GREEN ET AL. v. UNITED STATES
No. 100
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Argued October 21, 1957. - Decided March 31, 1958.
356 U.S. 165
Petitioners are two of eleven defendants who were convicted in the Southern District of New York in 1949 of conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the Government in violation of the Smith Act, 54 Stat. 670, 671,
Shortly thereafter, the United States instituted criminal contempt proceedings against the petitioners in the District Court for willful disobedience of the surrender order in violation of
The petitioners urge four grounds for reversal, namely: (1) the criminal contempt power of federal courts does not extend to surrender orders; (2) even if such power exists, the evidence was insufficient to support the judgments of contempt; (3) a prison sentence for criminal contempt cannot, as a matter of law, exceed one year; and (4) in any event the three-year sentences imposed were so excessive as to constitute an abuse of discretion on the part of the District Court. For the reasons given hereafter we think that none of these contentions can be sustained, and that the judgment of the Court of Appeals must be upheld.
I.
The contempt judgments rest on
... shall have power to punish by fine or imprisonment, at its discretion, such contempt of its authority, and none other, as-
“(3) Disobedience or resistance to its lawful ... order ....”
Since the order here issued was beyond dispute “lawful,”
An evaluation of this argument requires an analysis of the course of development of federal statutes relating to criminal contempts. The first statute bearing on the contempt powers of federal courts was enacted as § 17 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, 1 Stat. 73, 83. It stated that federal courts “shall have power to ... punish by fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of said courts, all contempts of authority in any cause or hearing before the same....” The generality of this language suggests that § 17 was intended to do no more than expressly attribute to the federal judiciary those powers to punish for contempt possessed by English courts at common law. Indeed, this Court has itself stated that under § 17 the definition of contempts and the procedure for their trial were “left to be determined according to such established rules and principles of the common law as were applicable to our situation.” Savin, Petitioner, 131 U. S. 267, 275-276.2 At English common law disobedience of a writ under the King‘s seal was early treated as a contempt, 4 Blackstone Commentaries 284, 285; Beale, Contempt of Court, 21 Harv. L. Rev. 161, 164-167; Fox, The Summary Process to Punish Contempt, 25 L. Q. Rev. 238, 249, and over the centuries English courts came to use the
So much the petitioners recognize. They point out, however, that, at early English law, courts dealt with absconding defendants not by way of contempt, but under the ancient doctrine of outlawry, a practice whereby the defendant was summoned by proclamation to five successive county courts and, for failure to appear, was declared forfeited of all his goods and chattels. 4 Blackstone Commentaries 283, 319. In view of this distinct method at English common law of punishing refusal to respond to this summons, which was the equivalent of the present surrender order, petitioners argue that § 17 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, incorporating English practice, did not reach to a surrender order, and that the unique status of such an order subsisted under all statutory successors to § 17, including
We find these arguments unconvincing. The reasons for the early English practice of proceeding against absconding defendants by way of outlawry rather than by contempt are obscure. It may have been that outlawry was resorted to because absconding was regarded so seriously as to require the drastic penalties of outlawry rather than fine or imprisonment. But whatever the reasons may have been, the fact that English courts adhered
The subsequent development of the federal contempt power lends no support to the petitioners’ position, for the significance of the Act of 1831, 4 Stat. 487, 488, lies quite in the opposite direction. Sentiment for passage of that Act arose out of the impeachment proceedings instituted against Judge James H. Peck because of his conviction and punishment for criminal contempt of a lawyer who had published an article critical of a decision of the judge then on appeal. Although it is true that the Act marks the first congressional step to curtail the contempt powers of the federal courts, the important thing to note is that the area of curtailment related not to punishment for disobedience of court orders but to punishment for conduct of the kind that had provoked Judge Peck‘s controversial action. As to such conduct, the 1831 Act confined the summary power of punishment to “... misbehaviour of any person ... in the presence of the ... courts, or so near thereto as to obstruct the administration of justice....” The cases in this Court which have curbed the exercise of the contempt power by federal courts have concerned this clause, as found in statutory successors to the Act of 1831 including subdivision (1) of present
In contrast to the judicial restrictions imposed on the contempt power exercisable under the clauses now found in subdivisions (1) and (2) of
It may be true, as petitioners state, that this case and those of the other absconding Dennis defendants, United States v. Thompson, 214 F. 2d 545; United States v. Hall, 198 F. 2d 726, provide the first instances where a federal court has exercised the contempt power for disobedience of a surrender order. But the power to punish for willful disobedience of a court order, once found to exist, cannot be said to have atrophied by disuse in this particular instance. Indeed, when Congress in 1954 made bail-jumping a crime in
II.
Petitioners contend that the evidence was insufficient to support their contempt convictions, in that it failed to establish beyond a reasonable doubt their knowledge
In this Court, petitioners interpret the District Court‘s opinion to rest the contempt convictions on alternative theories: (a) that the petitioners had actual knowledge of the issuance of the July 2 surrender order, or (b) that they at least had notice of its prospective issuance and hence were chargeable with knowledge that it was in fact issued. But we find no such dual aspect to the District Court‘s decision, which rested solely on findings that, beyond a reasonable doubt, Green “knowingly disobeyed” the surrender order and Winston absented himself “with knowledge” of the order. Since we are satisfied that the record supports these findings, we need not consider whether mere notice of the prospective issuance of the order, cf. Pettibone v. United States, 148 U. S. 197, 206-207, would be sufficient to sustain these convictions on the theory that petitioners were chargeable as a matter of law with notice that it was later issued.
