333 F.2d 475 | 2d Cir. | 1964
Lead Opinion
In July, 1962, a grand jury in the District Court for Connecticut returned a nine count indictment charging David I. Shackney with violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1581(a) and 1584. The former section makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of not more than $5,000, or imprisonment of not more than five years, or both, to hold or return “any person to a condition of peonage” or to arrest “any person with the intent of placing him in or returning him to a condition of peonage.” The latter section subjects to similar punishment “Whoever knowingly and willfully holds to involuntary servitude or sells into any condition of involuntary servitude, any other person for any term, or brings within the United States any person so held * * *.” The first two counts of the indictment charged the holding of Luis Oros and his wife, Virginia Oros, in a condition of peonage in Middlefield, Conn., from July 12, 1961, to March 3, 1962. The other seven counts charged the holding to involuntary servitude of Luis, Virginia, their four daughters and their son, at the same place and for the same time. Trial before Judge Blumenfeld and a jury began late in January, 1963, and continued until mid-March. At the end of the Government’s case the court granted a motion for acquittal on the two counts relating to the wife; later, on being required to elect between the peonage count and the involuntary servitude count as to the husband, the Government consented to dismissal of the former. Reserving decision on a motion for acquittal on the remaining six counts, all under § 1584, relating to Luis and the five children, the judge submitted the case to the jury, which rendered verdicts of guilty on all. Subsequently the judge denied Shackney’s motions for an acquittal and for a new trial and entered the judgment of conviction whence this appeal is taken. We hold that the Government did not show commission of the crime defined by § 1584.
Taking the evidence most favorably to the Government, we summarize this, noting only a few of the many items that were contradicted. However, we must add in fairness that this gives an unbalanced impression of the record as a whole, since it omits substantial evidence favorable to Shackney, much of it developed on Oros’ cross-examination,
Shackney, who had been ordained as a rabbi in Poland, came to the United States with his wife in 1941. During the period charged in the indictment he taught afternoon classes at the B’nai
Shackney had found it hard to get American farm laborers who would accommodate themselves to the hens’ annoying disregard for week-ends. Having seen an advertisement in a trade journal as to the availability of Mexican workers, he went to Mexico City in late June 1960, and hired two families, the Chavez’ and the Olguins. One evening he hailed a taxi to take him to a theatre. The taxi was driven by Oros, then 40, who had been a Mexico City taxi driver for some eleven years. Oros had been in the United States as a railroad worker for nine months in 1944 in Wilmington, Delaware, and again in 1945-46 in Nevada. Talk in the taxi led, according to Oros, to Shackney’s saying he needed still another family for the farm and Oros’ offering his own. Shackney made it plain that Oros would have to sign a two-year contract, during which he was never to drink or to leave the farm. Undeterred, Oros took Shackney to his house to meet the family; Shackney said he had a house like it on his farm. The family being away, Oros later brought them to Shackney’s hotel. Shackney, who was leaving the next morning, told Oros to prepare his immigration papers and to communicate with him.
Oros set about procuring his papers but letters to Shackney as to his progress were unanswered. In January, 1961, Shackney telegraphed Oros to phone him; Oros confirmed that he still desired to come. After developments unnecessary to detail, Oros, his wife and his eldest daughter Maria Elena signed a contract, in Spanish, to work on Shaek-ney’s farm. This provided, among other things, that the contract should have a two-year term beginning August 15, 1961; that together with another couple the three Oros’ would care for 20,000 laying hens; that the hours of work were to be from 6:30 A.M. until the work was completed, with three breaks; that “because of the fact that our work will be handling living things which must be carefully cared for, this work must be done every day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year with no exception”; that they were to receive a furnished place to live, with heat, electricity and gas for cooking, and sufficient food; and that their combined salary should be $160 per month for the first year and $240 for the second, half of which was to be deposited in a joint bank account as security for their performing their obligations.
