Opinion ID: 108266
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Injunctions

Text: The companion cases decided today hold that a federal court should not interfere by injunction with an existing state criminal prosecution pending against the federal court plaintiff at the time the federal action is brought, except upon a showing that great, immediate, and irreparable injury is threatened. Such a showing may be, for example, in the form of bad-faith harassment of the federal court plaintiff by state law enforcement officials. These decisions adhere to the policy established by this Court that, in the absence of such showing, [i]t is generally to be assumed that state courts and prosecutors will observe [in the pending prosecution] constitutional limitations as expounded by this Court. Dombrowski v. Pfister, 380 U. S. 479, 484 (1965). While the three-judge court sustained the constitutionality of the state statute on its face (a holding not before us on this appeal), the court interfered with the pending state prosecution under the statute to the extent of ordering the return of the seized materials and suppressing their use as evidence in the prosecution, thus leaving the State free to proceed with the prosecution on the basis of other evidence. This interference was improper on this record. There is an utter absence of any evidence that the seizures and the arrest of appellee Ledesma, and the filing of the informations accusing Ledesma of violation of the state statute, were undertaken in bad faith to harass appellees, or for any purpose except the good-faith enforcement of the State's criminal laws. I have no occasion to consider, and intimate no view upon, the holding of the Federal District Court that, as to the seizures and the arrest of appellee Ledesma, the conclusion is irresistible in logic and in law that none of these may be constitutionally undertaken prior to an adversary judicial determination of obscenity. 304 F. Supp., at 667. [2] That appeal to federal constitutional protections was open to appellee Ledesma in the state prosecution by way of challenge, in any manner permitted by Louisiana criminal procedure, to the validity of the arrest, and objections to admission into evidence of, or motions to suppress use of, the materials. In Dombrowski, the Court expressly included controversies over the admissibility of evidence as controversies which, without more, involved no special circumstances to warrant cutting short the normal adjudication of constitutional defenses in the course of a [state] criminal prosecution. 380 U. S., at 485. The Court said: It is difficult to think of a case in which an accused could properly bring a state prosecution to a halt while a federal court decides his claim that certain evidence is rendered inadmissible by the Fourteenth Amendment. Id., at 485 n. 3. While there may be circumstances in which a federal court could properly adjudicate such a claim, this record discloses none which justified this three-judge court in doing so. I therefore join the Court in concluding that paragraphs 1 and 2 of the judgment should be reversed and set aside.