Court Opinion

ID: 9419893
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:51:58.950327+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:21.139104
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Jackson,
concurring.
I concur in the result, but for quite different reasons. I join the opinions of Mr. Justice Frankfurter and of Mr. Justice Burton to the effect that we should not now direct dismissal of the indictment upon the jury question. In my opinion, the point either was abandoned by the parties or if not, was ignored or silently rejected by the Court in its prior decision, 322 U. S. 78, and should not be revived now. I therefore reach the other issues in the case. I would direct dismissal of the indictment upon the grounds stated in dissent in United States v. Ballard, 322 U. S. 78 at 92, and a further ground. This Court previously ruled that it is improper for the trial court to inquire whether the religious professions and experiences as represented by defendants were true or false but that it can inquire only as to whether they were represented without belief in their truth. This leaves no statutory basis for conviction of fraud and especially no basis for conviction under this indictment. It requires, in my opinion, a provably false representation in addition to *197knowledge of its falsity to make criminal mail fraud. Since the trial court is not allowed to make both findings, the indictment should be dismissed.
Mr. Justice Frankfurter, with whom Mr. Chief Justice Vinson, Mr. Justice Jackson and Mr. Justice Burton join.
In the exercise of its supervisory power over the lower federal courts, the Court is directing the dismissal of the indictment in this case, because, following the practice then prevailing in the federal district court in California, no women were included in the panel of the grand jury which found the indictment. My brother Burton demonstrates, I believe, that under the circumstances the absence of women from‘the grand jury panel did not vitiate the indictment. But, in any event, this Court’s authority to supervise practice in the lower federal courts should be exercised only to vindicate appropriate standards of judicial administration. In finding that the exclusion of women from the grand jury panel is fatal +o the indictment, the Court embraces a claim for the benefit of the petitioners which they themselves abandoned more than four years ago. And since women have not been excluded from jury service in the California federal courts since 1944, the Court cannot justify its action as a means of emphasizing to the lower courts the duty of adopting a proper practice. Thus the Court directs the dismissal of an indictment under circumstances in which the Court’s action does not advance the proper administration of criminal justice.
The defendants were fully cognizant of the facts and of the issues involved when they made their objection to the composition of the grand jury panel and when they abandoned it. They objected to the array before the district court, saved the point when their objection was overruled, and assigned it as one of the errors in their specifica*198tions on appeal to the Circuit Court of Appeals. In ample time for the defendants to rely on it in the Circuit Court of Appeals, this Court decided Glasser v. United States, 315 U. S. 60, which indicated that we deemed it important that a jury be selected on what may be described as a modern democratic basis. And yet the point made and overruled in the District Court was not argued in the briefs before the Circuit Court of Appeals, although the defendants vigorously urged other claims to reverse their convictions. The fact that the jury question was "in issue” before the Circuit Court of Appeals, in the sense of having been assigned as error, but was neither briefed nor argued there, only serves to emphasize the abandonment of the issue before that court. When on the Government’s petition the case came before this Court, the defendants surely pressed every claim that seemed to them relevant to sustain the judgment which the Circuit Court of Appeals had entered in their favor. For it is too well settled to require citation of cases that the respondent here may urge and support any ground by which judgment in his favor can be sustained, whether or not it was argued in the court below. Their briefs and oral argument vigorously urged other issues going to the validity of the indictment. The exclusion of women was not even mentioned. And this Court, with the full record before it, took no notice of this question which now is found to undermine the entire proceedings. When we remanded the case to the Circuit Court of Appeals we plainly did so to have that court decide questions argued here which it had left undecided. We would hardly have invited its decision on questions which had been abandoned and not argued before it. If a procedural point can ever be abandoned, objection to the jury panels was here abandoned.
With the Glasser opinion before them and with the point properly preserved in their appeal papers, the abandonment of the issue by the petitioners, when the case came *199before the Circuit Court of Appeals and later before us, can mean only that they had no confidence in the claim, and that, in any event, they had not been hurt by what is now deemed a fatal error. It hardly helps the proper administration of criminal justice to allow the defendants to resurrect a point which they had dropped four years earlier.*
Even now, this Court does not find that the exclusion of women constitutes an inroad on the vital safeguards for a criminal trial so as to involve a denial of due process. *200The Court orders dismissal of an indictment because of a past practice pursued in good faith under misapprehension of relevant law. But that misconception has been corrected and the proper practice has been enforced since 1944. The Court’s order cannot serve as a means of ensuring a change in federal practice when that change has already taken place.
Dismissal of this indictment will not put an end to prosecution for the offenses which it charges. And so it cannot in any event relieve the Court from the duty of deciding the central issue before us, namely, whether the mails may be used to obtain money by fraud when the fraud consists of a false claim of belief touching religion. Dismissal of this indictment does not terminate prosecution for these offenses because Congress by the Act of May 10,1934 (48 Stat. 772, amended, July 10,1940,54 Stat. 747, 18 U. S. C. § 587) has expressly saved this prosecution. By that Act, Congress allowed reindictment where an indictment was found defective but the basis of the prosecution is left untouched. As amended it provides that
“whenever an indictment is found defective or insufficient-for any cause, after the period prescribed by the applicable statute of limitations has expired, a new indictment may be returned not later than the end of the next succeeding regular term of such court, following the term at which such indictment was found defective or insufficient, during which a grand jury thereof shall be in session.”
