322 U.S. 487 | SCOTUS | 1944
Lead Opinion
delivered the opinion of the Court.
This is an indictment under Section 215 of the Criminal Code, 18 U. S. C. § 338, for using the mails to further a fraudulent scheme. Petitioner’s conviction was affirmed
In accordance with New York procedure, known as supplementary proceedings, designed to aid in the discovery of assets of a debtor, N. Y. Civil Practice Act, art. 45, Feldman, a judgment debtor, was called as a witness in such proceedings on several occasions between March 31,1936, and September 29,1939. Up to March 14,1938, the New York immunity statute merely provided that a debtor might not be excused from testifying because of self-crimination but that his testimony could not be used in evidence in a subsequent criminal proceeding against him. N. Y. Laws, 1935, c. 630, § 789. By an Act of March 14, 1938, New York broadened the debtor’s immunity so as to free him from prosecution on account of any matter revealed in his testimony. N. Y. Laws, 1938, c. 108, § 17; N. Y. Civil Practice Act, § 789. While the earlier provision was in effect, Feldman testified that he was unemployed, paid rent of $250 a month from funds supplied by his family, owed about $340,000 and contemplated immediate bankruptcy. He further testified that about once a month his father sent him a book of signed checks, he sent large sums of money to his father by Western Union and destroyed whatever evidence the receipts might offer — in short, that he was “kiting” his father’s checks by sending the proceeds of the later checks to cover those cashed earlier. After March 14, 1938, and down through September, 1939, Feldman again testified in New York supplementary proceedings, giving further details of his bizarre “kiting” practices.
We put to one side all these subtler issues because we think they cannot dispose of the case. And so we come directly to the main question, namely whether the Fifth Amendment prohibited the admission against Feldman upon his trial in a federal court of the earlier testimony given by him in the state courts. While the point has not been formally decided, we deem the answer to be controlled by a long series of decisions expressing basic principles of our federation.
The effective enforcement of a well-designed penal code is of course indispensable for social security. But the Bill of Rights was added to the original Constitution in the conviction that too high a price may be paid even for the unhampered enforcement of the criminal law and that, in its attainment, other social objects of a free society should not be sacrificed. We are immediately concerned with the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, intertwined as they are, and expressing as they do supplementing phases of the
But for more than one hundred years, ever since Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Pet. 243, one of the settled principles of our Constitution has been that these Amendments protect only against invasion of civil liberties by the Government whose conduct they alone limit. Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591, 606; Jack v. Kansas, 199 U. S. 372, 380; Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U. S. 78. Conversely, a State cannot by operating within its constitutional powers restrict the operations of the National Government within its sphere. The distinctive operations of the two governments within their respective spheres is basic to our federal constitutional system, howsoever complicated and
This principle has governed a series of decisions which for all practical purposes rule the present case. When this Court for the first time sustained an immunity statute as adequate, it rejected the argument that because federal immunity could not bar use in a state prosecution of testimony compelled in a federal court, the immunity falls short of the constitutional requirement. Brown v. Walker, supra, at 606. And when the reverse claim was made as to a state immunity statute, that a disclosure compelled in a state court could not assure immunity in a federal court, the argument was again rejected because “The state [anti-trust] statute could not, of course, prevent a prosecution of the same party under the United States [anti-trust] statute, and it could not prevent the testimony given by the party in the State proceeding from being used against the same person in a Federal court for a violation of the Federal statute, if it could be imagined that such prosecution would be instituted under such circumstances.” Jack v. Kansas, supra, at 380. When the matter was here last it was thus summarized: “This court has held that immunity against state prosecution is not essential to the validity of federal statutes declaring that a witness shall not be excused from giving evidence on the
And so, while evidence secured through unreasonable search and seizure by federal .officials is inadmissible in a federal prosecution, Weeks v. United States, supra; Gouled v. United States, 255 U. S. 298; Agnello v. United States, 269 U. S. 20, incriminating documents so secured by state officials without participation by federal officials but turned over for their use are admissible in a federal prosecution. Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 U. S. 465. Relevant testimony is not barred from use in a criminal trial in a federal court unless wrongfully acquired by federal officials. “If knowledge of them [the facts] is gained from an independent source they may be proved like any others, but the knowledge gained by the Government’s own wrong cannot “be used by it . . .” Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U. S. 385, 392. This Court has refused to draw nice distinctions as to when wrongful acquisition of evidence by state agencies was also a federal enterprise. When a representative of the United States is a participant in the extortion of evidence or in its illicit acquisition, he is charged with exercising the authority of the United States. Evidence so secured may be regained, GoBart Co. v. United States, 282 U. S. 344, and its admission, after timely motion for its suppression, vitiates a conviction. Byars v. United States, 273 U. S. 28.
