Opinion ID: 106268
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: constitutional challenge to the membership clause on its face.

Text: Petitioner's constitutional attack goes both to the statute on its face and as applied. At this point we deal with the first aspect of the challenge and with one part of its second aspect. The balance of the latter, which essentially concerns the sufficiency of the evidence, is discussed in the next section of this opinion. It will bring the constitutional issues into clearer focus to notice first the premises on which the case was submitted to the jury. The jury was instructed that in order to convict it must find that within the three-year limitations period [8] (1) the Communist Party advocated the violent overthrow of the Government, in the sense of present advocacy of action to accomplish that end as soon as circumstances were propitious; and (2) petitioner was an active member of the Party, and not merely a nominal, passive, inactive or purely technical member, with knowledge of the Party's illegal advocacy and a specific intent to bring about violent overthrow as speedily as circumstances would permit. The constitutional attack upon the membership clause, as thus construed, is that the statute offends (1) the Fifth Amendment, [9] in that it impermissibly imputes guilt to an individual merely on the basis of his associations and sympathies, rather than because of some concrete personal involvement in criminal conduct; and (2) the First Amendment, [10] in that it infringes on free political expression and association. Subsidiarily, it is argued that the statute cannot be interpreted as including a requirement of a specific intent to accomplish violent overthrow, or as requiring that membership in a proscribed organization must be active membership, in the absence of both or either of which it is said the statute becomes a fortiori unconstitutional. [11] It is further contended that even if the adjective active may properly be implied as a qualification upon the term member, petitioner's conviction would nonetheless be unconstitutional, because so construed the statute would be impermissibly vague under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, [12] and so applied would in any event infringe the Sixth Amendment, in that the indictment charged only that Scales was a member, not an active member, of the Communist Party.
Before reaching petitioner's constitutional claims, we should first ascertain whether the membership clause permissibly bears the construction put upon it below. We think it does. The trial court's definition of the kind of organizational advocacy that is proscribed was fully in accord with what was held in Yates v. United States, 354 U. S. 298. [13] And the statute itself requires that a defendant must have knowledge of the organization's illegal advocacy. The only two elements of the crime, as defined below, about which there is controversy are therefore specific intent and active membership. As to the former, this Court held in Dennis v. United States, 341 U. S. 494, 499-500, that even though the advocacy and organizing provisions of the Smith Act, unlike the literature section (note 1, supra ), did not expressly contain such a specific intent element, such a requirement was fairly to be implied. We think that the reasoning of Dennis applies equally to the membership clause, and are left unpersuaded by the distinctions petitioner seeks to draw between this clause and the advocacy and organizing provisions of the Smith Act. We find hardly greater difficulty in interpreting the membership clause to reach only active members. We decline to attribute to Congress a purpose to punish nominal membership, even though accompanied by knowledge and intent, not merely because of the close constitutional questions that such a purpose would raise (cf. infra, p. 228; Yates, supra, at 319), but also for two other reasons: It is not to be lightly inferred that Congress intended to visit upon mere passive members the heavy penalties imposed by the Smith Act. [14] Nor can we assume that it was Congress' purpose to allow the quality of the punishable membership to be measured solely by the varying standards of that relationship as subjectively viewed by different organizations. It is more reasonable to believe that Congress contemplated an objective standard fixed by the law itself, thereby assuring an even-handed application of the statute. This Court in passing on a similar provision requiring the deportation of aliens who have become members of the Communist Partya provision which rested on Congress' far more plenary power over aliens, and hence did not press nearly so closely on the limits of constitutionality as this enactmenthad no difficulty in interpreting membership there as meaning more than the mere voluntary listing of a person's name on Party rolls. Galvan v. Press, 347 U. S. 522; Rowoldt v. Perfetto, 355 U. S. 115; see Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U. S. 135. A similar construction is called for here. [15] Petitioner's particular constitutional objections to this construction are misconceived. The indictment was not defective in failing to charge that Scales was an active member of the Party, for that factor was not in itself a discrete element of the crime, but an inherent quality of the membership element. As such it was a matter not for the indictment, but for elucidating instructions to the jury on what the term member in the statute meant. Nor do we think that the objection on the score of vagueness is a tenable one. The distinction between active and nominal membership is well understood in common parlance (cf. Boyce Motor Lines v. United States, 342 U. S. 337; United States v. Petrillo, 332 U. S. 1; Sproles v. Binford, 286 U. S. 374), and the point at which one shades into the other is something that goes not to the sufficiency of the statute, but to the adequacy of the trial court's guidance to the jury by way of instructions in a particular case. See note 29, infra. Moreover, whatever abstract doubts might exist on the matter, this case presents no such problem. For petitioner's actions on behalf of the Communist Party most certainly amounted to active membership by whatever standards one could reasonably anticipate, and he can therefore hardly be considered to have acted unadvisedly on this score. We find no substance in the further suggestion that petitioner could not be expected to anticipate a construction of the statute that included within its elements activity and specific intent, and hence that he was not duly warned of what the statute made criminal. It is, of course, clear that the lower courts' construction was narrower, not broader, than the one for which petitioner argues in defining the character of the forbidden conduct and that therefore, according to petitioner's own construction, his actions were forbidden by the statute. The contention must then be that petitioner had a right to rely on the statute's, as he construed it, being held unconstitutional. Assuming, arguendo, that petitioner's construction was not unreasonable, no more can be said than thatin light of the courts' traditional avoidance of constructions of dubious constitutionality and in light of their role in construing the purpose of a statutethere were two ways one could reasonably anticipate this statute's being construed, and that petitioner had clear warning that his actions were in violation of both constructions. There is no additional constitutional requirement that petitioner should be entitled to rely upon the statute's being construed in such a way as possibly to render it unconstitutional. In sum, this argument of a right to a literal construction simply boils down to a claim that the view of the statute taken below did violence to the congressional purpose. Of course a litigant is always prejudiced when a court errs, but whether or not the lower courts erred in their construction is an issue which can only be met on its merits, and not by reference to a right to a particular interpretation. We hold that the statute was correctly interpreted by the two lower courts, and now turn to petitioner's basic constitutional challenge.
