Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/329/459/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 14:47:06+00:00

Document:
1.Fifth Amendment: ". . . nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; . . ."
When four members of the Court find that a State has denied to a person the due process which the Fourteenth Amendment safeguards, it seems to me important to be explicit regarding the criteria by which the State's duty of obedience to the Constitution must be judged. Particularly is this so when life is at stake.
Until July 28, 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the Constitution of the United States left the States free to carry out their own notions of criminal justice, except insofar as they were limited by Article I, § 10 of the Constitution which declares: "No State shall . . . pass any Bill of Attainder, [or] ex post facto Law . . ." The Fourteenth Amendment placed no specific restraints upon the States in the formulation or the administration of their criminal law. It restricted the freedom of the States generally, so that States thereafter could not "abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," or "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," or "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
These are broad, inexplicit clauses of the Constitution, unlike specific provisions of the first eight amendments formulated by the Founders to guard against recurrence of well defined historic grievances. But broad as these clauses are, they are not generalities of empty vagueness. They are circumscribed partly by history and partly by the problems of government, large and dynamic [p467] though they be, with which they are concerned. The "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" concern the dual citizenship under our federal system. The safeguards of "due process of law" and "the equal protection of the laws" summarize the meaning of the struggle for freedom of English-speaking peoples. They run back to Magna Carta, but contemplate no less advances in the conceptions of justice and freedom by a progressive society. See the classic language of Mr. Justice Matthews in Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516, 530-31.
When, shortly after its adoption, the Fourteenth Amendment came before this Court for construction, it was urged that the "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" which were not to be abridged by any State were the privileges and immunities which citizens theretofore enjoyed under the Constitution. If that view had prevailed, the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would have placed upon the States the limitations which the specific articles of the first eight amendments had theretofore placed upon the agencies of the national government. After the fullest consideration, that view was rejected. The rejection has the authority that comes from contemporaneous knowledge of the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 67-68; Davidson v. New Orleans, 96 U.S. 97. The notion that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment absorbed, as it is called, the provisions of the Bill of Rights that limit the Federal Government has never been given countenance by this Court.
Not until recently was it suggested that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was merely a compendious reference to the Bill of Rights whereby the States were now restricted in devising and enforcing their penal code precisely as is the Federal Government by the [p468] first eight amendments. On this view, the States would be confined in the enforcement of their criminal codes by those views for safeguarding the rights of the individual which were deemed necessary in the eighteenth century. Some of these safeguards have perduring validity. Some grew out of transient experience or formulated remedies which time might well improve. The Fourteenth Amendment did not mean to imprison the States into the limited experience of the eighteenth century. It did mean to withdraw from the States the right to act in ways that are offensive to a decent respect for the dignity of man, and heedless of his freedom.
These are very broad terms by which to accommodate freedom and authority. As has been suggested from time to time, they may be too large to serve as the basis for adjudication, in that they allow much room for individual notions of policy. That is not our concern. The fact is that the duty of such adjudication on a basis no less narrow has been committed to this Court.
have [p469] been found to be implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, and thus, through the Fourteenth Amendment, become valid as against the states.
Palko v. Connecticut, supra, at 324-25.
The Federal Bill of Rights requires that prosecutions for federal crimes be initiated by a grand jury and tried by a petty jury; it protects an accused from being a witness against himself. The States are free to consult their own conceptions of policy in dispensing with the grand jury, in modifying or abolishing the petty jury, in withholding the privilege against self-crimination. See Maxwell v. Dow, 176 U.S. 581; Twining v. New Jersey, supra; Snyder v. Massachusetts, supra; Palko v. Connecticut, supra, at 323, 324; cf. Feldman v. United States, 322 U.S. 487. In short, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not withdraw the freedom of a State to enforce its own notions of fairness in the administration of criminal justice unless, as it was put for the Court by Mr. Justice Cardozo, "in so doing, it offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental." Snyder v. Massachusetts, supra, at 105.
A State may offend such a principle of justice by brutal subjection of an individual to successive retrials on a charge on which he has been acquitted. Such conduct by a State might be a denial of due process, but not because the protection against double jeopardy in a federal prosecution against which the Fifth Amendment safeguards limits a State. For the disputations that are engendered by technical aspects of double jeopardy as enshrined in the Fifth Amendment, see the majority and dissenting opinions in Ex parte Lange, 18 Wall. 163, and In re Bradley, 318 U.S. 50. Again, a State may be found to deny a person due process by treating even one guilty of crime in a manner that violates standards of decency more or less universally accepted, though not when it treats him [p470] by a mode about which opinion is fairly divided. But the penological policy of a State is not to be tested by the scope of the Eighth Amendment, and is not involved in the controversy which is necessarily evoked by that Amendment as to the historic meaning of "cruel and unusual punishment." See Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, and particularly the dissenting opinion of White and Holmes, JJ.