The evidence for the Government, there being none offered by the defense, related to three time intervals: (1) the period up to June 28, 1951; (2) the four-day interval between June 28, when the proposed surrender order was served on counsel with the notice of settlement, and July 2, when the surrender order was signed; and (3) the period ending with the surrender of the petitioners- February 27, 1956, in the case of Green, and March 5, 1956, in the case of Winston.
1. The judgments of conviction upon the conspiracy indictment under the Smith Act were entered, and the
“surrender himself in execution of the judgment and sentence appealed from upon such day as the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York may direct, if the judgment and sentence appealed from shall be affirmed ....” (Italics added.)
Following the Court of Appeals’ affirmance of the conspiracy convictions on August 1, 1950, 183 F. 2d 201, Mr. Justice Jackson, as Circuit Justice, continued petitioners’ bail on September 25, 1950, pending review of the convictions by this Court. 184 F. 2d 280. This Court, as noted above, affirmed the conspiracy convictions on June 4, 1951, and on June 22, 1951, Mr. Justice Jackson denied a stay of the Court‘s mandate.
2. On Thursday, June 28, 1951, one of the counsel in the Dennis case accepted service on behalf of all the defendants, including petitioners, of a proposed order on mandate requiring the defendants to “personally surrender to the United States Marshal for the Southern District of New York ... on the 2nd day of July, 1951, at 11:05” a. m., together with a notice stating that the proposed order would be presented to the District Court “for settlement and signature” at 10 a. m. on that day.5
3. On July 3 the names of the petitioners were called again in open court, and after interrogating counsel as to their disappearance (see note 6, supra), the court declared their bail forfeited. The petitioners remained in hiding until their eventual surrender, some four and a half years later. Prior to their respective surrenders in February and March, 1956, Green and Winston issued press releases announcing their intention to surrender and “enter prison.”7 When he turned up on the steps of the
In summary, one day after counsel was served on June 28 with the proposed order calling for petitioners’ surrender on July 2, together with the notice stating that the order would also be presented for the court‘s signature on that day, petitioners were unequivocally notified by counsel that their presence in court was required on July 2. From these undisputed facts, coupled with petitioners’ disappearance, it was certainly permissible for the District Court to infer that petitioners knew of the proposed surrender order, of the failure of counsel‘s efforts on June 29 to postpone the surrender date, and of the court‘s intention to sign the order on July 2. We need not decide whether these facts alone would sustain the finding that petitioners knew of the issuance of the surrender order on July 2 as planned, for unquestionably as background they furnished significant support for the District Court‘s ultimate finding that petitioners’ statements to the press at the time of their eventual surrender in 1956 (see note 7, supra) indicated their knowledge of the issuance of the order, a finding strengthened by the fact that the recognizance admitting the petitioners to bail obligated petitioners to surrender for service of sentence only when so directed by the District Court.
No doubt some of this evidence lent itself to conflicting inferences, but those favorable to the petitioners were, in our view, not of such strength as to compel the trier of
III.
We deal here with petitioners’ claim that the District Court was without power to sentence them to imprisonment for more than one year.
Section 17 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 confirmed the power of federal courts “... to punish by fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of said courts...” certain contempts. The Act of 1831 simply referred to the power to “inflict summary punishments,” and present
We turn first to the argument based on the Clayton Act. Sections 21 and 22 of that Act provided that certain rights not traditionally accorded persons charged with contempt, notably the right to trial by jury, should be granted in certain classes of criminal contempts, and that persons tried under these procedures were not subject to a fine of more than $1,000 or imprisonment for longer
Petitioners’ argument is that the purpose and effect of the “usages ... now prevailing” language of § 24 of the Clayton Act was to freeze into federal contempt law the sentencing practices of federal courts, which up to that time appear never to have imposed a contempt sentence of more than one year.11 These practices, suggest peti-
Particularly in the context of the rest of the Clayton Act of 1914 we cannot read the “usages ... now prevailing” clause of § 24 as incorporating into the statute the sentencing practices up to that date. In § 22 the statute specifically restricts to six months the maximum term of imprisonment which may be imposed for commission of any of the contempts described in § 21. Had Congress also intended to restrict the term of imprisonment for contempts excluded from the operation of the Act by § 24, it is difficult to understand why it did not make explicit its intention, as it did in § 22, rather than so subtly express its purpose by proceeding in the devious manner attributed to it by the petitioners. Further, there is no evidence that the past sentencing practices of the courts were ever brought to the attention of Congress. That the federal courts themselves have not considered their sentencing power to be restricted by § 24 of the Clayton Act or by
Such of the legislative history as is germane here argues against the petitioners and strengthens our conclusions that the “usages ... now prevailing” clause of § 24 of the Clayton Act did no more than emphasize that contempts other than those specified in § 21 were to be tried under familiar contempt procedures, that is, among other things, by the court rather than a jury. The House Report accompanying the bill which was substantially enacted as §§ 21, 22 and 24 of the Clayton Act referred to the provisions later forming these sections as dealing “... entirely with questions of Federal procedure relating to injunctions and contempts committed without the presence of the court.” H. R. Rep. No. 627, 63d Cong., 2d Sess. 21. There is no evidence of a broader purpose to enact so substantial a rule of substantive law encompassing all criminal contempts.
