187 F. 398 | 8th Cir. | 1911
The injunction in this case was issued at the instance of the Board of Trade, to protect it from irreparable injury until the final decree could be rendered in the suit. The defendants in the suit, the plaintiffs in error here, must be assumed, for the purpose of the decision of this preliminary question, to have violated this injunction, and to have inflicted serious injury upon the Board while the suit was pending, and the court fined them for these unlawful acts, and ordered three-fourths of the fines to be paid to the Board and one-fourth thereof to the United States.
“If file contempt consists in the refusal of a party to do something which he is ordered to do for the benefit or advantage of the opposite party, the process is civil, and he stands committed until he complies with the order. * * * If, on the other hand, the contempt consists in the doing of a forbidden act, injurious to the opposite party, the proceeding is criminal, and conviction is followed by fine or imprisonment, or both; and this is by*400 way of punishment. * * * This rule, as definitely stated, has not been expressly recognized by any case coming under our observation, but it is consistent with all the decisions.”
The opinion from which these quotations are made was written in the year 1893. While the line of demarcation there drawn may not .have been inconsistent with any opinions coming under the eyes ot the Supreme Court of South Dakota at that time, it is inconsistent with the later decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. In Ex parte Heller, 214 U. S. 501, 29 Sup. Ct. 698, 53 L. Ed. 1060, Heller had been enjoined from using a certain trade-mark and from stamping waistbands in a certain manner, and the court that rendered the decree had adjudged him to be in contempt for violating the injunction, and had fined him $500. He had sued out a writ of error to the Circuit Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit, and that court had dismissed his writ, on the ground that the contempt was not criminal. Heller had then applied to the Supreme Court for a mandamus to compel the Court of Appeals to take jurisdiction of and to decide his case on the merits of the writ of error, and the Supreme Court dismissed his petition, after quoting from the opinion of the Court of Appeals this declaration:
“It Is well settled that, when an order imposing a fine for a violation of an injunction is substantially one to reimburse the party injured by the disobedience, it is to be reviewed only by appeal.”
The truth is that substantial benefit to a private party preponderating over that to the government is the distinguishing characteristic of a civil contempt, and that benefit is often as great and it arises as frequently from judgments for contempts for disobedience of a prohibitory as of a mandatory order or judgment. In view of this fact, and of the decisions of the Supreme Court which have been cited, we adhere to our earlier statement of the nature and of the distinction between criminal and civil contempts which was made in Re Nevitt, 54 C. C. A. 622, 632, 117 Fed. 448, 458, was approved by the Supreme Court in Bessette v. W. B. Conkey Company, 194 U. S. 324, 328, 24 Sup. Ct. 665, 48 L. Ed. 997, and was affirmed by this court in Clay v. Waters, 101 C. C. A. 645, 178 Fed. 385, 389, which reads:
“Proceedings for contempts are of two classes — those prosecuted to preserve the power and vindicate the dignity of the courts and to punish for disobedience of their orders, and those instituted to preserve and enforce the rights of private parties to suits and to compel obedience to orders and decrees made to enforce the rights and administer the remedies to which the court has found them to be entitled. The former are criminal and punitive in their nature, and the government, the courts, and the people, are interested in their prosecution. The latter are civil, remedial, and coercive in their nature, and the parties chiefly in interest in their conduct and prosecution are the individuals whose private rights and remedies they were instituted to protect or enforce. Thompson v. Railroad Company, 48 N. J. Eq. 105, 108 [21 Atl. 182]; Hendryx v. Fitzpatrick (C. C.) 19 Fed. 810; Ex parte Culliford, 8 Barn. & C. 220; Rex v. Edwards, 9 Barn. & C. 652; People v. Court of Oyer & Terminer, 101 N. Y. 245, 247 [4 N. E. 259, 54 Am. Rep. 691]; Phillips v. Welch, 11 Nev. 187, 190; State v. Knight, 3 S. D. 509, 513 [54 N. W. 412, 44 Am. St. Rep. 809]; People v. McKane, 78 Hun, 154, 160, 28 N. Y. Supp. 981; 7 Am. & Eng. Ene. Law, OS,”
In every civil as well as in every criminal contempt there necessarily inheres an affront to the dignity and a defiance of the power of the court and a liability to punishment therefor. The liability to punishment for an affront to the dignity of the court cannot, therefore, distinguish a civil from a criminal contempt, for it always exists in each. Yet every contempt is either a civil contempt or a criminal contempt. What, then, is the distinguishing characteristic, between them? It is the dominating object of the prosecution and the party chiefly interested therein. If the chief purpose of the proceeding for contempt is to enforce the rights and administer the remedies to which courts have adjudged or may adjudge a private party to be entitled, and if such a private party is the one chiefly interested in it, the proceeding is for a civil contempt. If the chief object of the prosecution, as in cases of misconduct in court, or of disobedience of a subpoena, is, by punishment of the offender, to preserve the power and vindicate the dignity of the court, and if the party chiefly interested in the prose
“The complaint made against them in this is of disobedience to an order of a civil court, made for the protection of property and the security of rights.” In re Debs, 158 U. S. 565, 594, 15 Sup. Ct. 900, 39 L. Ed. 1092.