Since Oros had encountered difficulty in obtaining visas, he asked Shackney to come to Mexico City to help. It was apparently on this occasion that Shack-ney allegedly made two statements much emphasized by the Government:
“You have contract, if you break this contract, I deport you and you never come back to the United States, not you, not your son, and not your grandsons, nobody, because I have lot of friends in Mexico and the United States, too, and I have lot of money, and money is money here or any place.”
In contrast,
“If you are nice man and you work in my farm the two years like say the contract, after two years you are American citizen and then you can go any place, you are free, you go to work in taxi-cab or you go to California if feel you want to go. You want stay in my farm, you can stay.”
It developed that Oros had no money to pay for his visas or transportation save for $80 which he had borrowed and turned over to Shackney. The latter arranged for funds to be provided but insisted on the signing by Oros of twelve promissory notes for $100 each, payable monthly, and their co-signing by a friend, Rosalio, who owned his own home. The next day Shackney made Oros sign six
They found the conditions of life less attractive and the work more arduous than they had pictured. Their dwelling was a four-room half of a Quonset hut, set upon wooden pilings; the walls were of corrugated cardboard; and there were holes in the floor which Shack-ney told Oros to cover. Two of the rooms were bedrooms, with a total of two beds and a cot for the family of .seven, there was a bathroom, and the ■other room contained kitchen facilities, an automatic hot water heater, a large ■television set and later a radio as well. The dwelling was heated by a wood stove. There was some criticism of the food, but the Government does not make this a serious item of complaint. Shack-ney gave the Oros’ used clothing, and also furnished them with some new ■clothes, toilet articles and postage stamps which he said would ultimately have to be paid for. Although the contract called only for the services of the parents and the eldest daughter, all seven of the family worked, the two youngest children, aged 9 and 7, starting their labors at 10:00 A.M. instead of 6:30 A.M. when the others began.
None of the Oros children went to school. Oros claimed that Shackney had said that the school was too far away, that the Oros’ had no money to pay for the school, the school bus and clothing, and that the children could not speak English; Shackney countered that he had urged Oros to send the children to school but that Oros had objected. Oros also testified that a request for permission to attend the movies and a few requests to go to church were denied. Oros left the farm on only four occasions, Shackney going along on all save one. Until the latter months of the Oros’ stay on the farm, all outgoing letters from the Oros’ were given for posting to Shackney, who supplied the stamps; all incoming letters for the farm were placed in a rural post box and letters to the Oros’ were delivered by him. There was evidence from which the jury could find that Shackney censored the Oros’
Oros and Maria Elena testified that from the first day they had come to the farm they wished to leave it because the house was so different from what had been represented.
The Government’s case was that the Oros’ did not dare avail themselves of the easy methods of release admittedly available because their wills were overborne by fear which Shackney had engendered. Oros and Maria Elena testified they were always afraid. Of prime importance was the fear of deportation if they left. Here the Government linked the conversation in Mexico in July, 1961, that if Oros broke his contract he would be deported, with incidents in which Shackney spoke of deportation for other causes. A notable one occurred around September or October; Oros quoted Shackney’s description how a “man he say is too lazy and don’t do everything, and say sometime he’s drunk, too, so is bad man; and sometime he do something Mr. Shackney don’t like, and this time Mr. Shackney say are very mad, and take him from * * * the chicken coop, and * * * send back to Mexico in half hour.”
