Marcus v. Search Warrant

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-11 05:00:02

Marcus v. Search Warrant, 367 U.S. 717 (1961), full title Marcus v. Search Warrant of Property at 104 East Tenth Street, Kansas City, Missouri, is an in rem case decided by the United States Supreme Court on the seizure of obscene materials. The Court unanimously overturned a Missouri Supreme Court decision upholding the forfeiture of hundreds of magazines confiscated from a Kansas City wholesaler. It held that both Missouri's procedures for the seizure of allegedly obscene material and the execution of the warrant itself violated the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments' prohibitions on search and seizure without due process. Those violations, in turn, threatened the rights protected by the First Amendment.

The case had begun in 1957, when the Kansas City Police Department vice squad raided the warehouse of a local news distributor and five newsstands. Officers seized dozens of publications, far beyond those which had started the investigation, since the search warrants were not specific. Less than half of the seized titles were ultimately found obscene and ordered to be burned.

Justice William Brennan wrote for the Court. He found the officers' conduct similar to that which had inspired the Founding Fathers to write the Fourth Amendment. He added that the Missouri Supreme Court had incorrectly applied an earlier Court holding in sustaining the forfeiture. The result was a system that operated as an effective prior restraint. Hugo Black, in a concurring opinion, joined by William O. Douglas restated his conviction that the Fourteenth Amendment applies all the rights protected by the Constitution to the states.