Once we are explicit in stating the problem before us in terms defined by an unbroken series of decisions, we cannot escape acknowledging that it involves the application of standards of fairness and justice very broadly conceived. They are not the application of merely personal standards, but the impersonal standards of society which alone judges, as the organs of Law, are empowered to enforce. When the standards for judicial judgment are not narrower than "immutable principles of justice which inhere in the very idea of free government," Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366, 389, "fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions," Hebert v. Louisiana, 272 U.S. 312, 316, "immunities . . . implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," Palko v. Connecticut, supra, at 324-25, great tolerance toward a State's conduct is demanded of this Court. Such were recently stated to be "the controlling principles." See Mr. Chief Justice Stone in Malinski v. New York, 324 U.S. 401, 438, in connection with the concurring opinion in that case, ibid., 412, 416, 417.
I cannot bring myself to believe that for Louisiana to leave to executive clemency, rather than to require, mitigation of a sentence of death duly pronounced upon conviction for murder because a first attempt to carry it out was an innocent misadventure, offends a principle of justice "rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people." See Snyder v. Massachusetts, supra, at 105. Short of [p471] the compulsion of such a principle, this Court must abstain from interference with State action no matter how strong one's personal feeling of revulsion against a State's insistence on its pound of flesh. One must be on guard against finding in personal disapproval a reflection of more or less prevailing condemnation. Strongly drawn as I am to some of the sentiments expressed by my brother BURTON, I cannot rid myself of the conviction that, were I to hold that Louisiana would transgress the Due Process Clause if the State were allowed, in the precise circumstances before us, to carry out the death sentence, I would be enforcing my private view, rather than that consensus of society's opinion which, for purposes of due process, is the standard enjoined by the Constitution.
the gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion, as the cases presented for decision shall require, with the reasoning on which such decisions may be founded.
Davidson v. New Orleans, supra, at 104. This is another way of saying that these are matters which depend on "differences of degree. The whole law does so as soon as it is civilized." Holmes, J., in LeRoy Fibre Co. v. Chicago, M. & St. P. R. Co., 232 U.S. 340, 354. Especially is this so as to questions arising under the Due Process Clause. A finding that, in this case, the State of Louisiana has not gone beyond its powers is, for me, not the starting point for abstractly logical extension. Since I cannot say that it would be "repugnant to the conscience of mankind," [p472] Palko v. Connecticut, supra, at 323, for Louisiana to exercise the power on which she here stands, I cannot say that the Constitution withholds it.
MR. JUSTICE BURTON, with whom MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS, MR. JUSTICE MURPHY and MR. JUSTICE RUTLEDGE concur, dissenting.
Under circumstances unique in judicial history, the relator asks this Court to stay his execution on the ground that it will violate the due process of law guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States. We believe that the unusual facts before us require that the judgment of the Supreme Court of Louisiana be vacated, and that this cause be remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion. Those proceedings should include the determination of certain material facts not previously determined, including the extent, if any, to which electric current was applied to the relator during his attempted electrocution on May 3, 1946. Where life is to be taken, there must be no avoidable error of law or uncertainty of fact.
. . . between the Hours of 12:00 o'clock noon and 3:00 o'clock p.m., Willie Francis was strapped in the electric chair and an attempt was made to electrocute him, but, because of some defect in the apparatus devised and used for electrocutions, the contrivance failed to function, and, after an unsuccessful attempt to electrocute Francis, he was removed from the chair.
Through a latent electrical defect, the attempt to electrocute Francis failed, the State contending no [p473] current whatsoever reached Francis' body, the relator contending a current of electricity did pass through his body; but, in any event, Willie Francis was not put to death.
On May 8, the death warrant was canceled, and the relator's execution has been stayed pending completion of these proceedings. The Governor proposes to issue another death warrant for the relator's electrocution, and the relator now asks this Court to prevent it for the reason that, under the present unique circumstances, his electrocution will be so cruel and unusual as to violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
That Amendment provides: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; . . ." When this was adopted in 1868, there long had been imbedded deeply in the standards of this nation a revulsion against subjecting guilty persons to torture culminating in death. Pre-constitutional American history reeked with cruel punishment to such an extent that, in 1791, the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States expressly imposed upon federal agencies a mandate that "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." Louisiana and many other states have adopted like constitutional provisions. See Section 12 of Article I of the Constitution of Louisiana (1921).
