Opinion ID: 106534
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Predecessor Statute and Judicial Construction.

Text: The subsections here in question have their origin in part of a Civil War Act to amend the several Acts heretofore passed to provide for the Enrolling and Calling out the National Forces, and for other Purposes. Act of March 3, 1865, 13 Stat. 487. Section 21 of that Act, dealing with deserters and draft evaders, was in terms punitive, providing that in addition to the other lawful penalties of the crime of desertion, persons guilty thereof shall be deemed and taken to have voluntarily relinquished and forfeited their rights of citizenship and their rights to become citizens . . . and all persons who, being duly enrolled, shall depart the jurisdiction of the district in which he is enrolled, or go beyond the limits of the United States, with intent to avoid any draft into the military or naval service, duly ordered, shall be liable to the penalties of this section. [31] The debates in Congress in 1865 confirm that the use of punitive language in § 21 was not accidental. The section as originally proposed inflicted loss of rights of citizenship only on deserters. Senator Morrill of Maine proposed amending the section to cover persons who leave the country to avoid the draft, stating, I do not see why the same principle should not extend to those who leave the country to avoid the draft. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2d Sess. 642 (1865). This same principle was punitive, because Senator Morrill was also worried that insofar as the section as originally proposed provides for a penalty to be imposed on persons who had theretofore deserted, there was question whether it is not an ex post facto law, whether it is not fixing a penalty for an act already done. Ibid. Senator Johnson of Maryland attempted to allay Senator Morrill's concern by explaining that the penalties are not imposed upon those who have deserted, if nothing else occurs, but only on those who have deserted and who shall not return within sixty days. The crime for which the punishment is inflicted is made up of the fact of an antecedent desertion, and a failure to return within sixty days. It is clearly within the power of Congress. Ibid. This explanation satisfied the Senate sufficiently so that they accepted the section, with Senator Morrill's amendment, although Senator Hendricks of Indiana made one last speech in an effort to convince his colleagues of the bill's ex post facto nature and, even apart from that, of the excessiveness of the punishment, particularly as applied to draft evaders: It seems to me to be very clear that this section proposes to punish desertions which have already taken place, with a penalty which the law does not already prescribe. In other words it is an ex post facto criminal law which I think we cannot pass. . . . One of the penalties known very well to the criminal laws of the country is the denial of the right of suffrage and the right to hold offices of trust or profit. It seems to me this objection to the section is very clear, but I desire to suggest further that this section punishes desertions that may hereafter take place in the same manner, and it is known to Senators that one desertion recently created is not reporting when notified of the draft. . . . I submit to Senators that it is a horrible thing to deprive a man of his citizenship, of that which is his pride and honor, from the mere fact that he has been unable to report upon the day specified after being notified that he has been drafted. Certainly the punishment for desertion is severe enough. It extends now from the denial of pay up to death; that entire compass is given for the punishment of this offense. Why add this other? It cannot do any good. Id., at 643. In the House, the motion of New York's Representative Townsend to strike the section as a despotic measure which would have the effect to deprive fifty thousand, and I do not know but one hundred thousand, people of their rights and privileges, was met by the argument of Representative Schenck of Ohio, the Chairman of the Military Committee, that Here is a penalty that is lawful, wise, proper, and that should be added to the other lawful penalties that now exist against deserters. Id., at 1155. After Representative Wilson of Iowa proposed an amendment, later accepted and placed in the enacted version of the bill, extending the draft-evasion portion to apply to persons leaving the district in which they are enrolled in addition to those leaving the country, Representative J. C. Allen of Illinois raised the ex post facto objection to the section as a whole. Id., at 1155-1156. Representative Schenck answered him much as Senator Johnson had replied in the Senate: The gentleman from Illinois [Mr. J. C. ALLEN] misapprehends this section from not having looked carefully, as I think, into its language. He thinks it retroactive. It is not so. It does not provide for punishing those who have deserted in their character of deserters acquired by having gone before the passage of the law, but of those only, who, being deserters, shall not return and report themselves for duty within sixty days. If the gentleman looks at the language of the section, he will find that we have carefully avoided making it retroactive. We give those who have deserted their country and their flag sixty days for repentance and return. Mr. J. C. ALLEN. Will not the