In January and February, 1962, Oros talked with persons coming to the farm and gave some of them letters to mail. One of these was to a Mr. Davalos in Philadelphia. Mr. and Mrs. Davalos came to the farm on Saturday, March 3, and asked to see Oros. Shackney at first declined to permit them either to visit Oros or to drive him to town; later he agreed they might see Oros a few hours hence. He asked Oros and the family to clean themselves and their house, cautioned that the guests were not to remain too long, and offered to provide refreshments. Meanwhile the Davalos’ communicated with Officer Cabelus of the Connecticut State Police. Cabelus returned with them, interviewed Oros, and took Oros to his office. Mrs. Davalos requested that he call an attorney; this was done around 10 P.M. After Oros’ return to the farm, Shackney questioned him, around 1 A.M., as to what he had said. On learning that Oros had told Cabelus, among other things, that the children didn’t go to school “because you don’t want my children to go out the farm” and that nobody went to church “because you don’t want never nobody go out the farm,” Shackney asked whether Oros didn’t know “if you say this, this is a crime” and ordered him to leave at once — an order whose execution Shackney later postponed to Sunday morning when the Oros’ departed with the Davalos’ under the supervision of Officer Cabelus who had supplied a truck to carry their belongings. Before leaving Connecticut for Philadelphia, Oros and the Davalos’ called on the lawyer, who wrote Shackney on March 7 that the Oros’ claimed that the latter and his company “are guilty of servitude” and suggested “an amicable settlement.” A week later, after a call from Mrs. Dava-los to the lawyer, Oros was contacted in Philadelphia by the F. B. I., whose investigation led to the indictment.
The first and, in our view, dis-positive issue is the reach of the language of 18 U.S.C. § 1584, “Whoever knowingly and willfully holds to involuntary servitude * * The Government suggests in effect that this is equivalent to “Whoever knowingly and willfully holds to service by duress.” To test the consequences of such a reading, appellant’s brief put a series of cases, starting with that of a man chained to his work bench and kept -under restraint at all times, and ranging through the instant ease to others where an employer threatens an employee who wishes to leave his service with blackballing in the industry, revealing a crime to the police, or preventing the employee’s son from achieving a much desired admission to Yale. The Government manfully answered that all these cases constitute a holding to involuntary servitude, although also denying “that the outer limits of that statute need be explored in this case.” With the most profound respect for the illustrious university at New Haven, we cannot believe that retention of an employee by a threat to prevent his son’s admission there was quite what Congress had in mind when, in the great words of the 13th Amendment, it forbade a holding in involuntary servitude; and a court does not discharge its duty by saying that although it cannot tell just what a penal statute does forbid, it is confident that the case sub judice falls within it. When criminal statutes use “abstractions of common certainty,” E. Freund, The Use of Indefinite Terms in Statutes, 30 Yale L.J. 437 (1921), courts must give what has been aptly called “a pointing definition — a direction which attaches them to that one object to which they refer,” if the statute is to escape
Our endeavor to construe the statute had best begin with its history. There is an initial puzzlement why the Criminal Code should contain two provisions, one relating to peonage, § 1581, and the other to involuntary servitude, § 1584, since any case that could be reached under the former section could also be reached under the latter.
The section with respect to peonage is a century old, deriving from the Act of March 2, 1867, 14 Stat. 546, a prompt exercise of the power granted Congress by § 2 of the 13th Amendment, which had become effective December 18, 1865, “to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” In its original form, entitled “An Act to abolish and forever prohibit the System of Peonage in the Territory of New Mexico and other Parts of the United States,” § 1 of this Act provided:
“That the holding of any person to service or labor under the system known as peonage is hereby declared to be unlawful, and the same is hereby abolished and forever prohibited in the Territory of New Mexico, or in any other Territory or State of the United States; and all acts, laws, resolutions, orders, regulations, or usages of the Territory of New Mexico, or of any other Territory or State of the United States, which have heretofore established, maintained, or enforced, or by virtue of which any attempt shall hereafter be made to establish, maintain, or enforce, directly or indirectly, the voluntary or involuntary service or labor of any persons as peons, in liquidation of any debt or obligation, or otherwise, be, and the same are hereby, declared null and void; and any person or persons who shall hold, arrest, or return, or cause to be held, arrested, or returned, or in any manner aid in the arrest or return of any person or persons to a condition of peonage, shall, upon conviction, be punished by fine not less than one thousand nor more than five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not less than one nor more than five years, or both, at the discretion of the court.”
In the Revised Statutes the first two clauses appear as § 1990 under the title “Civil Rights”; the third, the direct ancestor of § 1581(a), is § 5526 under the title “Crimes.”