The capital case before us presents an instance of the violation of constitutional due process that is more clear than would be presented by many lesser punishments prohibited by the Eighth Amendment or its state counterparts. Taking human life by unnecessarily cruel means shocks the most fundamental instincts of civilized man. It should not be possible under the constitutional procedure [p474] of a self-governing people. Abhorrence of the cruelty of ancient forms of capital punishment has increased steadily until, today, some states have prohibited capital punishment altogether. It is unthinkable that any state legislature in modern times would enact a statute expressly authorizing capital punishment by repeated applications of an electric current separated by intervals of days or hours until finally death shall result. The Legislature of Louisiana did not do so. The Supreme Court of Louisiana did not say that it did. The Supreme Court of Louisiana said merely that the pending petitions for relief in this case presented an executive, rather than a judicial, question and, by that mistake of law, it precluded itself from discussing the constitutional issue before us.
In determining whether the proposed procedure is unconstitutional, we must measure it against a lawful electrocution. The contrast is that between instantaneous death and death by installments -- caused by electric shocks administered after one or more intervening periods of complete consciousness of the victim. Electrocution, when instantaneous, can be inflicted by a state in conformity with due process of law. In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436. The Supreme Court of Louisiana has held that electrocution, in the manner prescribed in its statute, is more humane than hanging. State ex rel. Pierre v. Jones, 200 La. 807, 9 So.2d 42, cert. denied, 317 U.S. 633. See also Malloy v. South Carolina, 237 U.S. 180.
The all-important consideration is that the execution shall be so instantaneous and substantially painless that the punishment shall be reduced, as nearly as possible, to no more than that of death itself. Electrocution has been approved only in a form that eliminates suffering.
Every sentence of death imposed in this State shall be by electrocution; that is, causing to pass [p475] through the body of the person convicted a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death, and the application and continuance of such current through the body of the person convicted until such person is dead. . . .
La.Code of Criminal Procedure (1928), Act No. 2, Art. 569, as amended by § 1, Act No. 14, 1940.
It does not provide for electrocution by interrupted or repeated applications of electric current at intervals of several days or even minutes. It does not provide for the application of electric current of an intensity less than that sufficient to cause death. It prescribes expressly and solely for the application of a current of sufficient intensity to cause death and for the continuance of that application until death results. Prescribing capital punishment, it should be construed strictly. There can be no implied provision for a second, third or multiple application of the current. There is no statutory or judicial precedent upholding a delayed process of electrocution.
These considerations were emphasized in In re Kemmler, supra, when an early New York statute authorizing electrocution was attacked as violative of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because prescribing a cruel and unusual punishment. In upholding that statute, this Court stressed the fact that the electric current was to cause instantaneous death. Like the Louisiana statute before us, that statute called expressly for the continued application of a sufficient electric current to cause death. It was the resulting "instantaneous" and "painless" death that was referred to as "humane."
"We have examined this testimony, and can find but little in it to warrant the belief that this new mode of execution is cruel, within the meaning of the constitution, [p476] though it is certainly unusual. On the contrary, we agree with the court below that it removes every reasonable doubt that the application of electricity to the vital parts of the human body, under such conditions and in the manner contemplated by the statute, must result in instantaneous, and consequently in painless, death."
(Italics supplied.) In re Kemmler, supra, at 443-444.
Punishments are cruel when they involve torture or a lingering death; but the punishment of death is not cruel, within the meaning of that word as used in the Constitution. It implies there something inhuman and barbarous, something more than the mere extinguishment of life.
(Italics supplied.) Id. at 447.
Lack of intent that the first application be less than fatal is not material. The intent of the executioner cannot lessen the torture or excuse the result. It was the statutory duty of the state officials to make sure that there was no failure. The procedure in this case contrasts with common knowledge of precautions generally taken elsewhere to insure against failure of electrocutions. The high standard of care generally taken evidences the significance properly attached to the unconditional requirement of a single continued application of the current until death results. In our view of this case, we are giving careful recognition to the law of Louisiana. Neither the Legislature nor the Supreme Court of Louisiana has expressed approval of electrocution other than by one continuous application of a lethal current.
Executive clemency provides a common means of avoiding unconstitutional or otherwise questionable executions. When, however, the unconstitutionality of proposed executive procedure is brought before this Court, as in this case, we should apply the constitutional protection. In this case, final recourse is had to the high trusteeship vested in this Court by the people of the United States over the constitutional process by which their own lives may be taken.
turned on the switch and a current of electricity was caused to pass through the body of relator, all in the presence of the official witnesses.