infliction of this penalty on those who have failed to return to the Army be an additional penalty that did not exist at the time they deserted? Mr. SCHENCK. Yes, sir. Mr. J. C. ALLEN. Does not that make the law retroactive? Mr. SCHENCK. They are deserters now. We take them up in their present status and character as deserters, and punish them for continuing in that character. The gentleman refers to lawyers here. I believe he is a good lawyer himself. Does he not know that if a man steals a horse and runs away with it to the next county it is a continual act of larceny until he delivers up the horse? Id., at 1156. The significance of these debates is, as these excerpts plainly show, that while there was a difference in both Houses as to whether the statute would be an ex post facto law, there was agreement among all the speakers on both sides of that issue, as well as on both sides of the merits of the bill generally, that deprivation of rights of citizenship for leaving the country to evade the draft was a penalty and punishment for a crime and an offense and a violation of a criminal law. A number of state court judicial decisions rendered shortly after the Civil War lend impressive support to the conclusion that the predecessor of §§ 401 (j) and 349 (a) (10), § 21 of the 1865 statute, was a criminal statute imposing an additional punishment for desertion and draft evasion. The first and most important of these was Huber v. Reily, 53 Pa. 112 (1866), in which, as in most of the cases which followed, [32] the plaintiff had brought an action against the election judge of his home township, alleging that the defendant had refused to receive his ballot on the ground that plaintiff was a deserter and thereby disenfranchised under § 21, and that such refusal was wrongful because § 21 was unconstitutional. The asserted grounds of invalidity were that § 21 was an ex post facto law, that it was an attempt by Congress to regulate suffrage in the States and therefore outside Congress' sphere of power, and that it proposed to inflict pains and penalties without a trial and conviction, and was therefore prohibited by the Bill of Rights. In an opinion by Justice Strong, later a member of this Court, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court first characterized the statute in a way which compelled discussion of the asserted grounds of unconstitutionality: The Act of Congress is highly penal. It imposes forfeiture of citizenship and deprivation of the rights of citizenship as penalties for the commission of a crime. Its avowed purpose is to add to the penalties which the law had previously affixed to the offence of desertion from the military or naval service of the United States, and it denominates the additional sanctions provided as penalties. 53 Pa., at 114-115. It then answered the ex post facto argument as it had been answered on the floor of Congress, that the offense could as well be in the continued refusal to render service as in the original desertion. The second contention was met with the statement that The enactment operates upon an individual offender, punishes him for violation of the Federal law by deprivation of his citizenship of the United States, but it leaves each state to determine for itself whether such an individual may be a voter. It does no more than increase the penalties of the law upon the commission of crime. Id., at 116. The third objection, the court continued, would be a very grave one if the act does in reality impose pains and penalties before and without a conviction by due process of law. Id., at 116-117. The court then summarized the protections guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and concluded that it was not consistent with these rights to empower a judge of elections or a board of election officers constituted under state laws . . . to adjudge the guilt or innocence of an alleged violator of the laws of the United States. Id., at 117. However, the court decided that since the penalty contemplated by § 21 is added to what the law had previously enacted to be the penalty of desertion, as imprisonment is sometimes added to punishment by fine, it must have been intended that it should be incurred in the same way, and imposed by the same tribunal that was authorized to impose the other penalties for the offence. Id., at 119. [T]he forfeiture which it prescribes, like all other penalties for desertion, must be adjudged to the convicted person, after trial by a court-martial, and sentence approved. For the conviction and sentence of such a court there can be no substitute. Id., at 120. (Emphasis in original.) Accordingly, since the plaintiff had not been so convicted, the court held that he was not disenfranchised. Subsequent state court decisions in the post-Civil War period followed Huber v. Reily, both in result and reasoning. State v. Symonds, 57 Me. 148 (1869); Severance v. Healey, 50 N. H. 448 (1870); Gotcheus v. Matheson, 58 Barb. (N. Y.) 152 (1870); McCafferty v. Guyer, 59 Pa. 109 (1868). Ultimately and significantly, in Kurtz v. Moffitt, 115 U. S. 487, a case dealing with the question whether a city police officer had the power to arrest a military deserter, this Court recognized both the nature of the sanction imposed by § 21 and the attendant necessity of procedural safeguards, approvingly citing the above decisions: The provisions of §§ 1996 and 1998, which re-enact the act of March 3, 1865, ch. 79, § 21, 13 Stat. 490, and subject every person deserting the military service of the United States to additional penalties, namely, forfeiture of all rights of citizenship, and disqualification to hold any office of trust or profit, can only take effect upon conviction by a court martial, as was clearly shown by Mr. Justice Strong, when a judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, in Huber v. Reily, 53 Penn. St. 112, and has been uniformly held by the civil courts as well as by the military authorities. State v. Symonds, 57 Maine, 148; Severance v. Healey, 50 N. H. 448; Goetcheus v. Matthewson, 61 N. Y. 420; Winthrop's Digest of Judge Advocate General's Opinions, 225. 