Freedom of the Stomach

On the morning of July 1, 1949, three men from the Los Angeles County sheriff's office broke into the home of Antonio Rochin, a 22-year-old truck driver whom they suspected of carrying narcotics. Before they could stop him, Rochin swallowed the only evidence against him--two morphine capsules. The deputies choked him and pummeled him, trying unsuccessfully to make him cough them up. Then they dragged him to a hospital, forced him on to an operating table, where a doctor "pumped" out his stomach to get the evidence. The judge gave him 60 days.

A smart lawyer named David Marcus for two years appealed the case up the ladder of the higher California courts. Most of the judges attacked the brutality of the arrest, but, conforming to California precedents, upheld the conviction.

Last week, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed the California courts and made Antonio Rochin a free man. Wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter for the majority of the court: ". . . The proceedings by which this conviction was obtained do more than offend some fastidious squeamishness ... They are methods too close to the rack and the screw to permit of constitutional differentiation." Frankfurter based his decision on the 14th Amendment, which forbids a state to interfere with a person's life or liberty "without due process of law."

Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black agreed with the decision, but they had much sharper reasons for it. The constitutional amendment violated, said Douglas, was not the 14th Amendment, but the Fifth, which says explicitly that no man can be compelled to testify against himself in any criminal case. Wrote Douglas: "Words taken from his lips, capsules taken from his stomach, blood taken from his veins are all inadmissible, provided they are taken from him without his consent."

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