Totten v. United States

Totten v. United States, 92 U. S. 105 (1876), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the court ruled on judicial jurisdiction in espionage cases. The case was an important precursor to the court's 1953 decision in United States v. Reynolds wherein it recognized the State Secrets Privilege. The case was later referenced and its holding expanded by the Court in the 2005 case of Tenet v. Doe and then again in General Dynamics Corp. v. United States. In Tenet, which involved a contract claim against the CIA brought by Cold War era spies, Court clarified that “Totten precludes judicial review in cases . where success depends upon the existence of their secret espionage relationship with the government.” In General Dynamics, the Court held that the same logic applied outside the espionage context, with the limitation that “[b]oth parties—the government no less than petitioners—must have assumed the risk that state secrets would prevent the adjudication of claims of inadequate performance."

William Alvin Lloyd was employed as a Union spy by President Abraham Lincoln. Lloyd claimed that he was to be paid $200 per month but was ultimately only reimbursed for expenses incurred in the course of his service. After his death, Lloyd's estate, represented by its executor Enoch Totten, filed suit to recover the promised wages.

In July 1861, in the midst of the American Civil War, William Alvin Lloyd was allegedly recruited as a Union spy by President Abraham Lincoln. His mission was to collect intelligence on the movements and positioning of Confederate States of America troops and other information useful to the Union war effort. Lloyd entered the Confederacy on July 16, 1861, at Memphis, Tennessee and was almost immediately jailed for an unrelated crime. Within a day or two he had bought his way out and over the course of the war spent time in Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana. There is one important distinction, however, between the State Secrets Privilege as endorsed by the Supreme Court in United States v. Reynolds and the privilege applied in Totten: under the Reynolds privilege, individual pieces of evidence may be excluded from the record at the government's behest, but the stronger Totten form of the privilege compels dismissal of entire cases where their subject matter is claimed to be too secret for proceedings in open court. This so called "Totten Bar" to jurisdiction has been controversial, because rather than eliminating access to particular evidence it often results in dismissal without recourse. Nevertheless, the privileges described and applied in Reynolds and Totten are often understood as two related varieties of the same general privilege. But Tenet clarified that “Totten precludes judicial review in cases . where success depends upon the existence of their secret espionage relationship with the government.” Then, finally, General Dynamics Corp. v. United States held that the same logic applies even outside the espionage context, so long as “[b]oth parties—the government no less than petitioners—must have assumed the risk that state secrets would prevent the adjudication of claims of inadequate performance."