In contrast, § 1584 is a relative newcomer to the statute book. It dates only from 1948, 62 Stat. 773, although, as the Reviser’s Notes tell us, it supposedly represents a “consolidation” of two much older statutes. One was a part of the series of enactments of the first quarter of the nineteenth century dealing with the African slave trade, other portions of which survive, in somewhat altered form, as 18 U.S.C. §§ 1582 and 1585-1587, see Hollander, Slavery in America, 33-35 (1964); this statute, Act of April 20, 1818, c. 91, § 6, 3 Stat. 452, later Rev.Stat. § 5377, § 248 of the Criminal Code of 1909, 35 Stat. 1139, and 18 U.S. C. § 423 (1940 ed.), was directed at “Every person who brings within the jurisdiction of the United States, in any manner whatsoever, any negro, mulatto, or person of color, from any foreign kingdom or country, or from sea, or holds, sells, or otherwise disposes of, any negro, mulatto, or person of color so brought in, as a slave, or to be held to service or labor * * The other parent was the Act of June 23, 1874, 18 Stat. 251, “An act
The Reviser’s statement that 18 U.S.C. § 1584 simply “consolidated” these sections with changes of phraseology necessary to effect consolidation, was thus quite inaccurate. The two statutes, neither of which would cover the instant case, had purposes and effects different from each other and from their “consolidation.” Since, in contrast to Title 18 of the 1926 Code, the 1948 enactment of Title 18 constitutes “positive law,” 62 Stat. 683, our search must be for the meaning of § 1584 rather than of its two parents. But the history, along with the statement of a consultant to the revisers “In general, with a few exceptions, the Code does not attempt to change existing law,” Holtzoff, Preface to Title 18 U.S. C.A. vi, at least forbids any view that Congress considered § 1584 to be staking out important new ground. Cf. Fourco Glass Co. v. Transmirra Prod. Corp., 353 U.S. 222, 77 S.Ct. 787, 1 L.Ed.2d 786 (1957). We read its reference to involuntary servitude as covering the same type of compulsory holding as was proscribed by its parent statutes, comparable to the holding which was a necessary element of the crime of peonage.
For illumination as to what kinds of holding were so prohibited we turn initially to Supreme Court decisions under the peonage statute, all reviewed in Pollock v. Williams, 322 U.S. 4, 64 S.Ct. 792, 88 L.Ed. 1095 (1944). In Bailey v. Alabama, 211 U.S. 452, 29 S.Ct. 141, 53 L.Ed. 278 (1908), 219 U.S. 219 (1911) ; Taylor v. Georgia, 315 U.S. 25, 62 S.Ct. 415, 86 L.Ed. 615 (1942); and Pollock v. Williams, the peonage statute was used, in Mr. Justice Jackson’s phrase, “as a shield” — namely, to invalidate convic
Failing to find a clear answer in these , j ¿t. Supreme Court cases under the peonage , , . . , „ +aCt’ W".eXp 0re+ the earll.f ^ ory of the involuntary servitude.” A draft 0 Northwest Ordinance drawn in 1784, almost certainly by Thomas Jefferson> contained a provision “That, after the year 1800 of the Christian era, there sha11. be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, other-wf3 thfnjn the Punishment of crimes T ereo . e s a bave been duly convicted to have been personally guilty.
¡' Provisions outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude were included in the constitutions of the states to which the Ordinance applied. The Illinois Supreme Court held a statute allowing the owner of a slave to bring him into Illinois and bind him to agree to work for a term of years, for breach of which he would be returned to slavery outside the Northwest Territory, to be inconsistent with the Ordinance, although further holding that an indenture entered into legally without fraud or collusion could be valid in Illinois by virtue of the adoption of a constitutional provision and its acceptance by the Congress of the United States upon the admission of that state into the union. Phoebe v. Jay, 1 Ill. (Breese) 268 (1828). The Indiana Supreme Court had earlier issued habeas corpus to liberate a house maid, lulling that even an indenture voluntarily entered would not justify enforcement of involuntary service thereunder.
