Hugo Black

“ When the responsibilities of lawmaker, prosecutor, judge, jury and disciplinarian are thrust upon a judge he is obviously incapable of holding the scales of justice perfectly fair and true and reflecting impartially on the guilt or innocence of the accused. ”

“ Indeed if any other officer were presumptuous enough to claim such power I cannot believe the courts would tolerate it for an instant under the Constitution. Judges are not essentially different from other government officials. Fortunately they remain human even after assuming their judicial duties. Like all the rest of mankind they may be affected from time to time by pride and passion, by pettiness and bruised feelings, by improper understanding or by excessive zeal. ”

“ It is significant that neither the Court nor the Government makes any serious effort to justify such differentiation exept that it has been sanctioned by prior decisions. Under the Constitution courts are merely one of the coordinate agencies which hold and exercise governmental power. Their decrees are simply another form of sovereign directive aimed at guiding the citizen's activity. I can perceive nothing which places these decrees on any higher or different plane than the laws of Congress or the regulations of the Executive insofar as punishment for their violation is concerned. ”

“ I find it difficult to understand how it can be maintained that the same people who manifested such great concern for trial by jury as to explicitly embed it in the Constitution for every $20 civil suit could have intended that this cherished method of trial should not be available to those threatened with long imprisonment for the crime of contempt. ”

“ When examined in closer detail the argument from 'necessity' appears to rest on the assumption that the regular criminal processes, including trial by petit jury and indictment by grand jury, will not result in conviction and punishment of a fair share of those guilty of violating court orders, are unduly slow and cumbersome, and by intervening between the court and punishment for those who disobey its mandate somehow detract from its dignity and prestige. ”

“ Obviously this argument reflects substantial disrespect for the institution of trial by jury, although this method of trial is-and has been for centuries-an integral and highly esteemed part of our system of criminal justice enshrined in the Constitution itself. Nothing concrete is ever offered to support the innuendo that juries will not convict the same proportion of those guilty of contempt as would judges. ”

“ But such trifling economies as may result have not generally been thought sufficient reason for abandoning our great constitutional safeguards aimed at protecting freedom and other basic human rights of incalculable value. Cheap, easy convictions were not the primary concern of those who adopted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Every procedural safeguard they established purposely made it more difficult for the Government to convict those it accused of crimes. On their scale of values justice occupied at least as high a position as economy. ”

“ Once in a great while a particular appellate tribunal basically hostile to summary proceedings will closely police contempt trials but such supervision is only isoalted and fleeting. All too often the reviewing courts stand aside readily with the formal declaration that 'the trial judge has not abused his discretion.' But even at its rare best appellate review cannot begin to take the place of trial in the first instance by an impartial jury subject to review on the spot by an uncommitted trial judge. ”

“ Before going any further, perhaps it should be emphasized that we are not at all concerned with the power of courts to impose conditional imprisonment for the purpose of compelling a person to obey a valid order. Such coercion, where the defendant carries the keys to freedom in his willingness to comply with the court's directive, is essentially a civil remedy designed for the benefit of other parties and has quite properly been exercised for centuries to secure compliance with judicial decrees. ”

“ There is no valid reason why they should be singled out for an extraordinary and essentially arbitrary mode of enforcement. Unfortunately judges and lawyers have told each other the contrary so often that they have come to accept it as the gospel truth. In my judgment trial by the same procedures, constitutional and otherwise, which are extended to criminal defendants in all other instances is also wholly sufficient for the crime of contempt. ”

“ This element is vital to the effective administration of criminal justice, not only in safeguarding the rights of the accused, but in encouraging popular acceptance of the laws and the necessary general acquiescence in their application. It can hardly be denied that trial by jury removes a great burden from the shoulders of the judiciary. Martyrdom does not come easily to a man who has been found guilty as charged by twelve of his neighbors and fellow citizens.
It is undoubtedly true that a judge can dispose of charges of criminal contempt faster and cheaper than a jury. ”

“ Those who formed the Constitution struck out anew free of previous shackles in an effort to obtain a better order of government more congenial to human liberty and welfare. It cannot be seriously claimed that they intended to adopt the common law wholesale. ”

