Opinion ID: 285525
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Hershey Directive.

Text: 54 In considering whether the complaint against the Hershey directive is justiciable, we need not determine the precise legal status of the directive. General Hershey is authorized by 32 C.F.R. § 1604.1 (1968) both 55 (a) To prescribe such rules and regulations as he shall deem necessary for the administration of the Selective Service System.    56 and 57 (b) To issue such public notices, orders, and instructions as shall be necessary for carrying out the functions of the Selective Service System. 58 It matters little whether his directive is a rule, an order, a set of instructions, or only a sui generis directive. Whatever it is in law, it purports to be an authoritative declaration of policy issued for the guidance of the System's line officers. Neither they nor the average would-be war protester whose destinies they control are likely to suspect that, for all its official pretensions, it is really only a reflective letter from an interested citizen, and that its exhortation to expedite responsive classification, is nothing but the personal prayer of a venerable patriarch. 59 The substance of the directive is divisible into three parts: one part defining the authority of local draft boards under the delinquency regulations, another part (Local Board Memorandum No. 85) specifically applying the delinquency procedure to registrants who mutilate or abandon their draft cards, and a third part asserting the draft boards' authority independently of the delinquency regulations to deny defendants to otherwise eligible registrants who engage in various illegal anti-war activities. Since the considerations governing the justiciability of these three parts are not identical, we discuss each in turn.
60 With respect to the delinquency regulations in general, the directive states that if evidence of violation of the act and regulations is established, a local board may declare the registrant a delinquent and    process him accordingly. This statement amplifies the provision of the delinquency regulations authorizing draft boards to declare delinquent a registrant who has failed to perform any duty    required of him under the selective service law.    32 C.F.R. § 1642.4 (a) (1968). 37 Appellants attack the delinquency regulations both as written and as authoritatively construed by the directive. Either way, however, their attack prima facie alleges 61 no threat of interference    with [their] rights    beyond that implied by the existence of the law and regulations. 62 United Public Workers v. Mitchell, supra, 330 U.S. at 91, 67 S.Ct. at 565. 63 We think the alleged chilling effect of these regulations is insufficient to render them justiciable without a more specific threat of enforcement. The delinquency regulations do not themselves regulate expression. What chilling effect they may have derives from the provisions of the selective service law they are applied to enforce, and at least some of these provisions apparently do not in any way inhibit protected expression. 38 If, upon scanning the draft law, we should find a provision that does raise First Amendment problems, the chill attributable to the threat of its enforcement through the delinquency regulations would be barely noticeable beside the frigid blast from the severe criminal penalties attached to the offending provisions. 39 The mere possibility that more prosecutors than draft boards will abstain from enforcement is thin ice on which to rest the kind of chill that hardens general threats into justiciable controversies. 64 We think appellants' complaint against the delinquency regulations lies rather — if at all — against particular provisions of the draft law which threaten First Amendment injury. The added chill of anticipated enforcement through the delinquency regulations would be a factor to be considered in determining the justiciability of a challenge to such a provision. The delinquency portion of the present complaint, however, neither demonstrates a grave chill nor focuses on a narrowly-defined legal question. Accordingly, it does not present a justiciable case or controversy.
65 In Local Board Memorandum No. 85, the Hershey directive specifically endorses invocation of the delinquency regulations against registrants who abandon or mutilate their draft cards, and the affidavits attached to appellants' complaint indicate that the regulations are in fact being so applied. Mutilation is prohibited by Section 462(b) of the Act, and abandonment results in a violation of 32 C.F.R. § 1617.1 (1968), which requires a registrant to have his draft card in his personal possession at all times. Appellants' complaint against the Local Board Memorandum may reasonably be construed as a First Amendment challenge to these two provisions and specifically to their enforcement by means of the delinquency regulations. 66 The substantive provisions barring mutilation and requiring possession might on their face be thought to pose substantial First Amendment questions, for burning up and turning in draft cards are now time-honored gestures of dissent from official policy. However, in United States v. O'Brien, 40 the Supreme Court upheld a severe sentence for incendiary mutilation. It follows that the threat to enforce the mutilation provision by a declaration of delinquency does not infringe First Amendment rights: the threatened conduct is clearly defined, 41 and severe punishment of conduct so defined is constitutional; ergo, General Hershey's intent to punish it in his own way, even if illegal for other reasons, works no First Amendment injury. While O'Brien was not specifically concerned with the possession regulation, the Court's rationale plainly protects the First Amendment flanks of that regulation as well. 42 Since Local Board Memorandum No. 85 thus does not chill protected conduct, the asserted predicate for justiciability disappears.
