Lo-Ji Sales, Inc. v. New York
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| Lo-Ji Sales, Inc. v. New York State | ||||||||||
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| Argued April 16, 1979 Decided June 11, 1979 |
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| Majority by: Burger |
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| Laws applied | ||||||||||
| Fourth Amendment (unreasonable searches and seizures). | ||||||||||
Lo-Ji Sales v. New York, 442 U.S. 319 (1979) came to the United States Supreme Court on a writ of certiorari from the New York Court of Appeals seeking review of an affirmation of three convictions of the representative of an adult bookstore in upstate New York State for distributing obscene materials. The defendant pled guilty to the charges while reserving his right to appeal and was fined $1,000 on each count. The Supreme Court reversed the convictions and ruled that the evidence was seized per an illegal search warrant.
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[edit] Facts
On June 20, 1976, an officer with the New York State Police purchased two pornographic films from a store that specialised in selling pornographic books, magazines, and films. The officer brought the items to town magistrate who, upon viewing both films in their entirety, issued a search warrant for the premises of the store not only in order to seize not only copies of the two movies, but also "similar" obscene materials. The magistrate, along with a detachment of police officers, then travelled to the store to serve the warrant. The police continued their "investigation" of the store's merchandise, with the active support of the judge, who himself inspected the allegedly obscene materials himself and ordered the police to seize them. During this search, the judge kept adding items to be seized per the warrant, which grew from two pages when served to a total of sixteen pages once the raid was concluded.
[edit] Holding
The Court unanimously held, in an opinion delivered by Chief Justice Warren Burger, the warrant to be invalid on two grounds. The first of which was the warrant at issue lacked specificity in enumerating the items to be seized because of its authorization for the police to seize "similar" items to the two movies inspected, leaving the police themselves to determine the similarity of the items they seized to the two movies the magistrate determined to be illegally "obscene". The Court reasoned the warrant at issue to be nothing more than a contemporary version of the eighteenth century English writ of assistance that the Fourth Amendment prohibited. Secondly, the Court held that the magistrate, in leading the police ransacking of the store and directing the police personally to items he wanted seized, illegally departed from the doctrine requiring that search warrants are only to be issued by "neutral and detached" magistrates.
[edit] Important Notes
No First Amendment issues regarding whether the items were truly "obscene" (and thus not constitutionally protected) were presented for review. Furthermore, the Court distinguished the case of Heller v. New York, 418 U.S. 483 (1973), which held a search warrant to meet the requirements of the Fourth Amendment when issued by a judge, who as a paying customer, viewed a pornographic movie at a theatre, found it to be obscene, then met a police officer on the spot and issued a search warrant for its seizure. The Court reasoned that the issuing judge in Lo-Ji Sales was far more personally involved in investigating the facts at issue than the judge in Heller.