This allegation must be read in the light of the Louisiana statute, which authorized the electrocutioner to apply to the body of the relator only such an electric current as was of "sufficient intensity to cause death." On that record, denial of relief means that the proposed repeated, and at least second, application to the relator of an electric current sufficient to cause death is not, under present circumstances, a cruel and unusual punishment violative of due process of law. It exceeds any punishment prescribed by law. There is no precedent for it. What then is it, if it be not cruel, unusual and unlawful? In spite of the constitutional issue thus raised, the Supreme Court of Louisiana treated it as an executive question not subject to judicial review. We believe that, if the facts are as alleged by the relator, the proposed action is unconstitutional. We believe also that the Supreme Court of Louisiana should provide for the determination of the facts, and then proceed in a manner not inconsistent with this opinion.
The remand of this cause to the Supreme Court of Louisiana in the manner indicated would not mean that the [p481] relator necessarily is entitled to a complete release. It would mean merely that the courts of Louisiana must examine the facts, both as to the actual nature of the punishment already inflicted and that proposed to be inflicted, and, if the proposed punishment amounts to a violation of due process of law under the Constitution of the United States, then the State must find some means of disposing of this case that will not violate that Constitution.
For the reasons stated, we are unable to concur in the judgment of this Court which affirms the judgment below.
In this latter answer or opposition, it is admitted that the attempt was made to electrocute Willie Francis on May 3, 1946, in obedience of the death warrant, but it is averred that, through some latent electrical defect in the apparatus, no electric current reached the body of Willie Francis, and, for that reason, the sentence of death was not carried out. We have no other evidence, of course, as to whether an electric current did reach the body of Willie Francis. The important fact, however, is that a current of sufficient intensity to cause death, as required by the statute on the subject, and by the death warrant, did not pass through the body of Willie Francis.
This means that, as long as the relator did not die, the court apparently regarded the carrying out of the death sentence as a purely executive function not subject to judicial review.
2. The following excerpts are from copies of affidavits printed as appendices to the brief on behalf of the petitioner. The official witnesses named were persons charged by statute with the duty of making a signed report or "proces verbal" reciting the manner and date of the execution to be filed with the clerk of the court in which the sentence was imposed. La.Code of Criminal Procedure (1928), Act No. 2, Art. 571. The statements refer to what happened after the relator had been strapped into the electric chair and a hood placed before his eyes.
Then the electrocutioner turned on the switch, and when he did, Willie Francis' lips puffed out and he groaned and jumped so that the chair came off the floor. Apparently the switch was turned on twice, and then the condemned man yelled: "Take it off. Let me breath."
Affidavit of official witness Harold Resweber, dated May 23, 1946.
I saw the electrocutioner turn on the switch and I saw his lips puff out and swell, his body tensed and stretched. I heard the one in charge yell to the man outside for more juice when he saw that Willie Francis was not dying, and the one on the outside yelled back he was giving him all he had. Then Willie Francis cried out "Take it off. Let me breath." Then they took the hood from his eyes and unstrapped him.
This boy really got a shock when they turned that machine on.
Affidavit of official witness Ignace Doucet, dated May 30, 1946.
After he was strapped to the chair, the Sheriff of St. Martin Parish asked him if he had anything to say about anything, and he said nothing. Then the hood was placed before his eyes. Then the officials in charge of the electrocution were adjusting the mechanisms, and when the needle of the meter registered to a certain point on the dial, the electrocutioner pulled down on the switch, and at the same time said: "Good-bye, Willie." At that very moment, Willie Francis' lips puffed out and his body squirmed and tensed, and he jumped, so that the chair rocked on the floor. Then the condemned man said: "Take it off. Let me breath." Then the switch was turned off. Then some of the men left, and, a few minutes after, the Sheriff of St. Martin Parish, Mr. E. L. Resweber, came in and announced that the governor had granted the condemned man a reprieve.
Affidavit of official chaplain Reverend Maurice L. Rousseve, dated May 25, 1946.
Attached to the brief on behalf of the respondents there was submitted a copy of the transcript of testimony taken before the Louisiana Pardon Board on May 31, 1946, in support of the relator's application for executive clemency, which was denied June 1, 1946. This transcript includes testimony of those who were in charge of the electrical equipment on May 3, to the effect that no electric current reached the body of the relator, and that his flesh did not show electrical burns. It also included a statement by the sheriff of a neighboring parish, who accompanied the relator from the chair, that the relator told him on leaving the chair that the electric current had "tickled him."
These public records were not in existence, and therefore not before the Supreme Court of Louisiana, when it rendered its decision on May 15, 1946.

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