In our jurisprudence guilt is personal, and when the imposition of punishment on a status or on conduct can only be justified by reference to the relationship of that status or conduct to other concededly criminal activity (here advocacy of violent overthrow), that relationship must be sufficiently substantial to satisfy the concept of personal guilt in order to withstand attack under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Membership, without more, in an organization engaged in illegal advocacy, it is now said, has not heretofore been recognized by this Court to be such a relationship. [16] This claim stands, and we shall examine it, independently of the claim made under the First Amendment. Any thought that due process puts beyond the reach of the criminal law all individual associational relationships, unless accompanied by the commission of specific acts of criminality, is dispelled by familiar concepts of the law of conspiracy and complicity. While both are commonplace in the landscape of the criminal law, they are not natural features. Rather they are particular legal concepts manifesting the more general principle that society, having the power to punish dangerous behavior, cannot be powerless against those who work to bring about that behavior. [17] The fact that Congress has not resorted to either of these familiar concepts means only that the enquiry here must direct itself to an analysis of the relationship between the fact of membership and the underlying substantive illegal conduct, in order to determine whether that relationship is indeed too tenuous to permit its use as the basis of criminal liability. In this instance it is an organization which engages in criminal activity, [18] and we can perceive no reason why one who actively and knowingly works in the ranks of that organization, intending to contribute to the success of those specifically illegal activities, should be any more immune from prosecution than he to whom the organization has assigned the task of carrying out the substantive criminal act. Nor should the fact that Congress has focussed here on membership, the characteristic relationship between an individual and the type of conspiratorial quasi-political associations with the criminal aspect of whose activities Congress was concerned, of itself require the conclusion that the legislature has traveled outside the familiar and permissible bounds of criminal imputability. In truth, the specificity of the proscribed relationship is not necessarily a vice; it provides instruction and warning. [19] What must be met, then, is the argument that membership, even when accompanied by the elements of knowledge and specific intent, affords an insufficient quantum of participation in the organization's alleged criminal activity, that is, an insufficiently significant form of aid and encouragement to permit the imposition of criminal sanctions on that basis. It must indeed be recognized that a person who merely becomes a member of an illegal organization, by that act alone need be doing nothing more than signifying his assent to its purposes and activities on one hand, and providing, on the other, only the sort of moral encouragement which comes from the knowledge that others believe in what the organization is doing. It may indeed be argued that such assent and encouragement do fall short of the concrete, practical impetus given to a criminal enterprise which is lent for instance by a commitment on the part of a conspirator to act in furtherance of that enterprise. A member, as distinguished from a conspirator, may indicate his approval of a criminal enterprise by the very fact of his membership without thereby necessarily committing himself to further it by any act or course of conduct whatever. In an area of the criminal law which this Court has indicated more than once demands its watchful scrutiny (see Dennis, supra, at 516; Yates, supra, at 328; and see also Noto v. United States , decided today, post, p. 290), these factors have weight [20] and must be found to be overborne in a total constitutional assessment of the statute. We think, however, they are duly met when the statute is found to reach only active members having also a guilty knowledge and intent, and which therefore prevents a conviction on what otherwise might be regarded as merely an expression of sympathy with the alleged criminal enterprise, unaccompanied by any significant action in its support or any commitment to undertake such action. Thus, given the construction of the membership clause already discussed, we think the factors called for in rendering members criminally responsible for the illegal advocacy of the organization fall within established, and therefore presumably constitutional, standards of criminal imputability.
Little remains to be said concerning the claim that the statute infringes First Amendment freedoms. It was settled in Dennis that the advocacy with which we are here concerned is not constitutionally protected speech, and it was further established that a combination to promote such advocacy, albeit under the aegis of what purports to be a political party, is not such association as is protected by the First Amendment. We can discern no reason why membership, when it constitutes a purposeful form of complicity in a group engaging in this same forbidden advocacy, should receive any greater degree of protection from the guarantees of that Amendment. If it is said that the mere existence of such an enactment tends to inhibit the exercise of constitutionally protected rights, in that it engenders an unhealthy fear that one may find himself unwittingly embroiled in criminal liability, the answer surely is that the statute provides that a defendant must be proven to have knowledge of the proscribed advocacy before he may be convicted. It is, of course, true that quasi-political parties or other groups that may embrace both legal and illegal aims differ from a technical conspiracy, which is defined by its criminal purpose, so that all knowing association with the conspiracy is a proper subject for criminal proscription as far as First Amendment liberties are concerned. If there were a similar blanket prohibition of association with a group having both legal and illegal aims, there would indeed be a real danger that legitimate political expression or association would be impaired, but the membership clause, as here construed, does not cut deeper into the freedom of association than is necessary to deal with the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. Schenck v. United States, 249 U. S. 47, 52. The clause does not make criminal all association with an organization which has been shown to engage in illegal advocacy. There must be clear proof that a defendant specifically intend[s] to accomplish [the aims of the organization] by resort to violence. Noto v. United States , post, at p. 299. Thus the member for whom the organization is a vehicle for the advancement of legitimate aims and policies does not fall within the ban of the statute: he lacks the requisite specific intent to bring about the overthrow of the government as speedily as circumstances would permit. Such a person may be foolish, deluded, or perhaps merely optimistic, but he is not by this statute made a criminal. We conclude that petitioner's constitutional challenge must be overruled. [21]