fructus

Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., is a certified public utility that provides telephone service to several communities in northwest Kansas. As a condition of its monopoly franchise, state regulation requires Rural to issue an updated telephone directory annually. Rural's directory consists of white pages listing subscribers' names, towns, and telephone numbers in alphabetical order, along with yellow pages featuring classified advertisements. Feist Publications, Inc., specializes in area-wide telephone directories covering larger geographical ranges than typical local directories. Feist's 1983 directory encompasses eleven telephone service areas in fifteen counties and contains 46,878 white pages listings. To compile its directory, Feist approached each of the eleven telephone companies operating in northwest Kansas and offered to pay for the right to use their white pages listings. Of the eleven companies, only Rural refused to license its listings. Feist then copied 1,309 listings from Rural's 1982-1983 white pages after first removing several thousand outside its geographic range and verifying the remaining data through additional investigation that added street addresses to many entries. Four of the copied listings were fictitious entries that Rural had inserted to detect copying. Rural sued Feist for copyright infringement in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The district court granted summary judgment to Rural. The Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed in an unpublished opinion. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to review whether the copyright in Rural's directory protects the names, towns, and telephone numbers copied by Feist.

George Reynolds, a longtime member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, was indicted in the District Court of the third judicial district of the Territory of Utah for bigamy after entering a second marriage to Amelia Jane Schofield while his first wife remained alive. Reynolds had obtained permission from recognized church authorities to contract the polygamous marriage. He and other male church members believed the practice was a religious duty enjoined by divine revelation to Joseph Smith. Refusal would bring damnation when circumstances permitted. The grand jury that returned the indictment consisted of fifteen persons under a territorial statute. This differed from the sixteen to twenty-three persons required by federal statute for United States circuit and district courts. During voir dire, the trial court overruled Reynolds's challenges for cause to prospective jurors including Charles Read who stated they had formed opinions about the case. The court sustained government challenges to other prospective jurors who were or had been living in polygamy. At trial the prosecution offered the transcript of testimony given by Amelia Jane Schofield at an earlier prosecution of Reynolds for the same offense under a different indictment. The government showed that subpoenas were served at Reynolds's house. An officer was told the witness was not at home. Reynolds declined to disclose her location. A later subpoena with the correct name also failed to locate her. Reynolds had been present and able to cross-examine at the prior trial but offered no explanation for her absence. Reynolds requested a jury instruction that he must be acquitted if the jury found he acted in the sincere belief that the second marriage fulfilled a religious duty. The court refused and instead instructed that religious belief could not excuse a knowing violation of the criminal law. The court further instructed the jury to consider the consequences of polygamy for innocent women and children. Reynolds was convicted and the case reached the Supreme Court of the United States on writ of error.

Petitioner Dickerson was indicted for bank robbery, conspiracy to commit bank robbery, and using a firearm in the course of committing a crime of violence. Before trial, Dickerson moved to suppress a statement he had made at a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office on the grounds that he had not received Miranda warnings before being interrogated. The District Court granted his motion to suppress, and the Government took an interlocutory appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. That court reversed the District Court's suppression order. It agreed that petitioner had not received Miranda warnings before making his statement but held that 18 U.S.C. § 3501 governed the admissibility of the statement. The Fourth Circuit concluded that Miranda was not a constitutional holding and that Congress could therefore have the final say on admissibility. Two years after Miranda was decided, Congress enacted 18 U.S.C. § 3501, which provides that a confession shall be admissible in evidence if it is voluntarily given and directs the trial judge to consider specified factors in determining voluntariness. Because of the importance of the questions raised by the Court of Appeals' decision, the Supreme Court granted certiorari.