William O. Douglas

“ We now hold that the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.
The principle of Mooney v. Holohan is not punishment of society for misdeeds of a prosecutor but avoidance of an unfair trial to the accused. Society wins not only when the guilty are convicted but when criminal trials are fair; our system of the administration of justice suffers when any accused is treated unfairly. ”

“ When the law lays an unequal hand on those who have committed intrinsically the same quality of offense and sterilizes one and not the other, it has made as invidious a discrimination as if it had selected a particular race or nationality for oppressive treatment. Sterilization of those who have thrice committed grand larceny, with immunity for those who are embezzlers, is a clear, pointed, unmistakable discrimination. Oklahoma makes no attempt to say that he who commits larceny by trespass or trick or fraud has biologically inheritable traits which he who commits embezzlement lacks. ”

“ This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.'
This is the only philosophy consistent with the First Amendment. When belief in an idea is punished as it is today, we sacrifice those ideals and substitute an alien, totalitarian philosophy in their stead. ”

“ If we are to hold that a given rate is reasonable just because the Commission has said it was reasonable, review becomes a costly, time-consuming pageant of no practical value to anyone. If on the other hand we are to bring judgment of our own to the task, we should for the guidance of the regulators and the regulated reveal something of the philosophy, be it legal or economic or social, which guides us. We need not be slaves to a formula but unless we can point out a rational way of reaching our conclusions they can only be accepted as resting on intuition or predilection. ”

“ The Court, however, interprets the statute as merely allowing, not compelling, the jury to draw the inference of 'carrying on' from the fact of 'presence.' The jury is left free to reject the inference if, in light of all the circumstances of the case, a reasonable doubt remains as to the defendant's guilt. That is the way the jury would normally function, apart from the statute. So, I have concluded that the statute, as construed, merely provides a rule of evidence and no more.
There are, to be sure, dangers inherent in any statutory presumption. ”

“ Yet there is hardly any private enterprise that does not feel the pinch of some public regulation-from price control, to health and fire inspection, to zoning, to safety measures, to minimum wages and working conditions, to unemployment insurance. When the doors of a business are open to the public, they must be open to all regardless of race if apartheid is not to become engrained in our public places. It cannot by reason of the Equal Protection Clause become so engrained with the aid of state courts, state legislatures, or state police. ”

“ Thus, if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and press is to mean anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
The legality of a publication in this country should never be allowed to turn either on the purity of thought which it instills in the mind of the reader or on the degree to which it offends the community conscience. ”

“ Of course the school systems of the country need not become cells for Communist activities; and the classrooms need not become forums for propagandizing the Marxist creed. But the guilt of the teacher should turn on overt acts. So long as she is a law-abiding citizen, so long as her performance within the public school system meets professional standards, her private life, her political philosophy, her social creed should not be the cause of reprisals against her. ”

“ The interest of society in apprehending murderers is obviously strong; yet when the manhunt is on, passions often carry the day. I fear the long and short of it is that an officer's 'seizure' of a person on the street, even though not made upon 'probable cause,' means that if the suspect resists the 'seizure,' he may then be taken to the police station for further inquisition. That is a terrifying spectacle-a person is plucked off the street and whisked to the police station for questioning and identification merely because he resembles the suspected perpetrator of a crime. ”

“ There comes a time when even speech loses its constitutional immunity. Speech innocuous one year may at another time fan such destructive flames that it must be halted in the interests of the safety of the Republic. That is the meaning of the clear and present danger test. When conditions are so critical that there will be no time to avoid the evil that the speech threatens, it is time to call a halt. Otherwise, free speech which is the strength of the Nation will be the cause of its destruction. ”

“ I am confident that enlightened Alabama judges would make short shrift of sadistic prison guards. But I rebel at the thought that any human being, Negro or white, should be forced to run a gamut of blood and terror in order to get his constitutional rights. That is too great a price to pay for the legal principle that before a state prisoner can get federal relief he must exhaust his state remedies. The enlightened view is indeed the other way. ”

“ One has a right to freedom of speech whether he talks to one person or to one thousand. One has a right to freedom of speech not only when he talks to his friends but also when he talks to the public. It is startling to learn that a union spokesman or the spokesman for a corporate interest has fewer constitutional rights when he talks to the public than when he talks to members of his group. ”

“ We concluded:
'A citizen, a qualified voter, is no more nor no less so because he lives in the city or on the farm. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. This is an essential part of the concept of a government of laws and not men. This is at the heart of Lincoln's vision of 'government of the people, by the people, (and) for the people.' The Equal Protection Clause demands no less than substantially equal state legislative representation for all citizens, of all places as well as of all races.' Id., at 568, 84 S.Ct. ”

“ We cannot hold an insane man tried without counsel to the requirement of tendering the issue of his insanity at the trial. If he is insane, his need of a lawyer to tender the defense is too plain for argument. We have not allowed convictions to stand if the accused stood trial without benefit of counsel and yet was so unskilled, so ignorant, or so mentally deficient as not to be able to comprehend the legal issues involved in his defense. ”