We are nevertheless urged to read into
We therefore turn to petitioners’ constitutional arguments. The claim is that proceedings for criminal contempts, if contempts are subject to prison terms of more than one year, must be based on grand jury indictments under the clause of the Fifth Amendment providing: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury ....” (Italics added.) Since an “infamous crime” within the meaning of the Amendment is one punishable by imprisonment in a penitentiary, Mackin v. United States, 117 U. S. 348, and since imprisonment in a penitentiary can be imposed only if a crime is subject to imprisonment exceeding one year,
But this assertion cannot be considered in isolation from the general status of contempts under the Constitution, whether subject to “infamous” punishment or not. The statements of this Court in a long and unbroken line of decisions involving contempts ranging from misbehavior in court to disobedience of court orders establish beyond peradventure that criminal contempts are not subject to jury trial as a matter of constitutional right.14
Although appearing to recognize this, petitioners nevertheless point out that punishment for criminal contempts cannot in any practical sense be distinguished from punishment for substantive crimes, see Gompers v. United States, 233 U. S. 604, 610, and that contempt proceedings have traditionally been surrounded with many of the protections available in a criminal trial.15 But this Court has never suggested that such protections included the right to grand jury indictment. Cf. Savin, Petitioner, 131 U. S. 267, 278; Gompers v. United States, supra, at 612. And of course the summary procedures followed by English courts prior to adoption of the Constitution in dealing with many contempts of court did not embrace the use of either grand or petit jury. See 4 Blackstone Commentaries 283-287. It would indeed be anomalous to conclude that contempts subject to sentences of imprisonment for over one year are “infamous
We are told however that the decisions of this Court denying the right to jury trial in criminal contempt proceedings are based upon an “historical error” reflecting a misunderstanding as to the scope of the power of English courts at the early common law to try summarily for contempts, and that this error should not here be extended to a denial of the right to grand jury. But the more recent historical research into English contempt practices predating the adoption of our Constitution reveals no such clear error and indicates if anything that the precise nature of those practices is shrouded in much obscurity. And whatever the breadth of the historical error said by contemporary scholarship to have been committed by English courts of the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in their interpretation of English precedents involving the trials of contempts of court, it at least seems clear that English practice by the early Eighteenth Century comprehended the use of summary powers of conviction by courts to punish for a variety of contempts committed within and outside court.18 Such indeed is the
We do not write upon a clean slate. The principle that criminal contempts of court are not required to be tried by a jury under
IV.
Petitioners contend that the three-year sentences imposed upon them constituted an abuse of discretion on the part of the District Court.
It is in this light that we have considered the claim that the sentences here were so excessive as to amount to an abuse of discretion. We are led to reject the claim under the facts of this case for three reasons. First, the contempt here was by any standards a most egregious one. Petitioners had been accorded a fair trial on the conspiracy charges against them and had been granted bail pending review of their convictions by the Court of Appeals and this Court. Nevertheless they absconded, and over four and a half years of hiding culminated not in a belated recognition of the authority of the court, but in petitioners’ reassertion of justification for disobeying the surrender order. Second, comparing these sentences with those imposed on the other fugitives in the Dennis
In these circumstances we cannot say that the sentences imposed were beyond the bounds of the reasonable exercise of the District Court‘s discretion.
Affirmed.
MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER, concurring.
In joining the Court‘s opinion I deem it appropriate to add a few observations. Law is a social organism, and evolution operates in the sociological domain no less than in the biological. The vitality and therefore validity of law is not arrested by the circumstances of its origin. What Magna Carta has become is very different indeed from the immediate objects of the barons at Runnymede. The fact that scholarship has shown that historical assumptions regarding the procedure for punishment of contempt of court were ill-founded, hardly wipes out a century and a half of the legislative and judicial history of federal law based on such assumptions. Moreover, the most authoritative student of the history of contempt of court has impressively shown that “from the reign of Edward I it was established that the Court had power to punish summarily contempt committed . . . in the actual view of the Court.” Fox, History of Contempt of Court, 49-52.
Nor has the constitutionality of the power been doubted by this Court throughout its existence. In at least two score cases in this Court, not to mention the vast mass of
The materials on the basis of which this unbroken course of adjudication is proposed to be reversed have in fact been known in this country for almost half a century and were available to the Justices who participated in many of these decisions. The first of the studies of criminal contempt by Sir John Charles Fox, The King v. Almon, 24 Law Q. Rev. 184, appeared in 1908, and the results of the research of Solly-Flood were published as early as 1886. The Story of Prince Henry of Monmouth and Chief-Justice Gascoign, 3 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (N. S.) 47. Mr. Justice Holmes, writing for the Court in Gompers v. United States, 233 U. S. 604 (1914), noted the work of Solly-Flood. He observed that: “It does not follow that contempts of the class under consideration are not crimes, or rather, in the language of the statute, offenses, because trial by jury as it has been gradually worked out and fought out has been thought not to extend to them as a matter of constitutional right. These
| Washington | Gray | Pitney |
| Marshall | Blatchford | McReynolds |
| Johnson | L. Q. C. Lamar | Brandeis |
| Livingston | Fuller | Clarke |
| Todd | Brewer | Taft |
| Story | Brown | Sutherland |
| Duval | Shiras | Butler |
| Clifford | H. E. Jackson | Sanford |
| Swayne | White | Stone |
| Miller | Peckham | Roberts |
| Davis | McKenna | Cardozo |
| Field | Holmes | Reed |
| Strong | Day | Murphy |
| Bradley | Moody | R. H. Jackson |
| Hunt | Lurton | Rutledge |
| Waite | Hughes | Vinson |
| Harlan | Van Devanter | Minton3 |
| Matthews | J. R. Lamar |
To be sure, it is never too late for this Court to correct a misconception in an occasional decision, even on a rare occasion to change a rule of law that may have long persisted but also have long been questioned and only fluctuatingly applied. To say that everybody on the Court
MR. JUSTICE BLACK, with whom THE CHIEF JUSTICE and MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS concur, dissenting.
