Opinion ID: 105306
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: as to the incriminatory character of the 58 questions.

Text: It is quite true, as the majority observes, that this issue was not dealt with by either of the courts below. The District Court and the Court of Appeals did not have to reach the problem because of their conclusion that Emspak's claim of privilege was inadequate. And for some reason the Government has not pressed the point. This, however, does not foreclose this Court from considering it. See Swift & Co. v. Hocking Valley R. Co., 243 U. S. 281, 289 (1917). And perhaps it is due that I should explain why I think we should deal with it. My reason is twofold: first, because to hold, as the Court does, that the questions involved in Counts 1 to 58 of the indictment were of an incriminatory character seems to me to verge on an abandonment of the rule that a valid claim of privilege exists only as to incriminatory questions; and second, because the more recent decisions of this Court appear to me to leave the standard for determining whether a question is incriminatory in great confusion. For example, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit had occasion not so long ago to manifest its bewilderment as to where this aspect of the privilege against self-incrimination now stands in light of recent decisions of this Court. See United States v. Coffey, 198 F. 2d 438 (1952). In short, I think the standard for judging the character of a question against which the Fifth Amendment privilege is asserted needs both rehabilitation and restatement. (1) The standard. The concept of an incriminating answer includes not only those answers which constitute an admission of guilt, but also those which may furnish evidence of guilt or merely supply a lead to obtaining such evidence. Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U. S. 547 (1892). The answer to almost any question a witness is asked could be regarded as being useful as evidence, or as furnishing a lead to evidence, in support of some conceivable criminal charge against the person to whom the question is addressed. But unlike a defendant in a criminal case, a witness in a grand jury or other judicial or legislative proceeding has never been allowed, by claiming his privilege, to refuse to answer any questions at all. That would completely subordinate the public interest in the conduct of such proceedings. Accordingly, lest claims of the Fifth Amendment privilege be used as a cover for a person refusing to perform his duty to co-operate in such proceedings, reasonable bounds have been put upon the exercise of the privilege. Those bounds were stated as long ago as 1861 by the English Court of Queen's Bench in The Queen v. Boyes, 1 B. & S. 311, 330-331, in language which this Court has adopted as the basis for the rule in this country. See Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591, 599-600 (1896); Mason v. United States, 244 U. S. 362, 365-366 (1917). In the Boyes case, Cockburn, C. J., said: Further than this, we are of opinion that the danger to be apprehended must be real and appreciable, with reference to the ordinary operation of law in the ordinary course of thingsnot a danger of an imaginary and unsubstantial character, having reference to some extraordinary and barely possible contingency, so improbable that no reasonable man would suffer it to influence his conduct. We think that a merely remote and naked possibility, out of the ordinary course of the law and such as no reasonable man would be affected by, should not be suffered to obstruct the administration of justice. The object of the law is to afford to a party, called upon to give evidence in a proceeding inter alios, protection against being brought by means of his own evidence within the penalties of the law. But it would be to convert a salutary protection into a means of abuse if it were to be held that a mere imaginary possibility of danger, however remote and improbable, was sufficient to justify the withholding of evidence essential to the ends of justice. Throughout the course of its decisions this Court has consistently stated that the real danger v. imaginary possibility test is the proper standard to be applied in deciding whether particular questions are subject to a valid Fifth Amendment claim. See Brown v. Walker, supra ; Heike v. United States, 227 U. S. 131, 144 (1913); Mason v. United States, supra ; Rogers v. United States, 340 U. S. 367 (1951); Blau v. United States, 340 U. S. 159, 161 (1950); Hoffman v. United States, 341 U. S. 479, 486 (1951). But in recent per curiam reversals of contempt convictions this Court seems to have indicated a tendency to stray from the application of this traditional standard. [2] And I shall presently show that it has departed from that standard in this case. (2) Application of the standard to questions innocent on their face. The next question requiring consideration is: How should this standard be applied in a case where the questions appear on their face to call only for innocent answers? In United States v. Weisman, 111 F. 2d 260 (1940), the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had before it a claim of the Fifth Amendment privilege to a question in substantially the following form: Did you know anyone who visited or lived in Shanghai between 1934 and 1939? On the surface of thingshad nothing more appearedthe possible answers to this question Yes, No or I don't knowwould all appear innocent. A situation could be imagined in which one of these answers would have tended to incriminate, but this possibility by itself would not be enough to justify the claim of privilege. Additional facts appeared, however, which showed the question to be part of an incriminatory pattern: the witness was a New York night club proprietor, unlikely to be acquainted with Shanghai residents or visitors, and he had engaged in transactions looking suspiciously like importations of narcotics from China. Because of these and other facts, a real danger of incrimination from answering the question was held to exist by the court, through Judge Learned Hand. It may be argued that the admission sought was not sufficiently implicating to justify the invocation of the privilege, see Wigmore, Evidence, §§ 2260-2261; but for present purposes we may assume that the result is a correct one. Of course, in some cases the background facts making an apparently innocent question dangerous may not be known to the court. Then the choice must be made between requiring the court to accept the witness' word that facts exist which would make his answer incriminating, and requiring the witness to explain the circumstances which justify his claim of privilege. To be sure, the second alternative involves the danger that the witness will have to reveal some incriminatory evidence in order to show why he should not be required to answer. Nevertheless, traditionally the witness has not been allowed to be sole judge of the character of the questions objected to; he is required to open the door wide enough for the court to see that there is substance to his claim. United States v. Weisman, supra . If the background facts are known or suspected to exist, this problem disappears, for all the witness has to do is point to such facts or suspicions. (3) Application of the standard to dangerous questions. It seems to me that the real danger v. imaginary possibility standard ought to be applied in the same fashion to dangerous questions. Such questions include those which call for an admission of a crime or a necessary element of a crime, or a fact which, while innocent on its face, is dangerous in the light of other facts already developed. In all such cases other facts may appear which serve to cast an innocent aspect upon the question. Suppose two men are suspected of having conspired to steal cash from a bank one day during business hours. Each is asked whether he saw the other on the day of the theft, and each pleads his privilege. But facts already developed in the investigation show that both men are tellers in this bank and have worked in the same cage for ten years. Certainly, in these circumstances, the fact of each having seen the other cannot rationally be said to have any tendency to establish their guilt, or, in any realistic sense, to aid the prosecution in discovering evidence against them, since the prosecution already would be expected to have independent evidence of their presence in the bank on that day. In other words, if background facts can make an innocent question dangerous, they can also make a dangerous question innocent. And in deciding whether the privilege is available, we must take into account all the factsnot just those tending to make the question dangerous. I do not suggest that in a trial for contempt a Fifth Amendment defense should be set at naught whenever the prosecution is able to offer an exculpatory explanation for an otherwise incriminating answer. What I do submit is that the privilege should not be available when the facts have been sufficiently developed at the time the claim of privilege is made so that it is plain that no possible answer to the question put to the witness could rationally tend to prove his guilt or supply the prosecution with leads to evidence against him. In such circumstances there is no real danger of harm to the witness to be apprehended from his answering the question. (4) Application of the standard to this case. I come finally to the issue as to how the real danger v. imaginary possibility standard should be applied to the questions involved in the first 58 counts of the indictment. [3] Typical of these questions were the following: Are you acquainted with Joseph Persily?; Is Max Helford at the present time a field organizer for the UE? On their face, and without more, these questions were certainly innocent enough. And therefore the first issue confronting us is whether other existing background facts and circumstances made the questions incriminatory. We start from these premises: From the announced purposes of the Subcommittee and the pattern of its questioning of witnesses, it is a fair inference that one of the Subcommittee's objectives was to show that communists held positions of responsibility