The first judicial interpretation of this phrase in the 13th Amendment that we have found is in Tyler v. Heidorn, 46 Barb. 439, 458 (Albany General Term, 1866). The court there said:
“The term involuntary servitude, in my opinion, is substantially synonymous with slavery, though it may perhaps be regarded as slightly more comprehensive, and as embracing every thing under the name of servitude, though not denominated slavery, which gives to one person the control and ownership of the involuntary and compulsory services*485 of another agáinst his will and consent.”
Not long after came the more authoritative statement in Mr. Justice Miller’s opinion in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. (83 U.S. 36, 69, 21 L.Ed. 394 (1873):
“The exception of servitude as a punishment for crime gives an idea of the class of servitude that is meant. The word ‘servitude’ is of larger meaning than ‘slavery,’ as the latter is popularly understood in this country, and the obvious purpose was to forbid all shades and conditions of African slavery. It was very well understood that in the form of apprenticeship for long terms, as it had been practiced in the West India Islands, on the abolition of slavery by the English government, or by reducing the slaves to the condition of serfs attached to the plantation, the purpose of the article might have been evaded, if only the word ‘slavery’ had been used.”15
See also Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 3 S.Ct. 18, 27 L.Ed. 835 (1883).
Important material is found in Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1, 16-17, 27 S.Ct. 6, 8, 51 L.Ed. 65 (1906), a case which, although heavily relied upon by the Government, is rather more helpful to appellant. The Court said that “All understand by these terms [slavery and involuntary servitude] a condition of enforced compulsory service of one to another,” and referred to dictionary definitions of slavery as “the state of entire subjection of one person to the will of another” and of servitude as “the state of voluntary or compulsory subjection to a master.” The first Mr. Justice Harlan’s dissent characterized peonage as “the compulsory holding of one individual by another individual for the purpose of compelling the former, by personal service, to discharge his indebtedness to the latter,” and stated its disagreement with the majority by saying that “One who is shut up by superior or overpowering force, constantly present and threatening, from earning his living in a lawful way of his own choosing, is as much in a condition of involuntary servitude as if he were forcibly held in a condition of peonage.” 203 U.S. at 34, 27 S.Ct. at 16. The final datum is Butler v. Perry, 240 U.S. 328, 332, 36 S.Ct. 258, 259, 60 L.Ed. 672 (1916), where the Court said, in language reminiscent of the SlaughterHouse opinion:
“This [13 th] Amendment was adopted with reference to conditions existing since the foundation of our government, and the term ‘involuntary servitude’ was intended to cover those forms of compulsory labor akin to African slavery which, in practical operation, would tend to produce like undesirable results.”
This survey indicates to us that the prime purpose of those who outlawed “involuntary servitude” in the predecessors of the 13th Amendment, in the Amendment itself, and in statutes enacted to enforce it, was to abolish all practices whereby subjection having some of the incidents of slavery was legally enforced, either directly, by a state’s using its power to return the servant to the master, as had been the case under the peonage system in New Mexico, see The Peonage Cases, 123 F. 671, 673-675 (M.D.Ala.1903), or indirectly, by subjecting persons who left the employer’s service to criminal pen
Whether or not the 13th Amendment would permit passing this line, we are not convinced Congress has done so. If a makeweight were needed for our construction that the statute applies only to service compelled by law, by force or by the threat of continued confinement of some sort, the rule as to interpreting a statute to avoid “grave and doubtful constitutional questions,” United States v. Delaware & Hudson Co., 213 U.S. 366, 407-408, 29 S.Ct. 527, 53 L.Ed. 836 (1909), would afford one. Another would be the equally established canon that “When Congress leaves to the Judiciary the task of imputing to Congress an undeclared will” with respect to a criminal statute, “the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of lenity.” Bell v. United States, 349 U.S. 81, 83, 75 S.Ct. 620, 622, 99 L.Ed. 905 (1955).
