Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0367_0203_ZD1.html
Timestamp: 2013-05-20 04:50:01
Document Index: 569521980

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 3', '§ 2', '§ 3', '§ 2', '§ 1', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 4', '§ 2', '§ 1', '§ 1', '§ 2', 'Art. 7', 'Art. 3', '§ 3', '§ 1', 'Art. 10', '§ 2', '§ 3', 'Art. 1', '§ 1', '§ 1', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 1', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 1', 'Art. 3', '§ 6', '§ 3', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 1', '§ 26', '§ 2', '§ 3']

We legalize today guilt by association, sending a man to prison when he committed no unlawful act. Today's break with tradition is a serious one. It borrows from the totalitarian philosophy. As stated by O'Brian, National Security and Individual Freedom (1955), pp. 27-28: The Smith Act of 1940 made it unlawful for any person to be or to become a member of or affiliate with any society, group, or assembly which teaches, [p264] advocates, or encourages the overthrow or destruction of any government in the United States by force or violence. These statutes [the Smith Act, together with a 1920 amendment to the Immigration Law, Act of June 5, 1920, 41 Stat. 1008], therefore, imported into our law the alien doctrine of guilt by association, which, up to this time, had been regarded as abhorrent and which had never been recognized either by the courts or by the Department of Justice, even during the perils and excitements of the First World War.
Spinoza summed up in a sentence much of the history of the struggle of man to think and speak what he believes: Laws which decree what everyone must believe, and forbid utterance against this or that opinion, have too often been enacted to confirm or enlarge the power of those who dared not suffer free inquiry to be made, and have by a perversion of authority turned the superstition of the mob into violence against opponents.
"The thought of man shall not be tried, for the devil himself knoweth not the thought of man," said Chief Justice Brian in Y.B. Pasch, 17 Edw. IV, f. 2, pl. 2. The crime of belief -- presently prosecuted -- is a carryback to the old law of treason where men were punished for compassing the death of the King. That law, which had been employed for "suppression of political opposition or the expression of ideas or beliefs distasteful to those in power," Hurst, Historic Background of the Treason Clause, 6 Fed.B.J. 305, 307, was rejected here, and the treason clause of our Constitution was "most praised for the reason that it prevented the use of treason trials as an instrument of political faction." Id. 307. Sedition or treason in the realm of politics and heresy in the ecclesiastical field had long centered on beliefs as the abhorrent criminal act. The struggle on this side of the Atlantic was to get rid of that concept and to punish men not for what they thought, but for overt acts against the peace of the Nation. Cramer v. United States, 325 U.S. 1, 28-30. Montesquieu, who was a force in the thinking of those times (id., 15, n. 21), proclaimed against punishing thoughts or words: There was a law passed in England under Henry VIII by which whoever predicted the king's death [p267] was declared guilty of high treason. This law was extremely vague; the terror of despotic power is so great that it recoils upon those who exercise it. In the king's last illness, the physicians would not venture to say he was in danger, and surely they acted very right. . . . Marsyas dreamed that he had cut Dionysius' throat. Dionysius put him to death, pretending that he would never have dreamed of such a thing by night if he had not thought of it by day. This was a most tyrannical action: for though it had been the subject of his thoughts, yet he had made no attempt towards it. The laws do not take upon them to punish any other than overt acts.
The Spirit of Laws (1949), Vol. 1, pp. 192-193. "Words do not constitute an overt act; they remain only in idea." Id. 193.These were the notions that led to the restrictive definition of treason, presently contained in Art. III, § 3, of the Constitution, which requires overt acts. Cramer v. United States, supra; Haupt v. United States, 330 U.S. 631, 645 (concurring opinion); Hurst, Treason in the United States, 58 Harv.L.Rev. 395. Our long and painful experience with the law of treason, wholly apart from the First Amendment, should be enough warning that we as a free people should not venture again into the field of prosecuting beliefs.
That was the philosophy behind Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 641-642: We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That [p268] would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
Belief in the principle of revolution is deep in our traditions. The Declaration of Independence [n4] proclaims it: whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People [p269] to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
This right of revolution has been and is a part of the fabric of our institutions. [n5] Last century, when Russia invaded Hungary and subdued her, Louis Kossuth came here to enlist American support. On January 8, 1852, Lincoln spoke in sympathy of the Hungarian cause and was a member of a committee which, on January 9, 1852, submitted Resolutions in Behalf of Hungarian Freedom. Among these resolutions was one that read: That it is the right of any people, sufficiently numerous for national independence, to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose.
2 Hening's Stat.Va. 1660-1682, p. 517. The history is familiar; much of it is reviewed in Chafee, The Blessings of Liberty (1956). He states in one paragraph what I think is the Jeffersonian conception of the First Amendment rights involved in the present case: We must choose between freedom and fear -- we cannot have both. If the citizens of the United States persist in being afraid, the real rulers of this country will be fanatics fired with a zeal to save grown men from objectionable ideas by putting them under the care of official nursemaids.
