Hugo Black

“ Not a single one of the citizens who brought this action had ever been prosecuted, charged, or even arrested under the particular intimidation statute which the court below held unconstitutional. All the charges of the complaint deal broadly and generally with all the state statutes and city ordinances that the appellees originally challenged. In fact, the complaint contains no mention of any specific threat by any officer or official of Chicago, Cook County, or the State of Illinois to arrest or prosecute any one or more of the plaintiffs under that statute either one time or many times. ”

“ The three-judge court, 280 F.Supp. 938, upheld all of the challenged statutes except for one subsection of the mob-action statute which prohibited ' (t) he assembly of 2 or more persons to do an unlawful act * * *,' [8] and one subsection of the intimidation statute which prohibited intimidating a person by threats to ' (c) ommit any criminal offense. ”

“ Mackell, 401 U.S. 66, 91 S.Ct. 764, 27 L.Ed.2d 688, show, the normal course of state criminal prosecutions cannot be disrupted or blocked on the basis of charges which in the last analysis amount to nothing more than speculation about the future. The policy of a century and a half against interference by the federal courts with state law enforcement is not to be set aside on such flimsy allegations as those relied upon here. ”