Letter returned to jail as undeliverable was subject to being read

Defendant sent a letter from jail seeking perjury at trial from one of his friends. The letter was returned as undeliverable, and it was opened on return to the jail and read. There is no Fourth Amendment right to not have nonprivileged letters to the jail go unopened or unread. Commonwealth v. Thompson, 2007 PA Super 304, 934 A.2d 1281 (2007), quoting Commonwealth v. Moore, 2007 PA Super 207, 928 A.2d 1092, 1102 (Pa. Super. 2007):

Although prison walls do not separate inmates from their constitutional rights, because of the unique nature and requirements of the prison setting, imprisonment carries with it the circumscription or loss of many significant rights … to accommodate a myriad of institutional needs … chief among which is internal security. Prisoners have used the mail to transport contraband into and out of prison, to discuss and participate in ongoing criminal activity, and to coordinate escape plans. An unrestricted privacy interest in non-privileged mail would assist criminal objectives by facilitating the transmission of information. On the other hand, prisoners must appreciate the inherent loss of privacy in a prison, where security and surveillance obviate any legitimate expectation of privacy.

The Court went on to hold that a prisoner has no constitutional right to privacy in his non-privileged mail.

Defendant’s second statement to the police after his first appearance in court where he identified a witness that the police had not heard of before was sufficiently attenuated from the primary illegality under Wong Sun and Ceccolini. State v. Kirkman, 2007 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 797 (October 10, 2007):

Application of the “independent means” or “degree of attenuation” test established by the Supreme Court in Wong Sun and further illuminated in Ceccolini leads us to conclude that the items recovered from the convenience store dumpster–which were not mentioned in the defendant’s initial statement to police–were sufficiently purged of the taint of the defendant’s illegal arrest and were therefore admissible. Fiveash was discovered through the defendant’s initial, illegally obtained statement, and nothing appears in the record to suggest that the police would have discovered Fiveash absent the defendant’s statement. However, the police contacted Fiveash several hours after the defendant’s arrest and initial statement to police. Furthermore, Fiveash could have refused to talk to police, but she instead chose to cooperate. No evidence exists to suggest that Fiveash’s statements to police were coerced or otherwise involuntary. Additionally, after police discovered the location of the dumpster, the police requested, and were granted, permission to search the dumpster. The police ultimately recovered the dumpster items based upon the independent decisions of Fiveash to talk to police and of the convenience store worker to permit police to search the store’s dumpster. These independent decisions serve as sufficient attenuation to purge the evidence recovered from the dumpster of the taint of the defendant’s illegally obtained statement. Thus, this evidence was properly admitted into evidence.