The power of a judge to inflict punishment for criminal contempt by means of a summary proceeding stands as an anomaly in the law.1 In my judgment the time has
I would reject those precedents which have held that the federal courts can punish an alleged violation outside the courtroom of their decrees by means of a summary trial, at least as long as they can punish by severe prison sentences or fines as they now can and do.3 I
Ordinarily it is sound policy to adhere to prior decisions but this practice has quite properly never been a blind, inflexible rule. Courts are not omniscient. Like every other human agency, they too can profit from trial and error, from experience and reflection. As others have demonstrated, the principle commonly referred to as stare decisis has never been thought to extend so far as to prevent the courts from correcting their own errors. Accordingly, this Court has time and time again from the very beginning reconsidered the merits of its earlier decisions even though they claimed great longevity and repeated reaffirmation. See, e. g., Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U. S. 64; Graves v. New York ex rel. O‘Keefe, 306 U. S. 466; Nye v. United States, 313 U. S. 33.4 Indeed, the Court has a special responsibility where questions of constitutional law are involved to review its decisions from time to time and where compelling reasons present themselves to refuse to follow erroneous precedents; otherwise its mistakes in interpreting the Constitution are extremely difficult to alleviate and needlessly so. See Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co., 285 U. S. 393, 405
If ever a group of cases called for reappraisal it seems to me that those approving summary trial of charges of criminal contempt are the ones. The early precedents which laid the groundwork for this line of authorities were decided before the actual history of the procedures used to punish contempt was brought to light, at a time when “[w]holly unfounded assumptions about ‘immemorial usage’ acquired a factitious authority and were made the basis of legal decisions.”5 These cases erroneously assumed that courts had always possessed the power to punish all contempts summarily and that it inhered in their very being without supporting their suppositions by authority or reason. Later cases merely cite the earlier ones in a progressive cumulation while uncritically repeating their assumptions about “immemorial usage” and “inherent necessity.”6
It also seems significant that the initial decisions by this Court actually upholding the power of the federal courts to punish contempts by summary process were not made until as late as the final decades of the last century, almost a full century after the adoption of the Constitution. Since that time the power has been vigorously challenged on a number of occasions. See, e. g., Toledo Newspaper Co. v. United States, 247 U. S. 402, 425 (dissenting opinion); Sacher v. United States, 343 U. S. 1, 14 (dissenting opinion). Within the past few years there has been a tendency on the part of this Court to restrict the substantive scope of the contempt power to narrower bounds than had been formerly thought to exist. See, e. g., Nye v. United States, 313 U. S. 33; Bridges v. California, 314 U. S. 252; In re Michael, 326 U. S. 224; Cammer v. United States, 350 U. S. 399. Cf. In re Oliver, 333 U. S. 257. In substantial part this is attributable to a deeply felt antipathy toward the arbitrary procedures now used to punish contempts.
Before going any further, perhaps it should be emphasized that we are not at all concerned with the power of courts to impose conditional imprisonment for the purpose of compelling a person to obey a valid order. Such coercion, where the defendant carries the keys to freedom in his willingness to comply with the court‘s directive, is essentially a civil remedy designed for the benefit of other parties and has quite properly been exercised for centuries to secure compliance with judicial decrees. See United States v. United Mine Workers of America, 330 U. S. 258,
Summary trial of criminal contempt, as now practiced, allows a single functionary of the state, a judge, to lay down the law, to prosecute those who he believes have violated his command (as interpreted by him), to sit in “judgment” on his own charges, and then within the broadest kind of bounds to punish as he sees fit. It seems inconsistent with the most rudimentary principles of our system of criminal justice, a system carefully developed and preserved throughout the centuries to prevent oppressive enforcement of oppressive laws, to concentrate this much power in the hands of any officer of the state. No official, regardless of his position or the purity and nobleness of his character, should be granted such autocratic omnipotence. Indeed if any other officer were presumptuous enough to claim such power I cannot believe the courts would tolerate it for an instant under the Constitution. Judges are not essentially different from other government officials. Fortunately they remain human even after assuming their judicial duties. Like all the rest of mankind they may be affected from time to time by pride and passion, by pettiness and bruised feelings, by improper understanding or by excessive zeal. Frank recognition of these common human characteristics, as well as others which need not be mentioned, undoubtedly led to the determination of those who formed our Constitution to fragment power, especially the power to define and enforce the criminal law, among dif-
When the responsibilities of lawmaker, prosecutor, judge, jury and disciplinarian are thrust upon a judge he is obviously incapable of holding the scales of justice perfectly fair and true and reflecting impartially on the guilt or innocence of the accused.8 He truly becomes the judge of his own cause. The defendant charged with criminal contempt is thus denied what I had always thought to be an indispensable element of due process of law—an objective, scrupulously impartial tribunal to determine whether he is guilty or innocent of the charges filed against him. In the words of this Court: “A fair trial in a fair tribunal is a basic requirement of due process. Fairness of course requires an absence of actual bias in the trial of cases. But our system of law has always endeavored to prevent even the probability of unfairness. To this end no man can be a judge in his own case and no man is permitted to try cases where he has an interest in the outcome. . . . Fair trials are too important a part of our free society to let prosecuting judges be trial judges of the charges they prefer.” In re Murchison, 349 U. S. 133, 136-137. Cf. Chambers v. Florida, 309 U. S. 227, 236-237; Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U. S. 510; In re Oliver, 333 U. S. 257.
