Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1952

Rochin v. California

342 U.S. 165 | 72 S. Ct. 205 | 96 L. Ed. 2d 183 | 1952 U.S. LEXIS 2576 | 25 A.L.R. 2d 1396 | 96 L. Ed. 183

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, this case holds that police conduct so brutal and invasive that it “shocks the conscience” cannot be used to secure a state criminal conviction under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

Background

Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs, acting on information that Rochin was selling narcotics, entered the house where he lived and forced their way into his bedroom without a warrant. They saw two capsules on a nightstand. When an officer asked about them, Rochin put the capsules in his mouth. The officers struggled with him in an unsuccessful effort to force his mouth open, handcuffed him, and took him to a hospital. At an officer’s direction, a doctor forced an emetic solution into Rochin’s stomach through a tube. Rochin vomited two capsules containing morphine.

Rochin was convicted in a California bench trial for possessing morphine, with the capsules as the principal evidence. The California District Court of Appeal affirmed even while finding that the officers had unlawfully entered Rochin’s room and had assaulted, battered, tortured, and falsely imprisoned him. The California Supreme Court denied review. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide whether the conviction violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether a state may obtain and use evidence by forcibly pumping a suspect’s stomach after an unlawful entry and physical struggle.

Holding

No. The use of the morphine capsules obtained through this conduct violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Reasoning

The Due Process Clause does not make this Court a general overseer of state criminal justice. States retain primary responsibility for defining and enforcing crimes, and federal review of state convictions is narrow. But due process requires the Court to examine the entire course by which a conviction was obtained and to determine whether it violates fundamental standards of fairness and decency.

Due process protects rights that are deeply rooted in the traditions and conscience of the American people or implicit in ordered liberty. Although that standard is not mechanically precise, it is not a license for judges to rely on personal preferences. It calls for disciplined constitutional judgment informed by history, legal tradition, and the practical demands of a changing society.

The officers’ conduct—illegally invading Rochin’s bedroom, struggling to extract the capsules from his mouth, and then causing a doctor to pump his stomach against his will—was conduct that “shocks the conscience.” These methods were too close to the rack and screw to be constitutionally acceptable, even in the effort to obtain evidence of crime.

The constitutional defect was not cured by the fact that the capsules were reliable physical evidence. The Court’s coerced-confession cases rest not only on concern about reliability, but also on the principle that government may not secure convictions through methods that offend fundamental fairness and human dignity. A State cannot constitutionally forbid police from forcibly extracting evidence from a suspect’s mind while permitting them to extract it by force from his stomach.

Allowing the conviction to stand would give official brutality the cloak of law and would discredit the legal system. The Court therefore reversed without attempting to define every permissible or impermissible form of bodily intrusion; on these extreme facts, the due-process violation was clear.

Concurrences

Justice Black

Reasoning

Justice Black agreed that Rochin’s conviction had to be reversed, but he would have rested the decision on the Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self-incrimination rather than on the majority’s substantive due-process standard. In his view, the privilege applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, as he had argued in Adamson v. California.

For Black, a person is compelled to be a witness against himself not only when forced to testify orally, but also when the government forcibly takes incriminating evidence from his body through modern scientific means. Because California used capsules obtained in that manner, it violated the Fifth Amendment.

Black objected to the majority’s reliance on open-ended standards such as conduct that “shocks the conscience” or offends civilized decencies. He believed that adherence to the Bill of Rights’ specific guarantees provides more stable and durable protection for individual liberty than an indeterminate due-process inquiry.

Justice Douglas

Reasoning

Justice Douglas also concurred in the reversal but rejected the majority’s use of a free-floating due-process standard. He would hold that the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination applies in state as well as federal prosecutions and directly excludes the evidence obtained from Rochin’s stomach.

Douglas acknowledged that an accused may be required to submit to ordinary identifying acts, such as standing, turning, or trying on clothing. But he drew the constitutional line at obtaining words from a person’s lips, capsules from the person’s stomach, or blood from the person’s veins without consent. In his view, each is incriminating evidence compelled from the accused and is inadmissible under the Fifth Amendment.

Douglas stressed that the majority of state courts had admitted comparable bodily evidence. He thought it unfair to tell state courts that the Fifth Amendment did not bind them, yet condemn their evidentiary rule as inconsistent with civilized decency. A clear incorporation rule, he argued, would avoid making constitutional protection depend on the individual sensibilities of judges.