REHNQUIST, J., dissenting 408 U.S. that which the Court awards these petitioners was not only unauthorized by law, but completely contrary to the ingrained principles which have long governed the functioning of the grand jury. III When Congress set out to enact the two statutes on which the Court relies, it was certainly not with any announced intent to change the nature of contempt hearings relating to grand jury proceedings, or to change the modus operandi of the grand jury. Instead, largely in response to the decisions of this Court in Berger v. New York, 388 U. S. 41 (1967), and Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967), Congress undertook to draft comprehensive legislation both authorizing the use of evidence obtained by electronic surveillance on specified conditions, and prohibiting its use otherwise. S. Rep. No. 1097, 90th Cong., 2d Sess., 66 (1968). The ultimate result was the 1968 Act. Critical to analysis of the issue involved here are §§ 2515 and 2518 (10)(a) of that Act, which provide in pertinent part as follows: "Whenever any wire or oral communication has been intercepted, no part of the contents of such communication and no evidence derived therefrom may be received in evidence in any trial, hearing, or other proceeding in or before any court, grand jury, department, officer, agency, regulatory body, legislative committee, or other authority . . . if the disclosure of that information would be in violation of this chapter." § 2515. "Any aggrieved person in any trial, hearing, or proceeding in or before any court, department, officer, agency, regulatory body, or other authority of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision thereof, may move to suppress the contents of any 41 REHNQUIST, J., dissenting adequacy of the evidence before the grand jury." 350 U. S., at 363. While this general statement applied by its terms only to one who was ultimately indicted by the grand jury, its reasoning applies with like force to one who seeks to make an evidentiary challenge to grand jury proceedings on the basis of his status as a prospective witness. Indeed, time-consuming challenges by witnesses during the course of a grand jury investigation would be far more inimical to the function of that body than would a motion to dismiss an indictment after it had concluded its deliberations. In Lawn v. United States, 355 U. S. 339 (1958), the Court refused to accord to petitioners the hearing, prior to trial, on the issue of whether or not a grand jury which indicted them had made direct or derivative use of materials the use of which by an earlier grand jury had been held to violate the petitioners' privilege against self-incrimination. In supporting its conclusion that the petitioners should not even be accorded a hearing to sustain these contentions, the Court quoted a passage from Costello describing the grand jury as "[an] institution, in which laymen conduct their inquiries unfettered by technical rules. Neither justice nor the concept of a fair trial requires such a change. In a trial on the merits, defendants are entitled to a strict observance of all the rules designed to bring about a fair verdict. Defendants are not entitled, however, to a rule which would result in interminable delay but add nothing to the assurance of a fair trial.'" 355 U. S., at 350. It seems to me to be clear beyond cavil from these cases that prior to the enactment of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, a hearing such as REHNQUIST, J., dissenting 408 U.S. the investigation, or by doubts whether any particular individual will be found properly subject to an accusation of crime. As has been said before, the identity of the offender, and the precise nature of the offense, if there be one, normally are developed at the conclusion of the grand jury's labors, not at the beginning. Another passage from Blair pointed out the citizen's obligation to obey the process of the grand jury: "[I]t is clearly recognized that the giving of testimony and the attendance upon court or grand jury in order to testify are public duties which every person within the jurisdiction of the Government is bound to perform upon being properly summoned." Id., at 281. In Costello v. United States, 350 U. S. 359, 362 (1956), the Court traced the development of the English grand jury and concluded that the probable intent of the Framers of our Constitution was to parallel that institution as it had existed in England where "[g]rand jurors were selected from the body of the people and their work was not hampered by rigid procedural or evidential rules." 350 U. S., at 362. The Court in Costello was at pains to point out the necessity of limiting the nature of challenges to evidence adduced before a grand jury if that body were to retain its traditional comprehensive investigative authority: "If indictments were to be held open to challenge on the ground that there was inadequate or incompetent evidence before the grand jury, the resulting delay would be great indeed. The result of such a rule would be that before trial on the merits a defendant could always insist on the kind of preliminary trial to determine the competency and 41 REHNQUIST, J., dissenting be tried, and to alter past practice in any other way that it chose consistently with the Constitution. But in view of the stated congressional intent to "codify present practice" by the enactment of § 1826 (a), we should require rather strong evidence of congressional purpose to conclude that Congress intended to engraft on the traditional and rather summary contempt hearings a new type of hearing in which a grand jury witness is accorded carte blanche discovery of all of the Government's "applications, orders, tapes, and transcripts relating to such electronic surveillance" before he may be required to testify. 443 F. 2d, at 838. II Just as Congress was not writing on a clean slate in the area of contempt hearings, it was not writing on a clean slate with respect to the nature of grand jury proceedings. These petitioners were called before a grand jury that had been convened to investigate violations of federal laws. We deal, therefore, not with the rights of a criminal defendant in the traditional adversary context of a trial, but with the status of witnesses summoned to testify before a body devoted to sifting evidence that could result in the presentment of criminal charges. Just as the cases arising under the antecedents of 28 U. S. C. § 1826 (a) suggest a limitation on the type of issue which may be litigated in such a proceeding, cases dealing with the role of the grand jury stress the unique breadth of its scope of inquiry. In Blair v. United States, 250 U. S. 273, 282 (1919), this Court defined the vital investigatory function of the grand jury: "It is a grand inquest, a body with powers of investigation and inquisition, the scope of whose inquiries is not to be limited narrowly by questions of propriety or forecasts of the probable result of REHNQUIST, J., dissenting 408 U.S. typical hearing was short in duration and largely devoted to the arguments of counsel on an agreed statement of facts.2 Some of the flavor of the type of proceeding contemplated under the prior practice is gleaned from the following passage in the Court's opinion in Shillitani v. United States, 384 U. S. 364, 370 (1966) (citations omitted): "There can be no question that courts have inherent power to enforce compliance with their lawful orders through civil contempt. . . . And it is essential that courts be able to compel the appearance and testimony of witnesses. . . . A grand jury subpoena must command the same respect Where contempt consists of a refusal to obey a court order to testify at any stage in judicial proceedings, the witness may be confined until compliance. . . .' These proceedings seem almost invariably to have been short and summary in nature, not because the defendant was to be denied a fair hearing, but because the type of issue that could be raised at such a proceeding was one which did not generally permit extensive factual development. Even where a court of appeals reversed a contempt adjudication because of the district court's failure to allow the defendant to testify on his own behalf with respect to material issues, there was no hint of either the right to, or the necessity for, any discovery proceedings against the Government. Hooley v. United States, 209 F. 2d 219 (CA1 1954). Congress was, of course, free to expand the scope of inquiry in these proceedings, to enlarge the issues to 2 See, e. g., Blau v. United States, 340 U. S. 159 (1950); Rogers v. United States, 340 U. S. 367 (1951); Curcio v. United States, 354 U. S. 118 (1957); United States v. George, 444 F. 2d 310 (CA6 1971); In re October 1969 Grand Jury, 435 F. 2d 350 (CA7 1970). |