## Facts

- J. Lee Havens and John McLeroth arrived at Miami International Airport from Peru.
- Customs officers found cocaine sewn into makeshift pockets inside McLeroth’s T-shirt.
- After McLeroth implicated Havens, agents arrested Havens and conducted a warrantless search of Havens’s luggage, seizing a T-shirt with pieces cut out that matched the pockets found in McLeroth’s shirt.
- The trial court suppressed the seized T-shirt as the product of an unlawful search.
- At Havens’s federal drug trial, McLeroth (after pleading guilty) testified that Havens provided the altered T-shirt and sewed the pockets shut.
- Havens testified and broadly denied having engaged in that sort of activity with McLeroth.
- On cross-examination, the government questioned Havens about sewing the pockets and about whether he had such a cut-up T-shirt in his luggage; Havens denied involvement and denied knowledge of the shirt.
- In rebuttal, the government introduced the suppressed T-shirt solely to impeach Havens’s credibility; the jury received a limiting instruction restricting the evidence to impeachment.
- Havens was convicted; the Fifth Circuit reversed, limiting impeachment use of illegally seized evidence to contradictions of statements made on direct examination.
- The Supreme Court granted certiorari.

## Issues

1. Whether evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, inadmissible in the prosecution’s case-in-chief, may be used to impeach a defendant’s credibility based on statements made on cross-examination.
2. Whether impeachment is permitted when the cross-examination is proper and reasonably suggested by the defendant’s direct testimony, even if the contradiction is not confined to a specific statement made on direct.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit and reinstated Havens’s conviction.
- The Court held that a defendant’s statements made in response to proper cross-examination reasonably suggested by direct examination may be impeached with illegally obtained evidence, if used only for impeachment.
- The Court rejected a categorical rule limiting impeachment to contradictions of statements made on direct examination.
- The Court concluded the cross-examination about the T-shirt was within the scope of, and reasonably suggested by, Havens’s broad direct testimony.
- The Court noted limits: impeachment must be “otherwise proper,” and the government may not use cross-examination as a contrivance to introduce suppressed evidence.

## Legal Principles

- Illegally obtained evidence barred from the prosecution’s case-in-chief under the exclusionary rule may be admitted to impeach a testifying defendant’s credibility.
- Impeachment may address statements elicited on cross-examination when the questions are proper and reasonably suggested by the defendant’s direct testimony.
- The impeachment use must be limited to credibility, not treated as substantive proof of guilt, and may be accompanied by a limiting instruction.
- The exclusionary rule’s deterrent aim does not create a right to give false testimony free from contradiction by otherwise proper impeachment.

## Conclusion

The Court held that suppressed, illegally seized physical evidence may be used to impeach a defendant’s testimony given on proper cross-examination that is reasonably suggested by the defendant’s direct examination, thereby extending the impeachment exception to Fourth Amendment–tainted physical evidence and to contradictions first elicited on cross within the scope of direct.


United States v. Havens, 446 U.S. 620 (1980)