67 The remaining portion of the Hershey directive apparently announces a policy of denying relief from the obligation of military service to those who engaged in illegal conduct which does not violate the Selective Service Act or regulations. The relevant text states that 68 the military obligation for liable age groups is universal and    deferments are given only when they serve the national interest   . It follows that    illegal activity which interferes with recruiting or causes refusal of duty in the military or naval forces could not by any stretch of the imagination be construed as being in support of the national interest. It goes on to say that 69 demonstrations, when they become illegal, have produced and will continue to produce much evidence that relates to the basis for classification.    70 A local board, upon receipt of [such evidence]    may reopen the classification of the registrant and classify him anew   , 71 and concludes with an injunction to expedite responsive classification    to the greatest possible extent consistent with sound procedure. 43 72 For all that appears, this declaration of war against anti-war protesters springs full-grown from the head of General Hershey, without benefit of reference to any provision of the Act or regulations. In this sense, it may be something more than a general threat to enforce the law. In addition, each of the considerations which bear on the appropriateness of an exception to the Mitchell rule point toward the immediacy and reality, and also the specificity of the First Amendment interests at stake. Golden v. Zwickler, supra. 73 (a) The deferment policy is expressly directed only at illegal demonstrations and interference, although at least one local board has apparently failed to notice that limitation. 44 A complaint that illegal and unprotected conduct is being chilled has, of course, no special claim to prompt adjudication. 45 But the Hershey directive neither said nor meant that war protesters were to be reclassified only after a conviction for violation of a statute which the courts have found to be consistent with the First Amendment. Thus, it may deter not merely validly proscribed conduct, but any protest activity which a registrant could plausibly expect his draft board to think unprotected or illegal. 74 It is no reflection on the competence or integrity of selective service personnel to observe that they are ill-equipped to determine questions of law as delicate and complex as those commonly raised by anti-war protest activity. Draft boards do not employ judicial procedures, and their members often have no legal training. Rightly or not, registrants are also likely to have less confidence in the constitutional sensitivity of their draft board, especially in the area of war dissent, than in that of the prosecutor and the courts. These considerations loom particularly large in the light of the frequent vagueness and overbreadth of the myriad local laws and ordinances which are susceptible of application against protest activities and which cannot conceivably all be subjected to judicial review in the foreseeable future. As the cases arising out of civil rights demonstrations have shown, some of these hitherto untested laws may well be unconstitutional on their face. Many others undoubtedly require a judicious exercise of prosecutorial discretion or a narrowing construction before they can survive First Amendment scrutiny. The resultant uncertainty concerning the legality of various forms of dissent imposes some chill on protected protest even without the Hershey directive. But by entrusting to draft boards effective power to decide the hard legal and constitutional questions for themselves, the directive seriously compounds this chilling effect on protected conduct. 75 The directive's deferment policy also adds to the deterrents to legal protest by raising the price of a wrong guess as to the legality of particular protest activity or of a failure to foresee the course an initially legal demonstration may take. Participation in most lawful demonstrations unavoidably involves at least some risk that the protest will in fact get out of hand or that the authorities will decide that it has done so; innocent participants may then be penalized along with the rest. The directive adds a new and — at least in the eyes of many protesters — a more severe penalty for such unintentional illegality. Draft eligible males who are willing to run the risk of prosecution for a misdemeanor in order to make a protest might still be intimidated by the threat of a I-A classification. 76 Accordingly, we think the deferment policy works a pronounced chilling effect on legal or protected conduct. 77 (b) If draft boards in fact effectuate the Hershey directive, it may be exceedingly difficult to challenge the legality of their action. The breadth of the draft board's unreviewable discretion is legendary. While the law may be narrower than the legend, both Congress and the courts have forbidden judicial review of the sufficiency of the evidence to support a classification decision. Thus, Section 10(b) (3) provides that even in a prosecution for refusal of induction, the court's inquiry shall extend to the draft board's jurisdiction only when there is no basis in fact for the classification assigned. See also Estep v. United States, supra. This provision raises the possibility that a classification assigned for an illicit reason is unreviewable whenever the draft board can point to some other possible supporting ground under the general language of the classification provisions. Furthermore, even if the statute is not a bar to review of such classifications, a registrant may have serious difficulty in discovering or proving the actual basis of his draft board's action. Thus, if a complaint such as that of appellants does not lie, the chill of the Hershey directive's deferment policy may spread indefinitely without any judicial determination of its legality. 78 (c) Unlike the directive's threat of delinquency proceedings, which applies even-handedly to all violations of the Selective Service law, the deferment policy expressly singles out from the infinite range of illegal conduct specific kinds of illegal acts — namely those commonly performed by war protesters — for special treatment. The result is both to impart an element of specificity to the threat of enforcement and to accentuate its potential chilling effect on protected expression. 79 (d) Finally, the issues raised by this aspect of appellant's complaint are narrow and clearly defined. Appellants question the authority for and the constitutionality on its face of a simple and specific policy. Neither of these issues turns on the way in which the policy is applied. Thus, a delay in adjudication holds no promise of a better case. 80 For these reasons, we hold that, given a complaining party whose First Amendment rights are chilled, a suit against that portion of the Hershey directive which purports to authorize denial of deferments for illegal activity not covered by the delinquency regulations presents a justiciable controversy. 81