The Constitution prohibits an invasion of privacy only in proceedings over which the Government has control. There is no suggestion of complicity between Feldman’s creditors and federal law-enforcing officers. The Govern
Only a word need be said about the phrase of scepticism in Jack v. Kansas, supra, at 380, that it could hardly be imagined “that such prosecution would be instituted under such circumstances.” The “prosecution” and the “circumstances” there referred to were a prosecution on the same facts for violation of the state and the federal anti-trust laws. But see Fox v. Ohio, 5 How. 410, 435; United States v. Lanza, 260 U. S. 377. The cautionary words in Jack v. Kansas in nowise qualified the principle of that and later cases as to the separateness in the operation of state and
Judgment affirmed.
Dissenting Opinion
dissenting:
In Boyd v. United States, this Court said that “any compulsory discovery by extorting the party’s oath . . . is contrary to the principles of a free government. It is abhorrent ... to the instincts of an American. It may suit the purposes of despotic power; but it cannot abide the pure atmosphere of political liberty and personal freedom.” 116 U. S. 616, 631-632.
Feldman was compelled to testify under oath in a creditors’ compulsory discovery proceeding in a New York court conducted pursuant to a state statute which granted him immunity from state prosecution for any state crime he might be forced to confess. Had he refused to testify he could have been imprisoned. Over his objection, a transcript of his compelled testimony was used in the United States District Court to convict him of a federal crime. As the Fifth Amendment heretofore has been interpreted, Feldman’s testimony could not have been used for this purpose had it been compelled by a federal
Today, however, the Court adopts a different approach to the task of construing the Fifth Amendment. We are now told that under certain circumstances compelled testimony is purged of the fatal taint which the Fifth Amendment places upon it, and that an accused can be convicted
Nor is the holding in this case to be defended as one which our federal system requires. This case presents no conflict between federal and state spheres of power such as that presented by cases involving the validity of federal and state immunity statutes, wherein it has been contended, unsuccessfully, that neither the United States nor a State can compel a witness to testify against himself unless it grant him complete immunity from prosecution in both jurisdictions.
Putting aside the Court’s dialectical method of interpretation, and examining the history and purpose of the Fifth Amendment, there appears to be no justification for reducing its scope as the Court is now doing. Compulsion of self-incriminatory testimony by court oaths and by the less refined methods of torture were equally detested by the Fifth Amendment’s liberty-loving advocates and their forbears.
Perhaps, as some have argued, the men who framed this Amendment were mistaken or their fears have lost foundation and the unqualified prohibition against the extraction and use of compelled testimony which they put into the Fifth Amendment should be repealed or modified.
The prohibition against compelled testimony which the Court today has seen fit to restrict cannot be dissociated
But these men were not satisfied that the First Amendment would make this right sufficiently secure. As they well knew, history teaches that attempted exercises of the freedoms of religion, speech, press, and assembly have been the commonest occasions for oppression and persecution. Inevitably such persecutions have involved secret arrests, unlawful detentions, forced confessions, secret trials, and arbitrary punishments under oppressive laws. Therefore it is not surprising that the men behind the First Amendment also insisted upon the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, designed to protect all individuals against arbitrary punishment by definite procedural provisions guaranteeing fair public trials by juries. They sought by these provisions to assure that no Individual could be punished except according to “due process,” by
It is impossible for me to reconcile today’s restrictive interpretation of the prohibition against compelled self-incrimination with the principle of broad construction which this Court heretofore has deemed essential to full preservation of the basic safeguards of liberty specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The protections explicitly afforded the individual by the Bill of Rights represent a large part of the characteristics which distinguish free from totalitarian government. Under our Constitutional system the privileges it embodies and the rights it secures were intended to be above and beyond the power of any branch of government to mutilate or destroy. We have no assurance that the fears of those who drafted and adopted our Bill of Rights were groundless, nor that the reasons for those fears no longer exist. Ancient evils historically associated with, the possession of unqualified power to impose criminal punishment on individuals have a dangerous habit of reappearing when tried safeguards are removed.
