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

Heading: Statutory Construction.

Text: 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.