THE SUPREME COURT: Rightful Cooperation

On information supplied by a lesser Russian spy in the spring of 1957, the FBI cornered Master Spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, 55, in a New York hotel room.

Since the other spy was afraid to testify in court against Abel, the best the FBI could do was ask the Immigration and Naturalization Service to arrest Abel as a deportable alien. Then came a break. In his room, when seized, Abel had plenty of incriminating evidence—cipher pads. 18 microfilms, phony birth certificates—to help convict him for espionage four months later. Sentence: a $3,000 fine, 30 years.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Abel's conviction, but in a sharply split (5-4) decision. The four dissenting justices (William Brennan, Hugo Black, William Douglas, Chief Justice Earl Warren) agreed with Abel's court-appointed lawyer that the FBI had no right to use for criminal prosecution the evidence that was seized in the course of Immigration's "administrative" arrest (one not ordered by a court warrant). In his dissent. Justice Brennan charged violation of the spy's Fourth Amendment protections from "unreasonable searches and seizures." But the court majority reviewed each step of the case in a 24-page decision, found, as Justice Felix Frankfurter put it, that it indicated a good-faith example of "rightful cooperation between two branches of a single Department of Justice."