Opinion ID: 346635
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Heading: Background of the Supreme Court's Indictment Cases.

Text: 7 Colonial Americans were familiar with a wide range of punishments that had been used by the mother country and adopted by the colonies. In the early colonial period, imprisonment was usually an intermediate step in the punishment process; the convicted criminal was temporarily confined while awaiting punishment and, with the exception of those who suffered capital punishment, he was released after the penalty had been executed. (R. Goldfarb & L. Singer, After Conviction 20-21 (1973); H. Barnes, The Story of Punishment 56, 114 (2d ed. 1972); W. Goldberg, Twentieth Century Corrections VIII-16 (rev.ed.1970).) Among the punishments inflicted were death, flogging, mutilation, branding, stocks, pillory, bilboes, and ducking stool. (A. Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896); H. Barnes & N. Teeters, New Horizons in Criminology, 290-93 (3d ed. 1959); Thompson, Early Corporal Punishments, 6 Ill.L.Q. 37 (1923).) In many, if not most instances, the penalty was either publicly inflicted, or it altered the offender's appearance so that his criminal status was evident. It was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the new states supplemented or replaced these forms of punishment with imprisonment and imprisonment at hard labor. 4 8 The indictment clause, and its counterparts in the state constitutions, was initially directed to this array of punishments. The two states, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, which recommended that the Constitution be amended to include an indictment requirement, sought that procedural protection for an accused who may incur an infamous punishment, or loss of life. (1 Elliot's Debates 323, 326 (2d ed. 1907).) 5 When Madison introduced his amendments to the House of Representatives in 1789, he rephrased the states' proposals, apparently to reflect his eighteenth century conception of what constituted an infamous punishment: 9 in all crimes punishable with loss of life or member, presentment or indictment by a grand jury shall be an essential preliminary. 6 (1 Annals of Congress 435 (1789).) 10 And Nathan Dane, discussing the Massachusetts constitution in 1823, described the distinction between infamous and noninfamous punishments as follows: 11 Punishments, clearly infamous, are death, gallows, pillory, branding, whipping, confinement to hard labour, and cropping. Blackstone considers stocks and house of correction, ignominious, as well as whipping and pillory. But in some books, imprisonment; stocks, a species of imprisonment; house of correction, a species of confinement, and fines, and a fortiori, binding to the peace, and good behaviour, are not infamous ; and the latter opinion our law adopts, in its practice on the constitution. (2 Dane's Abridgements 569-70 (1823).) 12 Despite the continued use, in the early nineteenth century, of the harsh corporal punishments in some states, the range of penalties employed by the new federal government was more restricted. In the Crimes Act of 1790, the First Congress provided for the penalties of death, public whipping, standing in pillory, imprisonment, fines, reparations, disqualification to hold office, and disqualification to give testimony in the courts of the United States. (Act of April 30, 1790, ch. 9, 1 Stat. 112.) Imprisonment and fines were the most common non-capital punishments and were favored in subsequent criminal enactments of the late eighteenth century. (E. g., Act of Feb. 12, 1793, ch. 7, 1 Stat. 302; Act of June 5, 1794, ch. 50, 1 Stat. 381; Act of June 14, 1797, ch. 1, 1 Stat. 520; Act of July 14, 1798, ch. 74, 1 Stat. 596; Act of Jan. 30, 1799, ch. 1, 1 Stat. 613.) Hard labor was first added to the federal arsenal of penalties in 1798, when the Fifth Congress provided that persons convicted of counterfeiting national currency shall be sentenced to be imprisoned and kept at hard labour for a period of not less than three years, nor more than ten years, or shall be imprisoned not exceeding ten years, and fined not exceeding five thousand dollars. (Act of June 27, 1798, ch. 61, 1 Stat. 573-74.) 13 As the catalogue of federal crimes increased, imprisonment and imprisonment at hard labor dominated the non-capital punishments prescribed in the criminal code. In 1839 Congress abolished the penalties of whipping and standing in pillory (Act of Feb. 28, 1839, ch. 36, § 5, 5 Stat. 321-22, codified in 18 U.S.C. § 3564), and by the time the laws of the United States were compiled in the Revised Statutes, death, the two forms of imprisonment, pecuniary penalties, and, in a few instances, disqualification to hold office or to testify comprised the range of federal criminal penalties. (See generally Rev.Stat. §§ 5323-5550 (2d ed. 1878).) 14 Although Congress settled rather quickly on imprisonment and hard labor as the primary penalties for serious, non-capital offenses, it moved much more slowly in providing institutions in which federal prisoners could be confined. The First Congress recommended, by resolution, that the states pass laws providing for the keeping of federal prisoners at the rate of fifty cents per month (Sept. 23, 1789, 1 Stat. 96), and authorized the United States Marshals To hire a convenient place to serve as a temporary jail when a state did not comply with the recommendation. (March 3, 1791, 1 Stat. 225; March 3, 1821, 3 Stat. 646 (same authorization when state withdraws use of jail for federal prisoners).) The practice of sending federal convicts to state institutions continued until the beginning of the twentieth century. 15 Initially, Congress made no provision for differentiating among the types of institutions in which federal prisoners could be confined. In 1825, however, it both provided for and limited the discretion of the sentencing judge to designate the institution to which a prisoner could be sent. The court was authorized to order a sentence to be executed in any state prison, or penitentiary within the district 7 when the convict was sentenced to imprisonment and confinement to hard labour. (Act of March 3, 1825, ch. 65, § 15, 4 Stat. 115, 118.) 16 In 1865 Congress broadened the liability of federal convicts to penitentiary confinement. It provided that if a defendant were sentenced to imprisonment for a period longer than one year the court could order that execution be in any state prison or penitentiary within the district or state. (Act of March 3, 1865, ch. 86, § 3, 13 Stat. 500.) Thus, after 1865 the federal courts were empowered to order imprisonment in a state penitentiary when the sentence was greater than one year or when it included hard labor. Beginning in 1864, if no institution was available within the state, the Attorney General could designate a prison in another state. (Act of May 12, 1864, ch. 85, 13 Stat. 74.) 8 Transfers from one institution to another, in the discretion of the Attorney General, were authorized after 1876, but only to assure adequate custody of the prisoner or, upon application of the prisoner, to prevent cruel or improper treatment and to preserve the convict's health. (Act of July 12, 1876, ch. 183, 19 Stat. 88.) 17 Our brief summary of the development of the federal criminal law provides the context in which the Wilson and Mackin Courts construed the indictment clause. Imprisonment and hard labor had replaced the corporal punishments as the penalty for serious crimes. These two infamous punishments were separate sentencing options available to the trial judge. Hard labor was a distinct penalty expressly authorized for specific crimes and penitentiary confinement, while not included in the penalty clauses of particular offenses, was ordered by the sentencing judge as part of the punishment. There were no national prisons; nor was there an integrated system of state institutions. Federal convicts sentenced to a penitentiary were confined in whatever facility the state had provided or, if there was no prison in the state of conviction, in the institution of a neighboring state. Congress made no provision for the classification of prisoners or for tailoring the conditions of confinement to the rehabilitative needs of individual convicts. 18 Within this nineteenth century system of sentencing and punishment, the infamous consequences to the convict himself were included in the sentence and the statutes authorized the court to award an infamous punishment. An accused's exposure upon conviction to a sentence of penitentiary confinement or hard labor triggered his constitutional right to prosecution by indictment. (Wilson, supra, 114 U.S. at 423, 426, 5 S.Ct. 935.) 19