is-. It goes without saying that if defendant’s conduct was what the Oros’ testified and the jury evidently believed, this would have been highly reprehensible. But before deciding to make such conduct a felony, punishable with up to five years’ imprisonment, a legislator would wish to weigh the advantages to society in providing deterrence and retribution where the conduct had in fact occurred against the risk that innocent employers might be victimized by disgruntled employees able to convince prosecutors, and ultimately juries, of their story, and the consequent possible pref-erability of dealing with the evil by less drastic means. The most ardent believer in civil rights legislation might not think that cause would be advanced by permitting the awful machinery of the criminal law to be brought into play whenever an employee asserts that his will to quit has been subdued by a threat ■ which seriously affects his future welfare but as to which he still has a choice, however painful. Before we would assume that Congress meant to encompass such cases or consider whether it would have the power to do so, we would require clearer evidence of legislative purpose than repetition of the history-laden term, “holds to involuntary servitude.”
The judgment of conviction is re-' versed, with instructions to dismiss the indictment.
. Perhaps the most impressive single item was a series of letters from Oros indicating satisfaction with conditions on the farm and urging his married son Luis, Jr. and his daughter-in-law to join the family there, and a telephone call in which Shackney talked to Luis, Jr. in Oros’ presence. The explanation that Oros was writing only what he thought Shackney would like to see hardly covers the urging of the son and daughter-in-law to come to Middlefield — something which, according to the letters, was a project of Oros, which Shackney joined largely to accommodate him.
. The Chavez family had left just before the Oros’ arrived; apparently the Olguins had left earlier.
. Oros claimed that in February, 1962, he protested that he had now paid the original $1200 notes and did not expect to have to pay the $600 notes he had later signed at Shaekney’s request, and that Shackney then introduced the subject of interest, at 10% a month, which he illustrated by a computation introduced in evidence. Shackney offered a totally different explanation of this incident.
. The chickens were sold in January, 1962. The Oros’ then had to clean the chicken coop, and Oros testified this made them work harder than ever. There were later discussions as to the purchase of more chickens.
. Maria Elena testified that the first day she was on the farm “X think I was in prison because when I work, this day we work hard and we never did before in Mexico.”
. Although the Government’s brief says that “Many times appellant told Oros and bis family stories of this type”, there seems to have been at most one other such incident. The two other references cited, one in Oros’ testimony and one in Maria Elena’s, are quite obviously to the same incident recounted in the text.
. The testimony as to this threat having been made in February, 1962, is somewhat hard to reconcile with Oros’ admission that by that time the twelve notes co-signed by Rosalio had been surrendered to him. Of course, Oros might have been mistaken as to the date or have feared such action without any express threat. See fn. 17, infra.
. See Professor Amsterdam’s already classical discussion, The Void-for-Vagueness Doctrine in the Supreme Court, 109 U. Pa.L.Rev. 67, 90-92 (1960).
. Peonage involves the additional element that the involuntary servitude is tied to the discharge of an indebtedness. Clyatt v. United States, 197 U.S. 207, 215, 25 S.Ct. 429, 49 L.Ed. 726 (1905).
. § 1581(b) stems from § 2 of the Act of 1867, 14 Stat. 546, later Rev.Stat. § 5527.
. The restriction was deliberate. The Senate Judiciary Committee amended the original bill (H.R. 3581) by deleting the words:
“And whoever shall knowingly and wil-fully hold any other person in involuntary confinement or to any involuntary service, or who shall transfer any such service to any other person except for the purpose of acquiring a trade or occupation, in the United States, or the Territories thereof.”
. Swayne, The Ordinance of 1787 and the War of 1861, p. 82 (1892).
. Prom a contemporary account of the debates among the framers of the Ohio Constitution of 1802, it appears that the words “involuntary servitude” may not then have been thought to encompass an indenture freely entered into for bona fide consideration. The prohibition adopted for that constitution, thought to be coextensive with the prohibition of the Ordinance, made an exception for an indenture entered into “while in a state of perfect freedom and on a condition of a bona fide consideration received or to be received for their service.” See quotation from Journal of delegate Judge Ephraim Cutler in Swayne, The Ordinance of 1787 and the War of 1861, 57-58 (1892). Whatever doubt there may have been as to the applicability of these words to a condition of compulsory service voluntarily entered was dispelled by the time they were incorporated into the 13th Amendment. This is attested by the passage of the anti-peonage statute in 1867— peonage being a condition generally assumed by voluntary contract. See The Peonage Cases, 123 F. 671, 673-675 (M.D.Ala.1903). See also Clyatt v. United States, supra, 197 U.S. at 215, 25 S.Ct. at 430.
