Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/289/1/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 13:09:59+00:00

Document:
1. Concealment or misstatement by a juror upon a voir dire examination is punishable as a contempt if its tendency and design are to obstruct the processes of justice. So held where the juror, on being asked to state her past employments, mentioned several, but deliberately concealed an employment by the defendant, and, on being questioned as to bias, replied falsely that she had none, all with intent to gain a place in the box and thwart the prosecution. P. 289 U. S. 10.
2. The gist of the offense is neither the concealment nor the false swearing, but their use to gain acceptance as a juror in the case and, under cover of that relation, to obstruct the course of justice. P. 289 U. S. 11.
3. As respects punishment for contempt, deceit practiced by a talesman in order that he may become a juror -- part of the court -- and influence or prevent a verdict, is to be distinguished from deceit practiced by a witness in testifying. P. 289 U. S. 11.
4. A contemptuous obstruction to judicial power is nonetheless contempt when aggravated by perjury. P. 289 U. S. 11.
5. The privilege from exposure of his votes and arguments in the jury room does not belong to a juror who became such by a fraud on the court. P. 289 U. S. 12.
6. A statement by a juror of how she voted, made in her answer to an information for contempt, held a waiver to that extent of the privilege against disclosure. P. 289 U. S. 18.
7. Evidence of a juror's intentional concealment on voir dire of her disqualification by previous employment by defendant, and evidence of her arguments with other jurors while the trial was going on, and of her vote, revealed by her own answer in the contempt proceedings, held sufficient to overcome the claim of privilege and let in evidence of her conduct in the jury room after the case had been submitted. P. 289 U. S. 18.
8. The rule that the testimony of a juror is not admissible for the impeachment of his verdict bears no relation to the privilege of jurors against exposure of their arguments and votes in the jury room. P. 289 U. S. 18.
9. The doctrine allowing purgation by the oath of the contemnor as a bar to prosecution for contempt is obsolete. P. 289 U. S. 19.
10. There was no denial to the petitioner of a fair notice of hearing, nor any variance of substance between the information and the findings, in this case. P. 289 U. S. 19.
Certiorari, 287 U.S. 595, to review the affirmance of a conviction of criminal contempt. See 1 F.Supp. 747.
The petitioner, Genevieve A. Clark, has been adjudged guilty of a criminal contempt in that, with intent to obstruct justice, she gave answers knowingly misleading and others knowingly false in response to questions affecting her qualifications as a juror. 1 F.Supp. 747.
The conviction by the District Court was affirmed by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, the proceeding being remanded, however, to correct an error in the sentence. 61 F.2d 695. A writ of certiorari brings the case here.
a sister, Mrs. Brown, that she would like to be excused. She was advised by her sister, who had made inquiry of the clerk of the court, that excuses, if there were any, would have to be presented to the judge. At the same time, she was informed that the trial for which she had been summoned was the Foshay trial, and that she would probably not be accepted as a juror, since she had been employed by the Foshay Company, a corporation with which the indicted men had been connected as officers.
acquaintance with Foshay or his associates, and the District Court, by its findings, has accepted her denial. It is next to impossible, however, that her husband, who was with her in the courtroom, had refrained from telling her of his own friendship for one of the prisoners at the bar.
The petitioner, upon being called to the jury box, was questioned under oath by the judge presiding at the trial. She was asked whether she had ever been in any business of any kind. She answered, "I have been a stenographer before my marriage, yes." She was asked in what kind of business she had worked. She answered, "Well, I did some banking and some real estate and insurance, and I was with an automobile concern, with a Nash agency." Finally, she was asked whether she felt that her mind was free from bias, and whether, if accepted as a juror, she would be able and willing to base her verdict on the evidence and the law as given to her by the court. To those inquiries she answered that her mind was clear of bias, and that the law and the evidence would govern her in arriving at a verdict.
