Source: https://openjurist.org/397/us/337
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 22:27:51+00:00

Document:
The Court of Appeals felt that the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to be present at his own trial was so 'absolute' that, no matter how unruly or disruptive the defendant's conduct might be, he could never be held to have lost that right so long as he continued to insist upon it, as Allen clearly did. Therefore the Court of Appeals concluded that a trial judge could never expel a defendant from his own trial and that the judge's ultimate remedy when faced with an obstreperous defendant like Allen who determines to make his trial impossible is to bind and gag him.1 We cannot agree that the Sixth Amendment, the cases upon which the Court of Appeals relied, or any other cases of this Court so handicap a trial judge in conducting a criminal trial. The broad dicta in Hopt v. Utah, supra, and Lewis v. United States, 146 U.S. 370, 13 S.Ct. 136, 36 L.Ed. 1011 (1892), that a trial can never continue in the defendant's absence have been expressly rejected. Diaz v. United States, 223 U.S. 442, 32 S.Ct. 250, 56 L.Ed. 500 (1912). We accept instead the statement of Mr. Justice Cardozo who, speaking for the Court in Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U.S. 97, 106, 54 S.Ct. 330, 332, 78 L.Ed. 674 (1934), said: 'No doubt the privilege (of personally confronting witnesses) may be lost by consent or at times even by misconduct.'2 Although mindful that courts must indulge every reasonable presumption against the loss of constitutional rights, Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 458, 464, 58 S.Ct. 1019, 1023, 82 L.Ed. 1461 (1938), we explicitly hold today that a defendant can lose his right to be present at trial if, after he has been warned by the judge that he will be removed if he continues his disruptive behavior, he nevertheless insists on conducting himself in a manner so disorderly, disruptive, and disrespectful of the court that his trial cannot be carried on with him in the courtroom.3 Once lost, the right to be present can, of course, be reclaimed as soon as the defendant is willing to conduct himself consistently with the decorum and respect inherent in the concept of courts and judicial proceedings.
The safeguards that the Constitution accords to criminal defendants presuppose that government has a sovereign prerogative to put on trial those accused in good faith of violating valid laws. Constitutional power to bring an accused to trial is fundamental to a scheme of 'ordered liberty' and prerequisite to social justice and peace. History has known the breakdown of lawful penal authority—the feud, the vendetta, and the terror of penalties meted out by mobs or roving bands of vigilantes. It has known, too, the perversion of that authority. In some societies the penal arm of the state has reached individual men through secret denunciation followed by summary punishment. In others the solemn power of condemnation has been confided to the caprice of tyrants. Down the corridors of history have echoed the cries of innocent men convicted by other irrational or arbitrary procedures. These are some of the alternatives history offers to the procedure adopted by our Constitution. The right of a defendant to trial—to trial by jury—has long been cherished by our people as a vital restraint on the penal authority of government. And it has never been doubted that under our constitutional traditions trial in accordance with the Constitution is the proper mode by which government exercises that authority.
Lincoln said this Nation was 'conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal'. The Founders' dream of a society where all men are free and equal has not been easy to realize. The degree of liberty and equality that exists today has been the product of unceasing struggle and sacrifice. Much remains to be done—so much that the very institutions of our society have come under challenge. Hence, today, as in Lincoln's time, a man may ask 'whether (this) nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.' It cannot endure if the Nation falls short on the guarantees of liberty, justice, and equality embodied in our founding documents. But it also cannot endure if we allow our precious heritage of ordered liberty to be ripped apart amid the sound and fury of our time. It cannot endure if in individual cases the claims of social peace and order on the one side and of personal liberty on the other cannot be mutually resolved in the forum designated by the Constitution. If that resolution cannot be reached by judicial trial in a court of law, it will be reached elsewhere and by other means, and there will be grave danger that liberty, equality, and the order essential to both will be lost.
There is more than an intimation in the present record that the defendant was a mental case. The passage of time since 1957, the date of the trial, makes it, however, impossible to determine what the mental condition of the defendant was at that time. The fact that a defendant has been found to understand 'the nature and object of the proceedings against him' and thus competent to stand trial1 does not answer the difficult questions as to what a trial judge should do with an otherwise mentally ill defendant who creates a courtroom disturbance. What a judge should do with a defendant whose courtroom antics may not be volitional is a perplexing problem which we should not reach except on a clear record. This defendant had no lawyer and refused one, though the trial judge properly insisted that a member of the bar be present to represent him. He tried to be his own lawyer and what transpired was pathetic, as well as disgusting and disgraceful.
Our real problems of this type lie not with this case but with other kinds of trials. First are the political trials. They frequently recur in our history2 and insofar as they take place in federal courts we have broad supervisory powers over them. That is one setting where the question arises whether the accused has rights of confrontation that the law invades at its peril.
'Mayor. Take him away, take him away, turn him into the bale-dock.'3 The Trial of William Penn, 6 How.St.Tr. 951, 958 959.
Second are trials used by minorities to destroy the existing constitutional system and bring on repressive measures. Radicals on the left historically have used those tactics to incite the extreme right with the calculated design of fostering a regime of repression from which the radicals on the left hope to emerge as the ultimate victor.4 The left in that role is the provocateur. The Constitution was not designed as an instrument for that form of rough-and-tumble contest. The social compact has room for tolerance, patience, and restraint, but not for sabotage and violence. Trials involving that spectacle strike at the very heart of constitutional government.
I would not try to provide in this case the guidelines for those two strikingly different types of cases. The case presented here is the classical criminal case without any political or subversive overtones. It involves a defendant who was a sick person and who may or may not have been insane in the classical sense5 but who apparently had a diseased mind. And, as I have said, the record is so stale that it is now much too late to find out what the true facts really were.
See Murray, The Power to Expel a Criminal Defendant From His Own Trial: A Comparative View, 36 U.Colo.L.Rev. 171—175 (1964); Goldin, Presence of the Defendant at Rendition of the Verdict in Felony Cases, 16 Col.L.Rev. 18—31 (1916).
As to the Pullman strike and the Debs case, see L. Pfeffer, This Honorable Court 215—216 (1965); A. Lindsey, The Pullman Strike, cc. XII and XIII (1942); Commons, supra, at 502—508.
As to the repression of teaching involved in the Dennis case, see O. Kirchheimer. Political Justice 132—158 (1961).
As respects the strategy of German Communists vis-a-vis the Nazis in the 1930's, see K. Heiden, Der Fuehrer 461, 462, 525, 551—552 (1944).
At the time of Allen's trial in 1957, the tests in Illinois for the defendant's sanity at the time of the criminal act were the M'Naghten Rule supplemented by the so-called 'irrestible impulse test.' People v. Carpenter, 11 Ill.2d 60, 142 N.Ed.2d 11. The tests for determining a defendant's sanity at the time of trial were that '(h)e should be capable of understanding the nature and object of the proceedings against him, his own condition in reference to such proceedings, and have sufficient mind to conduct his defense in a rational and reasonable manner,' and, further, that 'he should be capable of co-operating with his counsel to the end that any available defenses may be interposed.' People v. Burson, 11 Ill.2d 360, 369, 143 N.E.2d 239, 244—245.

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