Considering the history of this litigation, the reasonable assumption is that the Government will press this prosecution.
A conviction was had. The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and ordered a new trial. On petition of the Government we brought the case here. The Government urged that the judgment of conviction be restored, while *201the defendants challenged its very foundation by invoking the constitutional guaranty of freedom of religion. In April 1944, we reversed the Circuit Court of Appeals and found that the District Court had properly “withheld from the jury all questions concerning the truth or falsity of the religious beliefs or doctrines of respondents.” 322 U. S. at 88. But the case was remanded to the Circuit Court of Appeals without considering the question whether the First Amendment affords immunity from criminal prosecution for the procurement of money by false statements as to one’s religious experiences. Three Justices concluded that the verdict should stand, and, in an opinion by the late Chief Justice, denied that the First Amendment afforded immunity for fraudulent use of the mails simply because the false statements concerned religious beliefs. A fourth Justice likewise thought this issue had to be met. He concluded that the indictment should be dismissed because it raised issues inextricably bound up with traditional liberty and could not be sustained in view of the First Amendment. Upon remand the Circuit Court of Appeals, after considering the issues which impliedly were remitted to it by this Court, found no flaw in the jury’s verdict and affirmed the conviction. After three years the case is again here, and the main issue urged, both in argument and in the extensive briefs, is the power of the Government to maintain this prosecution in view of the First Amendment. A decision by this Court merely directing the dismissal of the indictment because of error in the selection of the grand jury which found it will inevitably lead to curing of this defect by resubmission to a properly selected grand jury. It can hardly be believed that the Government will not feel under duty to do so. The whole machinery of criminal justice will again be set in motion. A trial will follow, and the District Court will naturally deem itself bound to entertain the prosecution *202in view of the decision of its Circuit Court of Appeals, twice left undisturbed here, which rejected the claim based on religious liberty.
It is too much like playing with justice to await a third review, two or three years hence, before facing this issue explicitly. The doctrine that a constitutional claim should not be prematurely-considered is a vital feature in the harmonious functioning of our scheme of government. But it is a rule founded in reason, not a mechanical formula for avoiding an aspect of a litigation which cannot be fairly decided without meeting the constitutional issue. If this controversy could really be disposed of merely by finding that the grand jury was improperly selected, abstention from a constitutional adjudication would be imperative. Such would be the case if further prosecution were barred by the statute of limitations. But the Act of 1934, as we have seen, removes the bar and sanctions a reindictment, which is to be anticipated in view of the circumstances of this litigation. We cannot escape our responsibility by dealing merely with the remediable invalidity of the indictment, leaving untouched the decision of the Circuit Court of Appeals that the prosecution is valid. Of course the defendants might be acquitted at a new trial. But a court which purports to exercise supervisory authority in the interests of the administration of criminal justice ought not to permit the waste and unfairness involved in a new trial if there is no foundation for it. Especially is this a claim on the proper administration of justice in a case which has been in the courts for almost six years, and which is now starting on a new round as a result of the Court’s decision.
In short, the prosecution will continue unless we terminate it. We can terminate it only if this Court should deem beyond constitutional authority a prosecution of the charges upon which the jury found the defendants *203guilty and which the Circuit Court of Appeals sustained. We ought not to give implied sanction to the continuance of this prosecution, if we do not mean to do so, by withholding our view on an issue inescapable in the full disposition of the controversy before the Court. Candor repels it and the requirements of constitutional adjudication do not justify it.

The two cases invoked by the Court are inapposite. The circumstances in Reynolds v. United States, 98 U. S. 145, 168-69, are so different from those now before us that the Court’s action in that case can afford no support for what is here done. In affirming the conviction the Court had not noticed that the sentence imposed after trial was imprisonment at hard labor, whereas the applicable statute authorized only sentence to ordinary imprisonment. It had not been called to the Court’s attention, and it was not the kind of error that the Court would notice. But the error, which everybody had overlooked, would, if uncorrected, have subjected a defendant to punishment far more severe than any authorized by Congress. In the case before us the error, such as it may be, goes to a procedural point not bearing on the fairness of the trial, or the conviction, or the sentence. And the result of this Court’s action as to this procedural point is to vitiate the entire proceeding, not merely to remand for formal resen-tencing, as in the Reynolds case. Also, in the Reynolds case the Court noted the error when indicated to it in a petition for rehearing at the same term of Court. It had not previously been indicated to any court and evidently had not previously been noted by anyone. It did not, as here, make its way to the surface after it had been duly and vigorously urged, had been assigned as error, then dropped, buried for three years, only to be resurrected as an afterthought and a makeweight to argument on the merits. Again, in Sibbach v. Wilson & Co., 312 U. S. 1, 16, the District Court sought to punish for contempt action which was specifically exempt from such punishment. Error of a “fundamental nature” was apparently noticed and pressed by the defendants for the first time when the case came to this Court. And the Court considered the point while the case was before it, not, as here, when it reappears as tail to another issue three years after the record containing the alleged error first came before us.