115 U. S., at 501-502. Section 21 remained on the books unchanged, except for being distributed in the Revised Statutes as §§ 1996 and 1998, until 1912, when Congress re-enacted it with an amendment making it inapplicable to peacetime violations and giving the President power to mitigate or remit punishment previously imposed on peacetime violators, Act of August 22, 1912, 37 Stat. 356. The legislative history of that amendment is also instructive for our present inquiry. The discussion in both Houses had reference only to the penalties as operative on deserters, no doubt because there was no peacetime draft to evade, but since the 1865 statute dealt without distinction with both desertion and leaving the jurisdiction to evade, there is no reason to suppose the discussion quoted below to be any less applicable to the latter type of misconduct. The House Committee Report, H. R. Rep. No. 335, 62d Cong., 2d Sess. (1912), which was quoted in its entirety in the Senate Committee Report, S. Rep. No. 910, 62d Cong., 2d Sess. 3-6 (1912), stated that In addition to the service penalty imposed by the court-martial, the law, as it now stands, imposes the further and most drastic punishment of loss of rights of citizenship . . . . There are in the United States to-day thousands of men who are literally men without a country and their numbers will be constantly added to until the drastic civil-war measure which adds this heavy penalty to an already severe punishment imposed by military law, is repealed. H. R. Rep. No. 335, supra, at 2. In reporting the bill out of the Committee on Naval Affairs, Representative Roberts of Massachusetts, its author, stated that the bill now under consideration is intended to remove one of the harshest penalties that can be imposed upon a man for an offense, to wit, the loss of rights of citizenship. . . . [S]uch a drastic penalty was entirely too severe to be imposed upon an American citizen in time of peace. He detailed the penalties meted out by court-martial for desertion, and then referred to the additional penalty of loss of citizenship, which, he concluded, is a barbarous punishment. 48 Cong. Rec. 2903 (1912). Senator Bristow of Kansas, a member of his chamber's Committee on Military Affairs, also referred in discussing the bill to the forfeiture of rights of citizenship as a penalty, and said that there is no reason why a peacetime offender should be punished so severely. 48 Cong. Rec. 9542 (1912). A somewhat similar amendment had been passed by both Houses of Congress in 1908 but vetoed by the President. [33] The House Committee Report on that occasion, H. R. Rep. No. 1340, 60th Cong., 1st Sess. (1908), consisted mainly of a letter from the Secretary of the Navy to the Congress, and of his annual report. In both documents he referred to loss of citizenship as a punishment, and as one of the penalties for desertion. Representative Roberts spoke in 1908, as he was to do once more in 1912, of the enormity of the punishment and the horrible punishment, and said, Conviction itself under the existing law forfeits citizenship. That is the monstrosity of the law. 43 Cong. Rec. 111 (1908). The entire discussion, id., at 110-114, was based on the premise that loss of citizenship is a punishment for desertion, the point at issue, as in 1912, being whether it was too severe a punishment for peacetime imposition. At one point Representative Roberts said, Loss of citizenship is a punishment, to which Representative Hull of Iowa replied, Certainly. Id., at 114. Section 504 of the Nationality Act of 1940, 54 Stat. 1172, repealed the portion of the 1865 statute which dealt with flight from the jurisdiction to avoid the draft. However, in connection with the provision governing loss of citizenship for desertion, which was enacted as § 401 (g) and declared unconstitutional in Trop v. Dulles, supra , the President's committee of advisers reported that the provisions of the 1865 Act had been distinctly penal in character, and concluded that They must, therefore, be construed strictly, and the penalties take effect only upon conviction by a court martial. [34] Codification of the Nationality Laws of the United States, 76th Cong., 1st Sess. 68 (Comm. Print 1939). Section 401 (g) was therefore worded so that loss of nationality could only occur upon conviction for desertion by court-martial. When, however, § 401 (j) was enacted in 1944, no such procedural safeguards were built in. See Trop v. Dulles, supra, at 93-94. Thus, whereas for JUSTICE BRENNAN concurring in Trop the conclusion that expatriation under § 401 (g) was punishment was but the beginning of critical inquiry, 356 U. S., at 110, a similar conclusion with reference to §§ 401 (j) and 349 (a) (10) is sufficient to sustain the holding that they are unconstitutional.