“ If our society collapses, it will not be because people read a book such as Fanny Hill. It will fall, because we will have refused to understand it. Decadence, in a nation or an individual, arises not because there is a lack of ability to distinguish between morality and immorality, but because the opportunity for self-expression has been so controlled or strangled that the society or the person becomes a robot. ”

“ We should hold that, until the Congress says differently, the States are free to tax all sales to cost-plus government contractors. We should dispense with fruitless talk of agency, titles, and obligations to pay. The legal incidence of a tax is a matter for the States to determine. We should decide today, as we did more than a decade ago, that a tax on a contractor for goods he uses is constitutional, even though the economic burden falls on the Federal Government. ”

“ Does the Constitution permit Congress to cancel his citizenship? Could an American who violated his passport restrictions and visited Red China be deprived of his citizenship? Or suppose he trades with those under a ban. To many people any of those acts would seem much more heinous than the fairly innocent act of voting abroad. If casting a ballot abroad is sufficient to deprive an American of his citizenship, why could not like penalties be imposed on the citizen who expresses disagreement with his Nation's foreign policy in any of the ways enumerated? ”

“ Who today would say it was not 'cruel and unusual punishment' within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment to impose the death sentence on a man who stole a loaf of bread, or in modern parlance, a sheet of food stamps? Who today would say that trial by battle satisfies the requirements of procedural due process?
We need not read procedural due process as designed to satisfy man's deepseated sadistic instincts. We need not in deference to those sadistic instincts say we are bound by history from defining procedural due process so as to deny men fair trials. ”

“ But it is the court, not the President, that is entrusted by Article III of the Constitution to shape and fashion the decree. If a federal court is to do it, it must act in its traditional manner, not as a military commander ordering people to work willy-nilly, nor as the President's Administrative Assistant. If the federal court is to be merely an automaton stamping the papers an Attorney General presents, the judicial function rises to no higher level than an IBM machine. Those who grew up with equity and know its great history should never tolerate that mechanical conception. ”

“ Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever? ”

“ Is it possible that a majority of a state legislature having those religious scruples could make it criminal for the nonbeliever to sell pork? Some have religious scruples against slaughtering cattle. Could a state legislature, dominated by that group, make it criminal to run an abattoir?
The Court balances the need of the people for rest, recreation, late sleeping, family visiting and the like against the command of the First Amendment that no one need bow to the religious beliefs of another. There is in this realm no room for balancing. ”

“ Banishment may be resorted to as punishment for crime; but among the powers reserved to the people, and not delegated to the government, is that of determining whether whole classes in our midst shall, for no crime but that of their race and birthplace, be driven from our territory.'
The right to be immune from arbitrary decrees of banishment certainly may be more important to 'liberty' than the civil rights which all aliens enjoy when they reside here. Unless they are free from arbitrary banishment, the 'liberty' they enjoy while they live here is indeed illusory. ”

“ First Amendment values ride on what we do today. If government can investigate ideas, beliefs, and advocacy at the left end of the spectrum, I see no reason why it may not investigate at any other part of the spectrum. Yet as I read the Constitution, one of its essential purposes was to take government off the backs of people and keep it off. There is the line between action on the one hand and ideas, beliefs, and advocacy on the other. The former is a legitimate sphere for legislation. Ideas, beliefs, and advocacy are beyond the reach of committees, agencies, Congress, and the courts. ”

“ In nearly every department of American life they are confronted by this insidious influence. It fills the air. It meets them at the workshop and factory, when they apply for work. It meets them at the church, at the hotel, at the ballot-box, and worst of all, it meets them in the jurybox. Without crime or offense against law or gospel, the colored man is the Jean Valjean of American society. ”

“ They bolieved liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is in inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. ”

“ An alien who merely writes or utters a statement critical of the Government, or who subscribes to an unpopular political or social philosophy, or who affiliates with a labor union, or who distributes religious handbills on the street corner, may be subjected to the legislative whim of deportation.
I am unable to believe that the Constitution sanctions that assumption or the consequences that logically and inevitably flow from its application. The power to exclude and deport aliens is one springing out of the inherent sovereignty of the United States. ”

“ Thus, long before the contempt trial-long before the contempt charge had been filed-the judge, who later sentenced the witness for contempt, had concluded and stated in so many words-that the witness was 'contemptuous.' It is a travesty on American justice to allow a judge who has announced his decision on the issue of guilt prior to the trial to sit in judgment at the trial.
Judges are human; and judges caught up in an altercation with a witness do not have the objectivity to give that person a fair trial. ”

“ Seditious conduct can always be punished. But the command of the First Amendment is so clear that we should not allow Congress to call a halt to free speech except in the extreme case of peril from the speech itself. The First Amendment makes confidence in the common sense of our people and in their maturity of judgment the great postulate of our democracy. Its philosophy is that violence is rarely, if ever, stopped by denying civil liberties to those advocating resort to force. ”