The vices of a summary trial are only aggravated by the fact that the judge‘s power to punish criminal contempt is exercised without effective external restraint. First, the substantive scope of the offense of contempt is inor-
In my view the power of courts to punish criminal contempt by summary trial, as now exercised, is precisely the kind of arbitrary and dangerous power which our forefathers both here and abroad fought so long, so bitterly, to stamp out. And the paradox of it all is that the courts were established and are maintained to provide impartial tribunals of strictly disinterested arbiters to resolve charges of wrongdoing between citizen and citizen or citizen and state.
The claim has frequently been advanced that courts have exercised the power to try all criminal contempts summarily since time immemorial and that this mode of trial was so well established and so favorably regarded at the time the Constitution was adopted that it was carried forward intact, by implication, despite the express provisions of the Bill of Rights requiring a completely different and fairer kind of trial for “all crimes.” The myth of immemorial usage has been exploded by recent scholarship as a mere fiction. Instead it seems clear that until at least the late Seventeenth or early Eighteenth Century the English courts, with the sole exception of the extraordinary and ill-famed Court of Star Chamber whose arbitrary procedures and gross excesses brought forth many of
Then in 1765 Justice Wilmot declared in an opinion prepared for delivery in the Court of King‘s Bench (but never actually handed down) that courts had exercised the power to try all contempts summarily since their creation in the forgotten past. Although this bald assertion has been wholly discredited by the painstaking research of the eminent authorities referred to above, and even though Wilmot‘s opinion was not published until some years after our Constitution had been adopted, nor cited as authority by any court until 1821, his views have nevertheless exerted a baleful influence on the law of contempt both in this country and in England.
The Government, relying solely on certain obscure passages in some early law review articles by Fox, contends that while the common-law courts may not have traditionally possessed power to punish all criminal contempts without a regular trial they had always exercised such authority with respect to disobedience of their decrees. I do not believe that the studies of Fox or of other students of the history of contempt support any such claim. As I understand him, Fox reaches precisely the opposite conclusion. In his authoritative treatise, expressly written to elaborate and further substantiate the opinions formed in his earlier law review comments, he states clearly at the outset:
“The first of [this series of earlier articles], entitled The King v. Almon, was written to show that in former times the offence of contempt committed out of court was tried by a jury in the ordinary course of law and not summarily by the Court as at present [1927]. The later articles also bear upon the history of the procedure in matters of contempt. Further
Then in summarizing he asserts that strangers to court proceedings were never punished except by the ordinary processes of the criminal law for contempts committed out of the court‘s presence until some time after the dissolution of the Star Chamber; he immediately follows with the judgment that parties were governed by the same general rules that applied to strangers.17 Of course he recognizes the antiquity of the jurisdiction of courts to enforce their orders by conditional confinement, but such coercion, as pointed out before, is obviously something quite different from the infliction of purely punitive penalties for criminal contempt when compliance is no longer possible.
Professors Frankfurter and Landis in their fine article likewise unequivocally declare:
“. . . the
Clayton Act [providing for jury trial of certain charges of criminal contempt] does nothing new. It is as old as the best traditions of the common law. . . .“Down to the early part of the eighteenth century cases of contempt even in and about the common-law courts when not committed by persons officially connected with the court were dealt with by the ordinary course of law, i. e., tried by jury, except when the offender confessed or when the offense was committed ‘in the actual view of the court.’ . .
“[U]ntil 1720 there is no instance in the common-law precedents of punishment otherwise than after trial in the ordinary course and not by summary process.”18
And Professor Beale in his discussion of the matter concludes:
“As early as the time of Richard III it was said that the chancellor of England compels a party against whom an order is issued by imprisonment; and a little later it was said in the chancery that ‘a decree does not bind the right, but only binds the person to obedience, so that if the party will not obey, then the chancellor may commit him to prison till he obey, and that is all the chancellor can do.’ This imprisonment was by no means a punishment, but was merely to secure obedience to the writ of the king. Down to within a century [Beale was writing in 1908] it was very doubtful if the chancellor could under any circumstances inflict punishment for disobedience of a decree . . . In any case the contempt of a defendant who had violated a decree in chancery could be purged by doing the act commanded and paying costs; . . . .