“In brief, a court, enforcing obedience to its orders by proceedings for contempt, is not executing the criminal laws of the land, but only securing, to suitors the rights which it has adjudged them entitled to.” 158 U. S. 596, 15 Sup. Ct. 911 (39 L. Ed. 1092).
And at 158 U. S. 599, 15 Sup. Ct. 912 (39 L. Ed. 1092), he said:
“That the proceeding by injunction is of a civil character, and may be enforced by proceedings in contempt, that such proceedings are not in execution of the criminal laws of the land.”
In Bessette v. W. B. Conkey Company, 194 U. S. 324, 24 Sup. Ct. 665, 48 L. Ed. 997, where the violation of an injunction by one who was not a party to the suit was held to be, like misconduct in the courtroom, a criminal contempt, Mr. Justice Brewer said that an act might partake oEthe characteristics of both a civil and of a criminal contempt, but that:
“A significant and generally determinative feature is that the act is by one party to a suit, in disobedience of a special order made in behalf of the other. Yet sometimes the disobedience may be of such a character and in such a manner as to indicate a contempt of the court, rather than a disregard of the rights of the adverse party.”
Every act, as we have seen, which constitutes a civil contempt, unavoidably partakes of the characteristics of both a, civil contempt and a criminal contempt, because it is necessarily punishable for its affront to the dignity of the court. But the proceeding for contempt is for a civil contempt, and not for a criminal contempt, although its incidental effect may be punitive, if the chief and dominating purpose and effect of the proceeding is to protect the property of a private party to a suit, if the party chiefly interested in the proceeding is such a private party, and if the “act is by one party to a suit in disobedience of a special order made in behalf of the other.”
The proceeding in the case at bar was clearly of this character. Not only the dominant, but in reality the sole, purpose of it was to protect the property of the complainant pendente lite by coercing the defendants to obey the injunction issued for that purpose. The party chiefly interested in it was the Board of Trade, and that Board instituted and conducted the proceeding, the acts which constituted the contempt were committed by the defendant in a suit in equity in disobedience of a temporary injunction issued in behalf of the complainant, the main effect, as well as the object of the judgment for contempt, is to coerce the defendants to obey the injunction and to cease their continuing appropriation of the complainant’s property, and the punitive element in it is subordinate, incidental, and, so far as the discussion and determination of this question is Concerned, negligible.
Any other practice in suits in equity would in effect render interlocutory injunctions and orders futile, would deprive courts of equity of their salutary power to protect parties from irreparable injury, to control the subject-matter and the parties, and to require the production of evidence pendente lite, and would produce intolerable delay in the prosecution of suits in equity. If, every time that a temporary injunction or an interlocutory order in an equity suit were made, parties to the suit might disobey it, submit to an order or judgment for contempt, and then by writ of error and supersedeas suspend that judgment until an appellate court could review it, the wrongs to prevent which such injunctions issue might; be perpetrated before the bearing's in the appellate court on the judgments for contempts could he had, and prosecutions of suits in equity might be indefinitely delayed, while parties awaited the decisions of appellate courts upon writs of error challenging the judgments for contempts for disobedience of interlocutory orders regarding the production of evidence and other matters relevant to the conduct of such suits. A practice of this nature should not be approved or permitted, and the writ of error must be dismissed. Doyle v. London Guarantee & Accident Company, 204 U. S. 599, 602, 603, 607, 27 Sup. Ct. 313, 51 L. Ed. 641.
It is so ordered.
