Court Opinion

ID: 9425201
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:03.118274+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:54.014277
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Douglas,
dissenting.
The correct interpretation of the word “prosecutions” as used in § 1103 (a) of the 1970 Act was, in my view, the one given by the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit in United States v. Stephens, 449 F. 2d 103, 105:
“Prosecution ends with judgment. The purpose of the section has been served when judgment under the old Act has been entered and abatement of proceedings has been avoided. At that point litigation has ended and appeal is available. Korematsu v. United States, 319 U. S. 432, 63 S. Ct. 1124, 87 L. Ed. 1497 (1943). What occurs thereafter — the manner in which judgment is carried out, executed or satisfied, and whether or not it is suspended — in no way affects the prosecution of the case.”
The problem of ambiguities in statutory language is not peculiar to legislation dealing with criminal matters. And the question as to how those ambiguities should be resolved is not often rationalized. The most dramatic illustration, at least in modern times, is illustrated by Rosenberg v. United States, 346 U. S. 273, where a divided Court resolved an ambiguity in a statutory scheme against life, not in its favor. The instant case is not of that proportion, but it does entail the resolution of unspoken assumptions — those favoring the status quo of prison systems as opposed to those' who see real rehabilitation as the only cure of the present prison crises. As Mr. Justice Holmes said, “judges do and must legislate, but they can do so only interstitially; they are confined from *613molar to molecular motions.” Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen, 244 U. S. 205, 221 (dissenting opinion).*
Judges do not make legislative policies. But in construing an ambiguous word in a criminal code, I would try to give it a meaning that would help reverse the long trend in this Nation not to consider a prisoner a “person” in the constitutional sense. Fay Stender, writing the introduction to Maximum Security, p. X, has described some of the “tremendously sophisticated defenses against the least increase in the enforceable human rights available to the prisoner.” (E. Pell ed., Bantam Books 1973).
A less strict and rigid meaning of the present Act would be only a minor start in the other direction. But it is one I would take.

Mr. Justice Holmes also said:
“[I]n substance the growth of the law is legislative. And this in a deeper sense than that that which the courts declare to have always been the law is in fact new. It is legislative in its grounds. The very considerations which the courts most rarely mention, and always with an apology, are the secret root from which the law draws all the juices of life. We mean, of course, considerations of what is expedient for the community concerned. Every important principle which is developed by litigation is in fact and at bottom the result of more or less definitely understood views of public policy; most generally, to be sure, under our practice and traditions, the unconscious result of instinctive preferences and inarticulate convictions, but none the less traceable to public policy in the last analysis. And as the law is administered by able and experienced men, who know too much to sacrifice good sense to a syllogism, it will be found that when ancient rules maintain themselves in this way, new reasons more fitted to the time have been found for them, and that they gradually receive a new content and at last a new form from the grounds to which they have been transplanted. The importance of tracing the process lies in the fact that it is unconscious, and involves the attempt to follow precedents, as well as to give a good reason for them, and that hence, if it can be shown that one half of the effort has failed, we are at liberty to consider the question of policy with a freedom that was not possible before.” Common Carriers and the Common Law, 13 Am. L. Rev. 609, 630-631 (1879).