“Where the court inflicts a definite term of imprisonment by way of punishment for the violation of its orders, the case does not differ, it would seem, from the case of criminal contempt out of court, and regular process and trial by jury should be required.”19
In brief the available historical material as reported and analyzed by the recognized authorities in this field
Those who claim that the delegates who ratified the Constitution and its contemporaneous Amendments intended to exempt the crime of contempt from the procedural safeguards expressly established by those great charters for the trial of “all crimes” carry a heavy burden indeed. There is nothing in the Constitution or any of its Amendments which even remotely suggests such an exception. And as the Government points out in its brief, it does not appear that there was a word of discussion in the Constitutional Convention or in any of the state ratifying conventions recognizing or affirming the jurisdiction of courts to punish this crime by summary process, a power which in all particulars is so inherently alien to the method of punishing other public offenses provided by the Constitution.
In the beginning the contempt power with its essentially arbitrary procedures was a petty, insignificant part of our law involving the use of trivial penalties to preserve order in the courtroom and maintain the authority of the courts.21 But since the adoption of the Constitu-
I cannot help but believe that this arbitrary power to punish by summary process, as now used, is utterly irreconcilable with first principles underlying our Constitution and the system of government it created—principles which were uppermost in the minds of the gen-
As manifested by the Declaration of Independence, the denial of trial by jury and its subversion by various contrivances was one of the principal complaints against the English Crown. Trial by a jury of laymen and no less was regarded as the birthright of free men.23 Witness the fierce opposition of the colonials to the courts of admiralty in which judges instead of citizen juries were authorized to try those charged with violating certain laws.24 The same zealous determination to protect jury trial dominated the state conventions which ratified the Constitution and eventually led to the solemn reaffirmation of that mode of trial in the Bill of Rights—not only for all criminal prosecutions but for all civil causes involving $20 or more. See 2 Story, Commentaries on the Constitution (5th ed. 1891), §§ 1763-1768. I find it difficult
As this Court has often observed, “The Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning,” United States v. Sprague, 282 U. S. 716, 731; “. . . constitutions, although framed by conventions, are yet created by the votes of the entire body of electors in a State, the most of whom are little disposed, even if they were able, to engage in such refinements. The simplest and most obvious interpretation of a constitution, if in itself sensible, is the
It is true that Blackstone in his Commentaries incorporated Wilmot‘s erroneous fancy that at common law the courts had immemorially punished all criminal contempts without regular trial. Much ado is made over this by the proponents of summary proceedings. Yet at the very same time Blackstone openly classified and uniformly referred to contempt as a “crime” throughout his treatise, as in fact it had traditionally been regarded and punished at common law.26 Similarly, other legal treatises available in this country during the period when the Constitution was established plainly treated contempt as a “crime.”27 It seems to me that if any guide to the meaning of the Constitution can be fashioned from the circulation of the Commentaries and these other legal authorities through the former colonies (primarily among lawyers and judges) it is at least as compatible with the
But far more significant, our Constitution and Bill of Rights were manifestly not designed to perpetuate, to preserve inviolate, every arbitrary and oppressive governmental practice then tolerated, or thought to be, in England. Cf. Bridges v. California, 314 U. S. 252, 263-268. Those who formed the Constitution struck out anew free of previous shackles in an effort to obtain a better order of government more congenial to human liberty and welfare. It cannot be seriously claimed that they intended to adopt the common law wholesale. They accepted those portions of it which were adapted to this country and conformed to the ideals of its citizens and rejected the remainder. In truth there was widespread hostility to the common law in general and profound opposition to its adoption into our jurisprudence from the commencement of the Revolutionary War until long after the Constitution was ratified. As summarized by one historian:
“The Revolutionary War made everything connected with the law of England distasteful to the people at large. The lawyers knew its value: the community did not. Public sentiment favored an American law for America. It was quickened by the unfriendly feeling toward the mother country which became pronounced toward the close of the eighteenth century and culminated in the War of 1812.”28
Apologists for summary trial of the crime of contempt also endeavor to justify it as a “necessity” if judicial orders are to be observed and the needful authority of the courts maintained. “Necessity” is often used in this context as convenient or desirable. But since we are dealing with an asserted power which derogates from and is fundamentally inconsistent with our ordinary, constitutionally prescribed methods of proceeding in criminal cases, “necessity,” if it can justify at all, must at least refer to a situation where the extraordinary power to punish by summary process is clearly indispensable to the enforcement of court decrees and the orderly administration of justice. Or as this Court has repeatedly phrased it, the courts in punishing contempts should be rigorously restricted to the “least possible power adequate to the end proposed.” See, e. g., In re Michael, 326 U. S. 224, 227.