in this Union. This in turn might be the starting point for prosecutions for filing false noncommunist affidavits under the Taft-Hartley Act [4] or for violations of the Smith Act. [5] The conclusion also seems justified that most, if not all, of the persons referred to in the 58 questions put to Emspak, and Emspak himself, were suspected of being communists or of having communist affiliations. Indeed, the Government on the oral argument conceded as much. Had Emspak admitted knowing any of these people, this might tend to show association with communists. While the decisions of this Court do not establish that these factors would have sufficed to make those questions incriminatory, lower courts have gone far in this direction. See Kasinowitz v. United States, 181 F. 2d 632 (1950); United States v. Raley, 96 F. Supp. 495 (1951); see also Falknor, Self-Crimination Privilege: Links in the Chain, 5 Vand. L. Rev. 479, 485-489 (1952). But there were also other background facts and circumstances. Emspak had told the Subcommittee that he was Secretary of the Union. He was asked if other named individuals held positions in the same Union, and with respect to some of them, whether he knew them personally. These things being so, it is difficult to see how the fact that Emspak knew some of these people or what position each held in the Union can rationally be said to support even an inference that he knew of their alleged communist affiliations, much less tend to prove that he himself had taken part in a conspiracy to advocate the forcible overthrow of the Government or had falsely sworn that he was not a communist. Nor could the answers to the questions have been of material assistance in providing leads to evidence to be used against him. Investigators presumably would already know that the Secretary of the Union knew other Union officials. Thus, in light of Emspak's admitted position, the questions appear proper. This conclusion is not affected by the additional possibility that Emspak's answers might have been admissible against him in a later criminal trial. If the answers were admissible, this fact should not of itself make the questions incriminatory, even though the answers might have been utilized by the prosecutor to show Emspak's acquaintance with these other persons as a first step in proving conspiracy, and the prosecutor would thus have been spared the necessity of proving this acquaintance by independent evidence. But in fact Emspak's answers would not have been admissible against him in such a trial. For at the time Emspak testified before the Sub-committee, a federal statute prevented the use of any of his testimony before that body as evidence against him in any later criminal proceedings, except a prosecution for perjury in the giving of the testimony. [6] Thus, to the extent that the incriminatory character of these questions depends solely upon the admissibility of Emspak's answers in evidence against him in a later criminal trial, there could hardly be a valid objection to them on this score. In the last analysis, the Court's holding seems to rest on the premise that the questions put to Emspak became automatically incriminatory once it was shown that he and those about whom he was interrogated were under suspicion of communism. This is painting with too broad a brush. It is true that under the rule as it exists a witness may sometimes have to walk a tightrope between waiver of his privilege, if he answers a question later held to be incriminatory, and contempt, if he refuses to answer a question later held to be nonincriminatory. And it may be that in some circumstances the privilege should be held to extend to questions which are not in themselves incriminatory, but which seem likely to lead to other questions which are. But in my view any such doctrine should be regarded as an exception to the general rule and should be confined to cases where special circumstances exist which make it unfair to apply the ordinary rule, such as where the witness is without counsel, is ignorant or confused, and the like. Some of the decisions of lower courts seem to suggest that in proceedings obviously designed to develop a case against a particular witness, the witness may be allowed to invoke the privilege as to all questions, as may a defendant in a criminal case. See Marcello v. United States, 196 F. 2d 437 (1952); Maffie v. United States, 209 F. 2d 225 (1954). I think, however, that such a view is too sweeping, and also that where there is room for the application of an exception to the ordinary rule, it should be done openly, and not under the guise of holding nonincriminatory questions incriminatory. No circumstances are shown here which would call for the application of any such exception. Emspak was represented by counsel and was obviously an intelligent and shrewd witness. The inference most readily drawn from the record is that Emspak did not want to stool pigeon against his associates. While such a motive would not, in my opinion, vitiate an otherwise valid claim of the privilege, it certainly furnished no legal excuse for refusing to answer nonincriminatory questions.