Wheeldin v. Wheeler (1963)

In Wheeldin v. Wheeler, 373 U.S. 647 (1963), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld decisions by federal district and circuit courts dismissing a claim for damages that Wheeldin (who had since withdrawn from the case) and Dawson had brought against Wheeler, an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee who had issued subpoenas requiring them to appear before the committee.

Justice William O. Douglas delivered the opinion for the Court. Douglas believed that federal courts had jurisdiction over petitioners' claims, but he could identify no Fourth Amendment violation in a subpoena that had been delivered to petitioners but had not resulted in their arrest or citation for contempt. Although petitioners viewed the subpoenas (at least one of which had been delivered to a place of work) as a form of harassment, Douglas did not believe that the subpoenas constituted an illegal search or seizure or that Congress had created “a cause of action for abuse of the subpoena power by a federal officer, at least where the subpoena was never given coercive effect.” Douglas noted that the decision in Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), had significantly limited federal common-law actions in preference to reliance on local state law. Here, the petitioners were alleging that committee staffers had issued blank subpoenas without proper authority, but Douglas found that “no general statute making federal officers liable for acts committed ‘under color,’ but in violation, of their federal authority has been passed.”

Justice William J. Brennan issued a dissent, joined by Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice Hugo Black, but he denied that petitioners' main reliance had been on the Fourth Amendment. He believed instead that their action was “a tort [a private, or civil, wrong] of malicious abuse of federal process by a federal officer,” and he thought the Court should be open to remedies. He cited a lower court decision stating that “implied rights of action are not contingent upon statutory language which affirmatively indicates that they are intended.” He presumed that Congress would want to limit the scope of congressional committee actions. Although not relying specifically on the Fourth Amendment, Douglas cited the decision, applying its exclusionary rule to the states in Mapp v. Ohio (1961) to establish that state remedies were sometimes inadequate to addressing wrongful acts of public officers. Noting that his own conclusions were “deliberately tentative,” Douglas still thought the lower courts should examine the issue.