Unreasonable Search

When two robbers broke into the Straight Way Iron and Metal Co. in St. Louis, the firm's president, Louis Adelstein, pulled out a gun and started shooting. He hit one of them in the buttock. The other robber grabbed Adelstein's gun and shot him to death.

A few hours later, Tommie W. Overstreet went to a hospital with a bullet wound in the buttock. The prosecutor got a court order for a doctor to remove the bullet, which matched Adelstein's gun. Overstreet was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

That 1974 conviction was overturned this month by the Missouri Supreme Court, which ruled, 7 to 0, that the bullet should not have been removed without an adversary hearing. Otherwise, it said, the surgery constituted unreasonable search and seizure, banned by the Fourth Amendment. The court ordered a new trial for Overstreet.

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