Stark necessity is an impressive and often compelling thing, but unfortunately it has all too often been claimed loosely and without warrant in the law, as elsewhere, to justify that which in truth is unjustifiable. As one of
“Not one of the oppressive prerogatives of which the crown has been successively stripped, in England, but was in its day, defended on the plea of necessity. Not one of the attempts to destroy them, but was deemed a hazardous innovation.”30
When examined in closer detail the argument from “necessity” appears to rest on the assumption that the regular criminal processes, including trial by petit jury and indictment by grand jury, will not result in conviction and punishment of a fair share of those guilty of violating court orders, are unduly slow and cumbersome, and by intervening between the court and punishment for those who disobey its mandate somehow detract from its dignity and prestige. Obviously this argument reflects substantial disrespect for the institution of trial by jury, although this method of trial is—and has been for centuries—an integral and highly esteemed part of our system of criminal justice enshrined in the Constitution itself. Nothing concrete is ever offered to support the innuendo that juries will not convict the same proportion of those guilty of contempt as would judges. Such evidence as is available plus my own experience convinces me that by and large juries are fully as responsible in meting out justice in criminal cases as are the judiciary.31 At the same time, and immeasurably more important, trial before a jury and in full compliance with all of the other protections of the Bill of Rights is much
Although some are prone to overlook it, an accused‘s right to trial by a jury of his fellow citizens when charged with a serious criminal offense is unquestionably one of his most valuable and well-established safeguards in this country.32 In the words of Chief Justice Cooley: “The law has established this tribunal because it is believed that, from its numbers, the mode of their selection, and the fact that jurors come from all classes of society, they are better calculated to judge of motives, weigh probabilities, and take what may be called a common sense view of a set of circumstances, involving both act and intent, than any single man, however pure, wise and eminent he may be. This is the theory of the law; and as applied to criminal accusations, it is eminently wise, and favorable alike to liberty and to justice.” People v. Garbutt, 17 Mich. 9, 27. Trial by an impartial jury of independent laymen raises another imposing barrier to oppression by government officers. As one of the more perceptive students of our experiment in freedom keenly observed, “The institution of the jury . . . places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or of a portion of the governed, and not in that of the government.” 1 De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Reeve trans., 1948 ed.), 282. The jury injects a democratic element into the law. This element is vital to the effective administration of criminal justice,
It is undoubtedly true that a judge can dispose of charges of criminal contempt faster and cheaper than a jury. But such trifling economies as may result have not generally been thought sufficient reason for abandoning our great constitutional safeguards aimed at protecting freedom and other basic human rights of incalculable value. Cheap, easy convictions were not the primary concern of those who adopted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Every procedural safeguard they established purposely made it more difficult for the Government to convict those it accused of crimes. On their scale of values justice occupied at least as high a position as economy. But even setting this dominant consideration to one side, what compelling necessity is there for special dispatch in punishing criminal contempts, especially those occurring beyond the courtroom? When the desired action or inaction can no longer be compelled by coercive measures and all that remains is the punishment of past sins there is adequate time to give defendants the full benefit of the ordinary criminal procedures. As a matter of fact any slight delay involved might well discourage a court from resorting to hasty, unnecessary measures to chastise suspected disobedience. I believe that Mr. Justice Holmes, speaking for himself and Mr. Justice Brandeis, took his stand on invulnerable ground when he declared that where “there is no need for immediate action contempts are like any other breach of law and should be dealt with as the law deals with other
For almost a half century the
I am confident that in the long run due respect for the courts and their mandates would be much more likely if they faithfully observed the procedures laid down by our nationally acclaimed charter of liberty, the Bill of Rights.37 Respect and obedience in this country are not engendered—and rightly not—by arbitrary and autocratic procedures. In the end such methods only yield real contempt for the courts and the law. The classic example of this is the use and abuse of the injunction and summary contempt power in the labor field. The federal courts have still not recovered from the scars inflicted by their intervention in that area where Congress finally stepped in and preserved the right of jury trial to all those charged with the crime of contempt.
In the last analysis there is no justification in history, in necessity, or most important in the Constitution for trying those charged with violating a court‘s decree in a manner wholly different from those accused of disobeying any other mandate of the state. It is significant that neither the Court nor the Government makes any serious effort to justify such differentiation except that it has been sanctioned by prior decisions. Under the
MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN, with whom THE CHIEF JUSTICE and MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS join, dissenting.
I dissent because I do not believe that the evidence was sufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt the petitioners’ guilt of the criminal contempt charged.
Petitioners were among 11 leaders of the Communist Party who were convicted of violation of the
The most that can be said is that the evidence might have been sufficient to support conviction of the petitioners for bail jumping if that had been an offense at the time they fled. But bail jumping did not become a separate crime until three years after the petitioners’ flight, when this void in the law—highlighted by the petitioners’ conduct—led the Department of Justice to secure the enactment of
The Court relates the criminal contempt charged to bail jumping by its use of
Assessment of the sufficiency of the evidence bearing on the petitioners’ knowledge requires that the precise time at which the order came into existence be kept clearly in mind. The Court of Appeals below fell into palpable error in reading the specifications to charge “disobedience of the order of June 28.” 241 F. 2d 631, 632. The order was not signed or entered until court convened after 10 o‘clock on the morning of July 2. What happened on June 28 was that the attorneys of the Dennis defendants were served with copies of a proposed order to be entered on July 2. But the attorneys’ knowledge cannot be imputed to their clients. In re Kwelman, supra. The petitioners had absconded by July 2, and the record is completely silent as to their whereabouts from June 29 until they surrendered almost five years later. Con-
The proof upon which reliance is placed consists of evidence (1) that the petitioners knew on June 29, 1951, that the order was to be entered on July 2, and (2) that the petitioners made certain statements to the press at the time of their surrender almost five years later.
First. Manifestly, foreknowledge that an order might come into existence does not prove knowledge that it did come into existence. Even if the petitioners knew on June 29 that the order was likely to be signed on July 2, the most that can be said is that after July 2 the petitioners knew that the order was to have been entered. This, of course, is not the same as knowledge that the order had been entered, and it is the latter knowledge which the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Knowledge that the order had been entered, of course, could only be acquired by the petitioners after the order had come into existence on the morning of July 2; and that knowledge can hardly be inferred from the events which occurred prior to the moment the order was entered. See the opinion of Judge Biggs in United States v. Hall, 198 F. 2d 726, 733-735.