“ I would hold that the defendants here were entitled to be tried by a jury after indictment by a grand jury and in full accordance with all the procedural safeguards required by the Constitution for 'all criminal prosecutions.' I am convinced that the previous cases to the contrary are wrong-wholly wrong for reasons which I shall set out in this opinion.
Ordinarily it is sound policy to adhere to prior decisions but this practice has quite properly never been a blind, inflexible rule. Courts are not omniscient. ”

“ Respect and obedience in this country are not engendered-and rightly not-by arbitrary and autocratic procedures. In the end such methods only yield real contempt for the courts and the law. The classic example of this is the use and abuse of the injunction and summary contempt power in the labor field. The federal courts have still not recovered from the scars inflicted by their intervention in that area where Congress finally stepped in and preserved the right of jury trial to all those charged with the crime of contempt. ”

“ Above all that generation deeply feared and bitterly abhorred the existence of arbitrary, unchecked power in the hands of any government official, particularly when it came to punishing alleged offenses against the state. ”

“ Those who claim that the delegates who ratified the Constitution and its contemporaneous Amendments intended to exempt the crime of contempt from the procedural safeguards expressly established by those great charters for the trial of 'all crimes' carry a heavy burden indeed. ”

“ Instead, at stake here is the validity of a criminal conviction for disobedience of a court order punished by a long, fixed term of imprisonment. In my judgment the distinction between conditional confinement of compel future performance and unconditional imprisonment designed to punish past transgressions is crucial, analytically as well as historically, in determining the permissible mode of trial under the Constitution. ”

“ When the desired action or inaction can no longer be compelled by coercive measures and all that remains is the punishment of past sins there is adequate time to give defendants the full benefit of the ordinary criminal procedures. As a matter of fact any slight delay involved might well discourage a court from resorting to hasty, unnecessary measures to chastise suspected disobedience. ”

“ Frank recognition of these common human characteristics, as well as others which need not be mentioned, undoubtedly led to the determination of those who formed our Constitution to fragment power, especially the power to define and enforce the criminal law, among different departments and institutions of government in the hope that each would tend to operate as a check on the activities of the others and a shield against their excesses thereby securing the people's liberty. ”

“ But since we are dealing with an asserted power which derogates from and is fundamentally inconsistent with our ordinary, constitutionally prescried methods of proceeding in criminal cases, 'necessity,' if it can justify at all, must at least refer to a situation where the extraordinary power to punish by summary process is clearly indispensable to the enforcement of court decrees and the orderly administration of justice. ”

“ Like every other human agency, they too can profit from trial and error, from experience and reflection. As others have demonstrated, the principle commonly referred to as stare decisis has never been thought to extend so far as to prevent the courts from correcting their own errors. Accordingly, this Court has time and time again from the very beginning reconsidered the merits of its earlier decisions even though they claimed great longevity and repeated reaffirmation. ”

“ It seems inconsistent with the most rudimentary principles of our system of criminal justice, a system carefully developed and preserved throughout the centuries to prevent oppressive enforcement of oppressive laws, to concentrate this much power in the hands of any officer of the state. ”

“ In the words of Chief Justice Cooley: 'The law has established this tribunal because it is believed that, from its numbers, the mode of their selection, and the fact that jurors come from all classes of society, they are better calculated to judge of motives, weigh probabilities, and take what may be called a common sense view of a set of circumstances, involving both act and intent, than any single man, however pure, wise and eminent he may be. This is the theory of the law; and as applied to criminal accusations, it is eminently wise, and favorable alike to liberty and to justice.' People v. ”

“ The early precedents which laid the ground-work for this line of authorities were decided before the actual history of the procedures used to punish contempt was brought to light, at a time when ' (w) holly unfounded assumptions about 'immemorial usage' acquired a factitious authority and were made the basis of legal decisions.' [5] These cases erroneously assumed that courts had always possessed the power to punish all contempts summarily and that it inhered in their very being without supporting their suppositions by authority or reason. ”

“ To this end no man can be a judge in his own case and no man is permitted to try cases where he has an interest in the outcome. * * * Fair trials are too important a part of our free society to let prosecuting judges be trial judges of the charges they prefer.' In re Murchison, 349 U.S. 133, 136-137, 75 S.Ct. ”

“ There has been no heavy investment in reliance on the earlier cases; they do not remotely lay down rules to guide men in their commercial or property affairs. Instead they concern the manner in which persons are to be tried by the Government for their alleged crimes. ”