Opinion ID: 2310847
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: The Garland decision.

Text: Because Abrams relies so heavily on Ex parte Garland, supra , we address that case in some detail. Shortly after the Civil War, Congress provided by statute that any person seeking the right to practice before a court of the United States must take an oath affirming that he had neither aided the Confederacy during the war nor held office in the Confederate government. Garland, who had been a member of the Supreme Court bar before the war, served as a member of the Confederate Congress during the Rebellion, and he was therefore unable to take the oath. Upon receiving a full and unconditional pardon from President Andrew Johnson, Garland petitioned the Supreme Court for the right to continue to practice before that Court without taking the prescribed oath. The Court, by a vote of 5-4, held that the Act of Congress which imposed the requirement of this oath was subject to the constitutional inhibition against the passage of bills of attainder. 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) at 377. Further, in the majority's view, the statute was brought within the further inhibition of the Constitution against the passage of an ex post facto law. Id. After holding the Act unconstitutional on these grounds, Justice Field wrote that the Court's conclusion to that effect was strengthened by a consideration of the effect of the pardon. Id. at 380. Justice Field then added the passage, quoted at page 10, above, in which the pardon was described as blot[ting] out the offense. Id. In light of the Court's holding on the bill of attainder and  ex post facto law issues, the discussion of the presidential pardon was unnecessary for its disposition of the case. By the time Justice Field reached the issue of the pardon, the case had already been decided. Irrespective of the pardon, the statute was deemed invalid on other constitutional grounds. The courts, both federal and state, have thus accurately described the blot[ting] out discussion in Garland as dictum. North, supra, 62 F.3d at 1437; Noonan, supra, 906 F.2d at 958; Skinner, supra, 632 A.2d at 84; see also Lavine, supra, 41 P.2d at 164 ([t]he additional discussion [in Garland ] as to the effect of the pardon was unnecessary to the decision.) [19] More fundamentally, the problem before the court in Garland was quite different from the one presented here. Garland did not involve a disciplinary proceeding against an individual attorney for violating his ethical responsibilities. Rather, that case dealt with a statutory enactment which, in one fell swoop, retroactively destroyed the right of numerous attorneys to practice law before the federal courts. That blanket disqualification, after the fact, of all who had served the Confederacy was the statute's principal vice. The Court had no occasion in Garland to decide the question whether an individual attorney who had violated applicable ethical requirements could escape disciplinary sanctions on the basis of a presidential pardon. There is, moreover, language in Garland which significantly undermines Abrams' reliance on that decision. After reasoning that the Act of Congress at issue operate[d] as a legislative decree of perpetual exclusion from the bar and that such exclusion from any of the ordinary avocations of life for past conduct can be regarded in no other light than as punishment, 71 U.S. at 377, the Court distinguished an exclusion of this sort from the authority of a court to determine who is qualified to become one of its officers, as an attorney and counsellor, and for what cause he ought to be removed. Id. at 379 (emphasis added) (quoting Ex parte Secombe, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 9, 13, 15 L.Ed. 565 (1856)). Upon entry of the order admitting them to practice, attorneys become officers of the court, and are responsible to it for professional misconduct. Id. at 378 (emphasis added). In Garland, however, the Act of Congress which effectively disbarred the respondent offended the principle that the right to practice law by one admitted to do so is something more than a mere indulgence, revocable at the pleasure of the court, or at the command of the legislature. It is a right of which [the attorney] can only be deprived by the judgment of the court, for moral or professional delinquency. 71 U.S. at 379 (emphasis added). Considering the majority opinion in Garland in its entirety, we agree with the following statement by the New York Court of Appeals in In the Matter of ____, An Attorney, 86 N.Y. 563 (1881), decided only fourteen years after Garland: If, in a case like Ex parte Garland ( supra ), though we are far from intimating that such a supposition was possible in that case, it had been shown that an attorney used the rebellion, and aided it, for the purpose and with the effect of wronging his clients, the U.S. Supreme Court, we think, would not have ignored that act, to which the rebellious acts were ancillary, and while holding that the public offense was obliterated by the pardon, they would, in considering his application to be restored to the rolls of the court, have taken cognizance of his infidelity to his clientage. Id. at 572-73. Moreover, Abrams' construction of Garland is inconsistent with the Supreme Court's subsequent holding in Carlesi v. New York, 233 U.S. 51, 34 S.Ct. 576, 58 L.Ed. 843 (1914). Carlesi was found guilty in the courts of New York of the offense of forgery. He had previously been convicted in the United States District Court of selling and possession of counterfeit currency, but the President had pardoned him for the earlier crime. Notwithstanding the pardon, the judge in the state court case treated the pardoned offense as constituting a prior conviction. Accordingly, in conformity with a state sentence enhancement statute, the judge sentenced Carlesi as a second offender. Relying, inter alia, on Ex parte Garland, Carlesi contended that [t]he President's pardon obliterated the first offense, so that Carlesi could not thereafter be prosecuted as a second offender. Id. at 53, 34 S.Ct. at 577. The Supreme Court held, however, that New York's use of the pardoned federal conviction to enhance Carlesi's sentence for the forgery did not constitute punishment for the pardoned earlier offense, and that the contention as to the effect of the pardon here pressed [by Carlesi] is devoid of all merit.... Id. at 59, 34 S.Ct. at 578. The result in Carlesi cannot be reconciled with the notion that the presidential pardon blot[ed] out of existence the conduct that led to Carlesi's federal conviction. As noted by the court in North, the broad reading of the blot[ting] out language in Garland for which Abrams contends is also difficult to reconcile with the Supreme Court's pre- Garland decision in Wilson and with its post- Garland reiteration of Wilson in Burdick. See North, supra, 62 F.3d at 1437. In addition, the Supreme Court of California has explained: That the situation presented in the Garland Case was unique was recognized in Hawker v. New York, 170 U.S. 189, [198, 18 S.Ct. 573, 577, 42 L.Ed. 1002 (1898)] wherein it is stated that the Garland Case merely determined that: One who has been admitted to practice the profession of the law, cannot be deprived of the right to continue in the exercise [thereof] by the exaction    of an oath as to    past conduct, respecting matters which have no connection with such profession.[ [20] ] The peculiar situation presented in the Garland Case is also recognized in State v. Hazzard, supra, 247 P. [at 958], wherein it is stated that the Garland decision has been robbed of much of its virility by later decisions of the court. In re Lavine, supra, 41 P.2d at 164. Perhaps the most perceptive assessment of the portion of the Garland opinion on which Abrams relies was that of Judge Lehman, writing for a unanimous New York Court of Appeals: Literally, of course, an executive pardon cannot blot out of existence the guilt of one who committed a crime. At most it can wipe out the legal consequences which flow from an adjudication of guilt. In Ex parte Garland, supra , the court gave to the presidential pardon no greater effect. The court decided only that the effect of this pardon is to relieve the petitioner from all penalties and disabilities attached to the offence of treason, committed by his participation in the Rebellion. So far as that offence is concerned, he is thus placed beyond the reach of punishment of any kind. 4 Wall. [71 U.S. at] 381. To illuminate a decision in which a bare majority of the court concurred and which was rendered while the passions roused by the rebellion still clouded the judgment of most citizens, the court used, appropriately enough, a metaphor; but metaphors cannot appropriately be used to justify a conclusion which would follow logically only if the metaphor were not a figure of speech but an accurate description. Brophy, supra, 38 N.E.2d at 470. At least since 1915, the federal and state courts have uniformly ruled that Professor Williston had it right and that the Supreme Court's use of metaphor in the Garland opinion does not compel a contrary conclusion. We now adopt the prevailing view. [21]