. The Emancipation Proclamation, which related only to the states in rebellion, spoke solely of “persons held as slaves,” 12 Stat. 1267.
. The dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Field stated that the words involuntary servitude “include something more than slavery in the strict sense * * *; they include also serfage, vassalage, vil-lenage, peonage and all other forms of compulsory service * * He went on to speculate that legislation which restricted a person to a single trade or calling or to a single locality might place him with respect to others in a condition of servitude, but did not rest his opinion on this ground,
. An even narrower interpretation seems indicated by a dictum in Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275, 280-281, 17 S.Ct. 326, 41 L.Ed. 715 (1897), but this is scarcely reconcilable with the Supreme Court decisions applying the peonage statute summarized above.
. The judge rightly instructed the jury to disregard “any threat to enforce the payment of notes signed by Luis Oros and to proceed legally against the Oros’ friend as endorser of those notes in order to obtain payment * * as it is within the rights of a mortgagee to threaten to enforce the security which, the contract gives him for nonperformance. In fact, Oros’ testimony that desire to protect his friend was a motivating factor works against the view that his will was overcome by the threats of deportation which the Government claims to come within the prohibition of the statute. The evidence as to threats of deportation for inefficiency or illness seems to have been relevant only to show further assertions by Shackney of power to cause deportation ; threats of that sort alone would plainly not meet the statutory test.
Concurrence Opinion
(coneur-ring).
As I read the majority opinion, the distinction thát it draws is between the servitor’s belief that he is being confined, by law, by force or by threat of force and his submitting to continued service because of a threat of another kind. I cannot find this distinction between different means of confinement to be implied by the statute.
The opinion rejects what I would consider the plain and intended meaning of “involuntary” as dealing only with the will of the servitor. That word raises the question of whether the will of the servitor has been subjugated, i. e., whether he has been rendered incapable of making a rational choice, and not the question of what were the means by which the servitude was imposed. It is impossible to generalize the means by which the will of man can be subjugated. What to one man is a paralyzing threat is to another merely a harsh alternative. Threats of force are the most extreme of threats to most of us but there are many who can brave this risk and will crumble in the face of others. To a drug addict the threat of deprivation of his supply is certainly more overbearing than the threat of almost any kind of force, yet it is a means falling outside of the majority’s guilt criterion.
On the other hand cases may be súp-posed within the majority’s guilt criterion where the servitude would not be' in
The servitude may be voluntary though imposed by a means falling within the majority’s guilt criterion and may be involuntary though imposed by a means falling without that criterion.
The “void for vagueness” doctrine does not compel us to substitute for the statutory test of involuntariness an arbitrary classification of means. To have an arbitrary classification which will resolve with equal facility all of the cases that would arise under the statute is indeed a tempting prospect. It is much harder to have to work under a statute which will raise difficult questions in the borderline cases inevitable wherever the application of a statute depends upon an appraisal of the state of the human mind. Statutes are not, however, void for vagueness because they raise difficult questions of fact. They are void for vagueness only where they fail to articulate a definite standard. Jordan v. De George, 341 U.S. 223, 229-232, 71 S.Ct. 703, 95 L.Ed. 886. I should not have thought that a statute fixing involuntariness as a standard would fall within that class.
Where the subjugation of the will of the servant is so complete as to render him incapable of making a rational choice, the servitude is involuntary within the terms of the statute and it is only where there is such subjugation that the servitude is involuntary. Where a master “willfully” thus subjugates a servant’s will, he has violated section 1584 of Title 18 of the United States Code. Unless he does so, there is no such violation. There is no evidence in the record from which the jury could have found willful subjugation of a servant’s will. I concur in the result.