This case involves the Fifth, not the Fourth, Amendment. Decisions which have read the Fourth and Fifth Amendments together for the purpose of broadening the Fourth Amendment should not now be employed to narrow the Fifth Amendment. To do so ignores the particu
I would reverse the judgment.
And see Jack v. Kansas, 199 U. S. 372, where this Court disposed of an argument that a Kansas statute unconstitutionally compelled Jack to confess his violations of a federal criminal statute with the assertion that, “We do not believe . . . such evidence would be availed of by the Government for such purpose.” Id., 381-382. In an earlier case, Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591, this Court thought that the likelihood that state prosecutors would use testimony compelled by the federal government was “so improbable that no reasonable man would suffer it to influence his conduct.” Id., 606-608. But see Ensign v. Pennsylvania, 227 U. S. 592.
McCarthy v. Arndstein, 266 U. S. 34; and see Bram v. United States, 168 U. S. 532; Wan v. United States, 266 U. S. 1; cf. Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616.
McCarthy v. Arndstein, supra, Note 2, pp. 40-41; Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U. S. 547, 562. See also United States ex rel. Bilokumsky v. Tod, 263 U. S. 149; United States ex rel. Vajtauer v. Commissioner of Immigration, 273 U. S. 103.
Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U. S. 547.
Wan v. United States, supra, Note 2; Anderson v. United States, 318 U. S. 350, 356.
Bram v. United States, supra, Note 2.
Anderson v. United States, supra, Note 5; and see Bram v. United States, supra, Note 2.
See Hale v. Henkel, 201 U. S. 43, and United States v. Murdock, 284 U. S. 141, holding it enough that the United States grant immunity from prosecution for federal crimes; but see, contra, United States v. Saline Bank, 1 Pet. 100; Ballmann v. Fagin, 200 U. S. 186. Had the Court in the Murdock case, supra, accepted the contention that the federal government must grant an immunity from state as well as federal prosecution, it would inevitably have been faced with the problem of the federal power to interfere with enforcement of state laws through the device of granting immunity from state prosecution to witnesses in federal proceedings — a problem replete with both prac
Compare Jack v. Kansas, supra, Note 1, holding that Kansas could compel a witness to testify to his past crimes upon a grant of immunity from state prosecution, though he still be subject to federal prosecution. In reaching this result the Court took specific notice of the fact that, were the rule otherwise, state immunity statutes must all be stricken down. “The state statute could not, of course, prevent a prosecution of the same party under the United States statute.” 199 U.S. 372, 380.
See Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U. S. 78, and Ensign v. Pennsylvania, supra, Note 1, holding respectively that despite the Fourteenth Amendment a state may compel a defendant to incriminate himself, and may use against him schedules he filed in an involuntary federal bankruptcy proceeding. But see Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U. S. 143.
For a Critical analysis of the conflict between the legal concept of “dual sovereignty” and preservation of the Constitutional prohibition against self-incrimination, see J. A. C. Grant, op. cit., supra, Note 8.
See Pittman, The Colonial and Constitutional History of the Privilege Against Sefl-Inerimination in America, 21 Va. L. Rev. 763, 775-783.
See United States v. Burr, 25 Fed. Cas. 38-41; Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U. S. 547, 564-566; Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591, 594, 600, 605-606; cf. Ex parte Lange, 18 Wall. 163, 173. And see Pittman, op. cit., supra, Note 11; and cases cited Notes 5, 6, and 7, supra.
Compare Knox, Self-Incrimination, 74 Univ. Pa. L. Rev. 139 with VIII Wigmore on Evidence, Third Ed., pp. 304-313; and see Editorial, 16 Journ. Crim. Law and Crim. 165-166.
See dissenting opinion of Circuit Judge Frank in United States v. St. Pierre, 132 F. 2d 837, 840, pp. 847-848. “Strangely enough, those who are most opposed to any changes in judicial constructions of those designedly elastic clauses of the Constitution are often the most vigorous in their demands that the courts should eviscerate the specific and relatively inelastic self-incrimination clause.” Id., 848.
See Chambers v. Florida, 309 U. S. 227, 235-238; Tot v. United States, 319 U. S. 463, 473.