The Informant in the Hotel

During a 1962 federal trial in Nashville, Tennessee, where the Defendant faced charges under a federal labor law, a Teamsters union official who was himself facing pending state and federal charges contacted federal agents and agreed to report back anything he learned. He was already acquainted with the Defendant, and over the following weeks he was frequently in the Defendant's company, including in the Defendant's hotel suite, the hotel lobby, the courthouse, and elsewhere, often alongside the Defendant's associates. During this period, the informant relayed to an FBI agent a series of conversations describing efforts to bribe members of the jury in that trial. The trial ended in a hung jury; afterward, government funds helped support the informant's family, and the charges against him were dropped or not pursued. The Defendant was later tried separately and convicted of jury tampering based on the informant's testimony, raising the question of whether conversations carried on in front of someone secretly reporting to the government amount to a search under the Fourth Amendment.