Constitutional Law in 1920–1921. II: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1920

The “self-incrimination” clause of the Fifth Amendment was brought forward in five cases, in three of which it was attended by the “search and seizure” provisions of the Fourth Amendment. The most important of these cases was Gouled v. the United States, in which the court was asked to pass upon the admissibility in evidence, first, of a paper obtained surreptitiously by officers of the government from the office of the accused; and secondly, of papers, described to be of “evidential value only,” which were taken from the office of accused under a search warrant. The court, declaring that the constitutional provisions involved must receive “a liberal construction, so as to prevent stealthy encroachment upon ‥‥ the rights secured by them,” held that the government had no right to the possession of any of these papers nor to the use of them as evidence. At the same time, it was held that if the government had had the right to seize the papers in question, for instance, as so much contraband property, and had done so under a warrant sufficient in form, “then it would have been competent to use them to prove any crime against accused as to which they constituted relevant evidence.”