The petitioner, after thus testifying, became a member of the jury, which was thereupon complete. The trial which followed lasted eight weeks. Two officers, a man and a woman, were in charge of the jury from the beginning to the end. During the first week of the trial, the petitioner made the remark to several of her fellow jurors that she regarded Mr. Foshay as a victim of circumstances, that he had gone to New York in the fall of 1929 to borrow $18,000,000, but that, because of the stock market crash, had come back without a dollar. When asked by a juror where she had procured that information, which was not supported by the evidence, she said that it was from a newspaper which she had read before the trial. Later on, she gave expression to dissatisfaction with the government because of the way the soldiers were treated after the war.
During the deliberations of the jury after the case was finally submitted, she announced that, since the prosecuting attorney had been unable to convince her of the guilt of the accused, the other jurors could hardly be expected to do so. At times, she placed her hands over her ears when other jurors tried to reason with her, and argument became useless because she was unwilling to reply. She said of a witness for the government that he had given perjured evidence in the South in an attempt to convict an innocent man. This information had come to her in the course of a conversation with her husband, who had seen her at her hotel, in the presence of a bailiff, while the trial was under way. After being kept together for a week, the jury was discharged because unable to agree. The votes of eleven were for conviction. The single vote for acquittal was cast by the petitioner.
introduced, and the law as given by the court. For the contempt thus adjudged, there was a sentence of imprisonment and fine.
There was concealment by the petitioner, and that willful and deliberate. She had been asked to state the kinds of work that she had been doing in other years. She counted off a few, and checked herself at the very point where the count, if completed, would be likely to bar her from the box. There is no room for the excuse of oversight or negligence. She had been warned that disclosure would lead to challenge and rejection. With her mind full of the warning, she told the part truth that was useless, and held back the other part that had significance and value. Whether this was perjury or false swearing,\ there is no occasion to inquire. It was a deliberate endeavor to thwart the process of inquiry, and to turn a trial into a futile form.
trial was over and deliberations had begun, she waived aside all argument and closed her ears to the debate. She had closed her mind to it before.
"An obstruction to the performance of judicial duty resulting from an act done in the presence of the court is . . . the characteristic upon which the power to punish for contempt must rest."
White, C.J., in Ex parte Hudgings, 249 U. S. 378, 249 U. S. 383. The petitioner is not condemned for concealment, though concealment has been proved. She is not condemned for false swearing, though false swearing has been proved. She is condemned for that she made use of false swearing and concealment as the means whereby to accomplish her acceptance as a juror, and, under cover of that relation, to obstruct the course of justice. There is a distinction not to be ignored between deceit by a witness and deceit by a talesman. A talesman, when accepted as a juror, becomes a part or member of the court. Ex parte Savin, 131 U. S. 267; United States v. Dachis, 36 F.2d 601. The judge who examines on the voir dire is engaged in the process of organizing the court. If the answers to the questions are willfully evasive or knowingly untrue, the talesman, when accepted, is a juror in name only. His relation to the court and to the parties is tainted in its origin; it is a mere pretense and sham. What was sought to be attained was the choice of an impartial arbiter. What happened was the intrusion of a partisan defender. If a kinsman of one of the litigants had gone into the jury room disguised as the complaisant juror, the effect would have been no different. The doom of mere sterility was on the trial from the beginning.
The books propound the question whether perjury is contempt, and answer it with nice distinctions. Perjury by a witness has been thought to be not enough where the obstruction to judicial power is only that inherent in the wrong of testifying falsely. Ex parte Hudgings, supra.
For offenses of that order, the remedy by indictment is appropriate and adequate. On the other hand, obstruction to judicial power will not lose the quality of contempt though one of its aggravations be the commission of perjury. Cf. In re Ulmer, 208 F. 461; United States v. Appel, 211 F. 495; United States v. Karns, 27 F.2d 453; United States v. Dachis, 36 F.2d 601; Lang v. United States, 55 F.2d 922; 286 U.S. 523; United States v. McGovern, 60 F.2d 880. We must give heed to all the circumstances, and of these not the least important is the relation to the court of the one charged as a contemnor. Deceit by an attorney may be punished as a contempt if the deceit is an abuse of the functions of his office (Bowles v. United States, 50 F.2d 848, 851; United States v. Ford, 9 F.2d 990), and that apart from its punishable quality if it had been the act of someone else. A talesman, sworn as a juror, becomes, like an attorney, an officer of the court, and must submit to like restraints. The petitioner blurs the picture when she splits her misconduct into parts, as if each were a separate wrong to be separately punished. What is punished is misconceived unless conceived of as a unit -- the abuse of an official relation by concealment and deceit. Some of her acts or none of them may be punishable as crimes. The result is all one as to her responsibility here and now. She has trifled with the court of which she was a part, and made its processes a mockery. This is contempt, whatever it may be besides. Sinclair v. United States, 279 U. S. 749; Ex parte Savin, 131 U. S. 267.
