to admit the petitioner’s fingerprints into evidence at his trial for rape, 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.” Id., at 281.

In view of a clear conflict between this decision and one in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 5 we granted the Government’s petition for certiorari. 406 U. S. 956.

I

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 *6 the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. In Holt v. United States, 218 U. S. 245, 252, Mr. Justice Holmes, writing for the Court, dismissed as an “extravagant extension of the Fifth Amendment” the argument that it violated the privilege to require a defendant to put on a blouse for identification purposes. He explained that “the prohibition of compelling a man in a criminal court to be witness against himself is a prohibition of the use of physical or moral compulsion to extort communications from him, not an exclusion of his body as evidence when it may be material.” Id., at 252-253.

More recently, in Schmerber v. California, 384 U. S. 757, we relied on Holt, and noted that:

“[B]oth federal and state courts have usually held that '[the privilege] offers no protection against compulsion to submit to fingerprinting, photographing, or measurements, to write or speak for identification, to appear in court, to stand, to assume a stance, to walk, or to make a particular gesture. The distinction which has emerged, often expressed in different ways, is that the privilege is a bar against compelling ‘communications’ or ‘testimony,’ but that compulsion which makes a suspect or accused the source of ‘real or physical evidence’ does not violate it.” Id., at 764 (footnote omitted).

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Bluebook (online)
410 U.S. 1, 93 S. Ct. 764, 35 L. Ed. 2d 67, 1973 U.S. LEXIS 110, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-dionisio-scotus-1973.