Charles Evans Hughes

“ It is no answer to say that the jury must find, and here found, that a fraudulent intent existed. The jury by their verdict cannot add to the facts before them. If nothing be shown but a mere breach of a contract of service and a mere failure to pay a debt, the jury have nothing else to go upon, and the evidence becomes nothing more because of their finding. Had it not been for this statutory presumption, supplied by the amendment, no one would be heard to say that Bailey could have been convicted. ”

“ Imprisonment with hard labor is not stricken from the statute books. On the contrary, involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime is excepted from the prohibition of the 13th Amendment in so many words. Also the power of the states to make breach of contract a crime is not done away with by the abolition of slavery. But if breach of contract may be made a crime at all, it may be made a crime with all the consequences usually attached to crime. There is produced a sort of illusion if a contract to labor ends in compulsory labor in a prison. ”

“ Is it not evidence that a man had a fraudulent intent if he receives an advance upon a contract over night and leaves in the morning? I should have thought that it very plainly was. Of course, the statute is in general terms, and applies to a departure at any time without excuse or repayment, but that does no harm except on a tacit assumption that this law is not administered as it would be in New York, and that juries will act with prejudice against the laboring man. For prima facie evidence is only evidence, and as such may be held by the jury insufficient to make out guilt. ”

“ Breach of a legal contract without excuse is wrong conduct, even if the contract is for labor; and if a state adds to civil liability a criminal liability to fine, it simply intensifies the legal motive for doing right; it does not make the laborer a slave. ”

“ The plain intention was to abolish slavery of whatever name and form and all its badges and incidents; to render impossible any state of bondage; to make labor free, by prohibiting that control by which the personal service of one man is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit, which is the essence of involuntary servitude.
While the Amendment was self-executing, so far as its terms were applicable to any existing condition, Congress was authorized to secure its complete enforcement by appropriate legislation. ”

“ The act of Congress, nullifying all state laws by which it should be attempted to enforce the 'service or labor of any persons as peons, in liquidation of any debt or obligation, or otherwise,' necessarily embraces all legislation which seeks to compel the service or labor by making it a crime to refuse or fail to perform it. Such laws would furnish the readiest means of compulsion. The 13th Amendment prohibits involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime. ”

“ A mere breach of a contract is not by the statute made a crime. The criminal feature of the transaction is wanting unless the accused entered into the contract with intent to injure or defraud his employer, and unless his refusal to perform was with like intent and without just cause. That there was an intent to injure or defraud the employer, both when the contract was entered into and when the accused refused performance, are facts which must be shown by the evidence. ”

“ If it cannot punish the servant as a criminal for the mere failure or refusal to serve without paying his debt, it is not permitted to accomplish the same result by creating a statutory presumption which, upon proof of no other fact, exposes him to conviction and punishment. ”

“ But the matter well may be left to a jury, because their experience as men of the world may teach them that in certain conditions it is so common for laborers to remain during a part of the season, receiving advances, and then to depart at the period of need, in the hope of greater wages at a neighboring plantation, that when a laborer follows that course there is a fair inference of fact that he intended it from the beginning. The Alabama statute, as construed by the state court and as we must take it, merely says, as a court might say, that the prosecution may go to the jury. ”

“ We cannot escape the conclusion that, althought the statute in terms is to punish fraud, still its natural and inevitable effect is to expose to conviction for crime those who simply fail or refuse to perform contracts for personal service in liquidation of a debt; and judging its purpose by its effect, that it seeks in this way to provide the means of compulsion through which performance of such service may be secured. ”

“ The power to create presumptions is not a means of escape from constitutional restrictions. And the state may not in this way interfere with matters withdrawn from its authority by the Federal Constitution, or subject an accused to conviction for conduct which it is powerless to proscribe.
In the present case it is urged that the statute as amended, through the operation of the presumption for which it provides, violates the 13th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and the act of Congress passed for its enforcement. ”

“ I think it a mistake to say that this statute attaches its punishment to the mere breach of a contract to labor. It does not purport to do so; what it purports to punish is fraudulently obtaining money by a false pretense of an intent to keep the written contract in consideration of which the money is advanced. ”

“ The holding of any person to service or labor under the system known as peonage is abolished and forever prohibited in the territory of New Mexico, or in any other territory or state of the United States ”

“ Neither public document nor evidence discloses a law which, by its administration, is made something different from what it appears on its face, and therefore the fact that in Alabama it mainly concerns the blacks does not matter. ”

“ The statute, on its face, makes no racial discrimination, and the record fails to show its existence in fact. No question of a sectional character is presented, and we may view the legislation in the same manner as if it had been enacted in New York or in Idaho. ”

“ This statute by no means provides that a person who has entered into a written contract for the performance of services, under which he has obtained money or other personal property, is punishable as if he had stolen such money or other personal property, upon his refusal to perform the contract, without refunding the money or paying for the property. ”

“ Prima facie evidence is sufficient evidence to outweigh the presumption of innocence, and if not met by opposing evidence, to support a verdict of guilty. 'It is such as, in judgment of law, is sufficient to establish the fact ”

“ While the action of a state, through its officers charged with the administration of a law fair in appearance, may be of such a character as to constitute a denial of the equal protection of the laws (Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 373, 30 L. ed. 220, 227, 6 Sup. Ct. Rep. 1064) , such a conclusion is here neither required nor justified. ”