dictum, rather than decision. See Woodward v. Leavitt, 107 Mass. 453, 460; cf. Matter of Cochran, 237 N.Y. 336, 340, 143 N.E. 212; People ex rel. Nunns v. County Court, 188 App.Div. 424, 430, 176 N.Y.S. 858. Even so, the dicta are significant because they bear with them the implications of an immemorial tradition. The doctrine is developed, and the privilege broadly stated, in the writings of a learned author. Wigmore, Evidence (2d ed.) vol. 5, § 2346. It has recognition to some extent by other authors of repute (Hughes, Evidence, p. 301; Jones, Commentaries on Evidence (2d ed.) § 2212; Chamberlayne, Evidence, vol. 5, § 3707), but in a way that has confused it with something very different -- the competency of witnesses to testify in impeachment of a verdict. What concerns us at the moment is the privilege alone. There will be need to recur later to the rule as to impeachment. For the origin of the privilege we are referred to ancient usage, and for its defense to public policy. Freedom of debate might be stifled and independence of thought checked if jurors were made to feel that their arguments and ballots were to be freely published to the world. The force of these considerations is not to be gainsaid. But the recognition of a privilege does not mean that it is without conditions or exceptions. The social policy that will prevail in many situations may run foul in others of a different social policy, competing for supremacy. It is then the function of a court to mediate between them, assigning, so far as possible, a proper value to each and summoning to its aid all the distinctions and analogies that are the tools of the judicial process. The function is the more essential where a privilege has its origin in inveterate but vague tradition, and where no attempt has been made, either in treatise or in decisions, to chart its limits with precision.
while considering his verdict, we think the privilege does not apply where the relation giving birth to it has been fraudulently begun or fraudulently continued. Other exceptions may have to be made in other situations not brought before us now. It is sufficient to mark the one that is decisive of the case at hand. The privilege takes as its postulate a genuine relation, honestly created and honestly maintained. If that condition is not satisfied, if the relation is merely a sham and a pretense, the juror may not invoke a relation dishonestly assumed as a cover and cloak for the concealment of the truth. In saying this, we do not mean that a mere charge of wrongdoing will avail, without more, to put the privilege to flight. There must be a showing of a prima facie case sufficient to satisfy the judge that the light should be let in. * Upon that showing's being made, the debates and ballots in the jury room are admissible as corroborative evidence, supplementing and confirming the case that would exist without them. Let us assume for illustration a prosecution for bribery. Let us assume that there is evidence, direct or circumstantial, that money has been paid to a juror in consideration of his vote. The argument for the petitioner, if accepted, would bring us to a holding that the case for the people must go to the triers of the facts without proof that the vote has been responsive to the bribe. This is paying too high a price for the assurance to a juror of serenity of mind. People ex rel. Nunns v. County Court, supra.
cf. Bank of Utica v. Mersereau, 3 Barb.Ch. 528, 598; Coveney v. Tannahill, 1 Hill 33, 41.