It also runs counter to Madison's views of the First Amendment, as we are advised by his eminent biographer, Irving Brant: When Madison wrote "Congress shall make no law" infringing these rights, he did not expect the Supreme Court to decide, on balance, whether Congress could or could not make a law infringing them. It was true, he observed in presenting his proposals, that state legislative bodies had violated many of the most valuable articles in bills of rights. But that furnished no basis for judging the effectiveness of the proposed amendments: If they are incorporated into the Constitution, independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights; they will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the Legislative or [p272] Executive; they will be naturally led to resist every encroachment upon rights expressly stipulated for in the Constitution by the declaration of rights.
APPENDIX TO OPINION OF MR. JUSTICE DOUGLASThe constitutions of 15 States have, at one time or another, made specific provision for the right of revolution by reserving to the people the right to "alter, reform or abolish" the existing frame of government. See Pennsylvania Const. of 1873, Art. I, § 2; Maryland Const. of 1867, Dec. of Rights, Art. I; Virginia Const. of 1902, Art. I, § 3; Alabama Const. of 1865, Art. I, § 2; Arkansas Const. of 1874, Art. II, § 1; Idaho Const. of 1889, Art. I, § 2; Kansas Const. of 1858, Art. I, § 2; Kentucky Const. of 1890, Bill of Rights, § 4; Ohio Const. of 1851, Art. I, § 2; Oregon Const. of 1857, Art. I, § 1; Tennessee Const. of 1870, Art. I, § 1; Texas Const. of 1876, Art. I, § 2; Vermont Const. of 1793, c. 1, Art. 7; West Virginia Const. of 1872, Art. 3, § 3; Wyoming Const. of 1889, Art. I, § 1. Some 24 other States have, or have had, slightly varying forms of the same provision. See New Hampshire Const., Pt. I, Art. 10; Massachusetts Const., [p276] Part the First, Article VII; Connecticut Const., Article First, § 2; New Jersey Const., Art. I, 2; Delaware Const., Preamble; North Carolina Const., Art. I, § 3; South Carolina Const., Art. 1, § 1; Rhode Island Const., Art. I, § 1; California Const., Art. I, § 2; Colorado Const., Art. II, § 2; Florida Const., Dec. of Rights, § 2; Indiana Const., Art. I, § 1; Iowa Const., Art. I, § 2; Maine Const., Art. I, § 2; Michigan Const. of 1835, Art. I, § 2; Minnesota Const., Art. I, § 1; Mississippi Const., Art. 3, § 6; Missouri Const., Art. I, § 3; Montana Const., Art. III, § 2; Nevada Const., Art. I, § 2; North Dakota Const., Art. I, § 2; Oklahoma Const., Art. II, § 1; South Dakota Const., Art. VI, § 26; Utah Const., Art. I, § 2. The older constitutions often add a clause which shows the roots of these provisions in the right of revolution.
embrace but three known recognised modes by which the whole people, the state, can give their consent to an alteration of an existing lawful frame of government, viz.: 1. The mode provided in the existing constitution.
Lincoln's full statement, made in 1848 and already referred to, reads: Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable -- a most sacred right -- a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the teritory [sic] as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement. Such minority was precisely the case of the tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws, but to break up both, and make new ones.
2. The prototype of the present prosecution is found in Communist lands. The Communist Government in Czechoslovakia on October 6, 1948, promulgated a law, § 3 of which provided: (1) Whoever publicly or before several people instigates against the Republic, against its independence, constitutional unity, territorial integrity or its people's democratic system [of government], its social or economic order, or against its national character as guaranteed by the Constitution, shall be punished for a minor crime by rigorous confinement for from three months to three years.
4. When honest men are impelled to withdraw their allegiance to the established law or custom of the community, still more when they are persuaded that such law or custom is too iniquitous to be longer tolerated, they seek for some principle more generally valid, some "law" of higher authority, than the established law or custom of the community. To this higher law or more generally valid principle they then appeal in justification of actions which the community condemns as immoral or criminal. They formulate the law or principle in such a way that it is, or seems to them to be, rationally defensible. To them, it is "true" because it brings their actions into harmony with a rightly ordered universe, and enables them to think of themselves as having chosen the nobler part, as having withdrawn from a corrupt world in order to serve God or Humanity or a force that makes for the highest good.
8. Gellhorn, American Rights (1960), in commenting on Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494"]341 U.S. 494, and 341 U.S. 494, and Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298, states: The aftermath of the Yates case is interesting. By the end of 1956, convictions of Communist leaders under the Smith Act had numbered 114. Many of these cases were still pending in the appellate courts when the Yates decision was announced in June of 1957. On one ground or another, convictions were set aside and new trials were granted to many of these defendants. The Department of Justice itself dropped the prosecution of a considerable number, on the ground that they could not properly be convicted on the basis of the evidence now available. Most significantly of all, the cases against the nine remaining defendants in Yates, as to whom the Supreme Court had refused to dismiss the charges, were abandoned by the prosecution because there was insufficient evidence that they had advocated action, as distinct from opinion. After all the clamor, after all the expressed alarm about the peril into which the United States was being plunged by this handful of misguided fanatics, the prosecution felt itself unable to show persuasively that the Communist spokesmen had engaged in the forbidden incitements to illegality