The Government‘s lack of confidence in the proofs to show actual knowledge is implicit in its effort to sustain the convictions on a theory of constructive knowledge derived from the events of June 28 and from the evidence that on June 29 the petitioners and the other Dennis defendants were told by the attorneys that they must be in court on July 2. The short answer to this contention is that the petitioners are not charged with disobedience of an order of which they had constructive knowledge but with disobedience of an order of which they had actual knowledge, and conviction can be had on the precise charge, or not at all. In any event, the sole authority
Second. Since the evidence of knowledge that an order was to be entered is not sufficient to prove knowledge that the order was entered, what of the evidence of what was said by the petitioners at the time of their surrender? The Court refers to the petitioners’ press releases in which they stated they would surrender to “enter prison,” and to Green‘s further reference that he intended to “go to the United States Marshal‘s Office.” But, of course, surrender could only have been to enter prison. Their statements prove no more than what the petitioners and everyone else knew had to happen when this Court affirmed their Smith Act convictions in 1951. And it can hardly be doubted that, after the many months these petitioners spent at their trial in the Foley Square Courthouse, both the location and function of the Marshal‘s Office was well known to them. That the Court must resort to these statements to find probative weight in the evidence demonstrates the inherent insufficiency of the proofs to show actual knowledge.
Nor do there appear other circumstances from which knowledge may be inferred. The Court‘s opinion gives the impression that the surrender order was an order in familiar and customary use, well known to the sophisticated in the criminal law. I doubt that even widely experienced criminal lawyers encounter this provision very often. The provision was not the occasion for the
I can well understand why the Government should have desired to proceed against these petitioners for their serious obstruction of the administration of justice. In the absence of a statutory provision aimed directly at this conduct, the Government resorted to this attempt to punish that obstruction as a criminal contempt. However, regardless of the view taken on the underlying constitutional issue involved, the odiousness of the offense cannot be a reason for relaxing the normal standards of proof required to sustain a conviction under
Notes
The Court: “Now, you did make a statement last week that you will have the four defendants [Green, Winston, Hall and Thompson] in court, as I recall, on Monday [July 2].
“Mr. Sacher: I said that all of them would be here.
“. . . . .
“The Court: And as you know, four of them were not here on Monday. Of course, you may be bound by some obligation of attorney and client, but are you able to give the Court any information as to their present whereabouts?
“Mr. Sacher: Your Honor, I should consider myself not bound by any obligation to withhold any information that I might have, and I give your Honor my assurance that I have no knowledge, I have no basis of knowledge as to their present whereabouts or where they might have gone.
“The Court: Where did you last see these four defendants?
“. . . . .
“Mr. Sacher: ... I am not certain about Thompson, but I am fairly certain that I saw the three I mentioned sometime on Friday [June 29] at 35 East Twelfth Street.
“The Court: Did you tell them at that time that their presence was required in court yesterday morning?
“Mr. Sacher: Definitely. As a matter of fact I advised that because I think I saw them among other defendants after I had been here on Friday, your Honor, and had made these motions [apparently referring to counsel‘s efforts to postpone the surrender date until after July 4], and therefore I advised that they all should be present and I was assured they would be.
“. . . . .
“The Court: Mr. Isserman, do you know where any of these defendants are?
“Mr. Isserman: I might say to the Court that I would not rest on privilege in this situation at all. I have no knowledge of the present whereabouts of any of these defendants. ... I remember, Green being my client, I remember distinctly that I saw him on that day [June 29] and received from him the assurance that he would be here Monday morning [July 2].”
Perhaps the classic example is the much criticized decision in In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564. For some of the milder comment see“On Monday, February 27th at 12 noon I shall cease being a fugitive from injustice and instead become its prisoner. At that time, I shall appear at Foley Square. ... The course I chose five years ago was not dictated by personal considerations. In many ways it was harsher than that of imprisonment. ... [I]t seemed incumbent upon me to resist that trend [i. e. to ‘an American brand of fascism‘] with every ounce of strength I possessed. Some could do so by going to jail; others by not. ... I enter prison with head high and conscience clear.” (Italics added.)
Excerpts from Winston‘s press release:
“Reiterating my innocence, and protesting the flagrant miscarriage of justice in my case, I now enter prison ... I shall appear this coming Monday, March 5th, 12:30 p. m., at the U. S. Marshal‘s Office in Foley Square.” (Italics added.)
E. g., see Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U. S. 250; Perez v. Brownell, ante, p. 44.For more general statements of the nature of the contempt power and its indispensability to federal courts, see United States v. Hudson, 7 Cranch 32, 34; Ex parte Robinson, 19 Wall. 505, 510; Ex parte Terry, 128 U. S. 289, 302-304; Bessette v. W. B. Conkey Co., supra, at 326; Myers v. United States, 264 U. S. 95, 103; Michaelson v. United States, supra, at 65-66.
One scholar has argued that even contempts in the face of the courts were tried by jury after indictment by grand jury until the reign of Elizabeth I. Solly-Flood, Prince Henry of Monmouth and Chief Justice Gascoign, 3 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (N. S.) 47. Although agreeing that contempts in facie were often tried by a jury up to and beyond this period, Fox takes the view that such contempts were also punishable by summary procedures from the early common law.