With the aid of this analogy, we recur to the social policies competing for supremacy. A privilege surviving until the relation is abused and vanishing when abuse is shown to the satisfaction of the judge has been found to be a workable technique for the protection of the confidences of client and attorney. Is there sufficient reason to believe that it will be found to be inadequate for the protection of a juror? No doubt the need is weighty that conduct in the jury room shall be untrammeled by the fear of embarrassing publicity. The need is no less weighty that it shall be pure and undefiled. A juror of integrity and reasonable firmness will not fear to speak his mind if the confidences of debate are barred to the ears of mere impertinence or malice. He will not expect to be shielded against the disclosure of his conduct in the event that there is evidence reflecting upon his honor. The chance that now and then there may be found some timid soul who will take counsel of his fears and give way to their repressive power is too remote and shadowy to shape the course of justice. It must yield to the overmastering need, so vital in our polity, of preserving trial by jury in its purity against the inroads of corruption. Cf. Attorney General v. Pelletier, 240 Mass. 264, 134 N.E. 407; People ex rel. Hirschberg v. Board of Supervisors, 251 N.Y. 156, 170, 167 N.E. 204; State v. Campbell, 73 Kan. 688, 85 P. 784.
"No juror shall be questioned (for any verdict rendered by him), or be subject to any action, . . . civil or criminal, except to indictment for corrupt conduct in rendering such verdict, in the cases prescribed by law."
before. One could urge with as much reason that she would be subjected to coercion if she had been indicted and tried for bribery and the same evidence had been accepted in support of the indictment.
Nor is there anything in our decision at variance with the rule, which is not without exceptions (Mattox v. United States, 146 U. S. 140, 146 U. S. 148; cf. Wigmore, Evidence, vol. 5, §§ 2353, 2354; Woodward v. Leavitt, 107 Mass. 453; Hyman v. Eames, 41 F. 676; Fuller v. Fletcher, 44 F. 34, 39), that the testimony of a juror is not admissible for the impeachment of his verdict. McDonald v. Pless, 238 U. S. 264. Here, there was no verdict, and hence none to be impeached. But, in truth, the rule against impeachment is wholly unrelated to the problem now before us -- the limits of the privilege to maintain a confidence inviolate. Wigmore, supra, § 2346. Impeachment may be forbidden though the jurors waive their privilege and combine with the defeated litigant to make the verdict null. Privilege may be asserted though there is nothing to impeach.
there would have been an adjudication of contempt. In considering with all this fullness the merits of the ruling, we have been moved by the desire to build securely for the future.
Little was left of that defense after the decision of this Court in United States v. Shipp, 203 U. S. 563, 203 U. S. 574. Since then, there has been no purgation by oath where an overt act of defiance is the gist of the offense. The point was reserved whether sworn disavowal would retain its ancient force "if the sole question were the intent of an ambiguous act."
The time has come, we think, to renounce the doctrine altogether and stamp out its dying embers. It has ceased to be a defense in England since 1796. Matter of Crossley, 6 Term Reports 701. It has been rejected generally in the states. Dale v. State, 198 Ind. 110, 150 N.E. 781; State v. District Court, 10 P.2d 586; In re Singer, 105 N.J.Eq. 220, 147 A. 328; State v. Keller, 36 N.M. 81, 8 P.2d 786; Boorde v. Commonwealth, 134 Va. 625, 114 S.E. 731; Huntington v. McMahon, 48 Conn. 174, 200, 201; State v. Matthews, 37 N.H. 450, 455; In re Bates, 55 N.H. 325, 327; State v. Harper's Ferry Bridge Co., 16 W.Va. 864, 873; cf. Carson v. Ennis, 146 Ga. 726, 92 S.E. 221; Matter of Snyder, 103 N.Y. 178, 181, 8 N.E. 479; Curtis, 41 Harvard Law Review 51, 65. It has even lost, since the decision in the Shipp case, the title to respect that comes of a long historical succession. It has taken its place with ordeal and wager of law and trial by battle among the dimly remembered curios of outworn modes of trial. Thayer, op. cit. supra, pp. 8 et seq.
* As to the function of the judge in the decision of such preliminary questions, see Maguire and Epstein, Preliminary Questions of Fact in Determining the Admissibility of Evidence, 40 Harvard Law Review 392, 397, 403; Morgan, Functions of Judge and Jury, 43 Harvard Law Review 165; Maguire and Epstein, Rules of Evidence in Preliminary Controversies as to Admissibility, 36 Yale Law Journal 1101, and the cases there collected.

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