Court Opinion

ID: 9419638
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:50:42.926776+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:19.685605
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Murpht,
dissenting.
I dissent. Robert Hall, a Negro citizen, has been deprived not only of the right to be tried by a court rather than by ordeal. He has been deprived of the right to life itself. That right belonged to him not because he was a Negro or a member of any particular race or creed. That right was his because he was an American citizen, because *135he was a human being. As such, he was entitled to all the respect and fair treatment that befits the dignity of man, a dignity that is recognized and guaranteed by the Constitution. Yet not even the semblance of due process has been accorded him. He has been cruelly and unjustifiably beaten to death by local police officers acting under color of authority derived from the state. It is difficult to believe that such an obvious and necessary right is indefinitely guaranteed by the Constitution or is foreign to the knowledge of local police officers so as to cast any reasonable doubt on the conviction under § 20 of the Criminal Code of the perpetrators of this “shocking and revolting episode in law enforcement.”
The Constitution and § 20 must be read together inasmuch as § 20 refers in part to certain provisions of the Constitution. Section 20 punishes anyone, acting under color of any law, who willfully deprives any person of any right, privilege or immunity secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. The pertinent part of the Constitution in this instance is § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which firmly and unmistakably provides that no state shall deprive any person of life without due process of law. Translated in light of this specific provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, § 20 thus punishes anyone, acting under color of state law, who willfully deprives any person of life without due process of law. Such is the clear statutory provision upon which this conviction must stand or fall.
A grave constitutional issue, however, is said to lurk in the alleged indefiniteness of the crime outlawed by § 20. The rights, privileges and immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States are claimed to be so uncertain and flexible, dependent upon changeable legal concepts, as to leave a state official confused and ignorant as to what actions of his might run afoul of the law. The statute, it is concluded, must be set aside for vagueness.
*136It is axiomatic, of course, that a criminal statute must give a clear and unmistakable warning as to the acts which will subject one to criminal punishment. And courts are without power to supply that which Congress has left vague. But this salutary principle does not mean that if a statute is vague as to certain criminal acts but definite as to others the entire statute must fall. Nor does it mean that in the first case involving the statute to come before us we must delineate all the prohibited acts that are obscure and all those that are explicit.
Thus it is idle to speculate on other situations that might involve § 20 which are not now before us. We are unconcerned here with state officials who have coerced a confession from a prisoner, denied counsel to a defendant or made a faulty tax assessment. Whatever doubt may exist in those or in other situations as to whether the state officials could reasonably anticipate and recognize the relevant constitutional rights is immaterial in this case. Our attention here is directed solely to three state officials who, in the course of their official duties, have unjustifiably beaten and crushed the body of a human being, thereby depriving him of trial by jury and of life itself. The only pertinent inquiry is whether § 20, by its reference to the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that no state shall deprive any person of life without due process of law, gives fair warning to state officials that they are criminally liable for violating this right to life.
Common sense gives an affirmative answer to that problem. The reference in § 20 to rights protected by the Constitution is manifest and simple. At the same time, the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law is distinctly and lucidly protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. There is nothing vague or indefinite in these references to this most basic of all human rights. Knowledge of a comprehensive law library is unnecessary for officers of the law to know that the right to murder *137individuals in the course of their duties is unrecognized in this nation. No appreciable amount of intelligence or conjecture on the part of the lowliest state official is needed for him to realize that fact; nor should it surprise him to find out that the Constitution protects persons from his reckless disregard of human life and that statutes punish him therefor. To subject a state official to punishment under § 20 for such acts is not to penalize him without fair and definite warning. Rather it is to uphold elementary standards of decency and to make American principles of law and our constitutional guarantees mean something more than pious rhetoric.
Under these circumstances it is unnecessary to send this case back for a further trial on the assumption that the jury was not charged on the matter of the willfulness of the state officials, an issue that was not raised below or before us. The evidence is more than convincing that the officials willfully, or at least with wanton disregard of the consequences, deprived Robert Hall of his life without due process of law. A new trial could hardly make that fact more evident; the failure to charge the jury on willfulness was at most an inconsequential error. Moreover, the presence or absence of willfulness fails to decide the constitutional issue raised before us. Section 20 is very definite and certain in its reference to the right to life as spelled out in the Fourteenth Amendment quite apart from the state of mind of the state officials. A finding of willfulness can add nothing to the clarity of that reference.
It is an illusion to say that the real issue in this case is the alleged failure of § 20 fully to warn the state officials that their actions were illegal. The Constitution, § 20 and their own consciences told them that. They knew that they lacked any mandate or authority to take human life unnecessarily or without due process of law in the course of their duties. They knew that their excessive and abusive *138use of authority would only subvert the ends of justice. The significant question, rather, is whether law enforcement officers and those entrusted with authority shall be allowed to violate with impunity the clear constitutional rights of the inarticulate and the friendless. Too often unpopular minorities, such as Negroes, are unable to find effective refuge from the cruelties of bigoted and ruthless authority. States are undoubtedly capable of punishing their officers who commit such outrages. But where, as here, the states are unwilling for some reason to prosecute such crimes the federal government must step in unless constitutional guarantees are to become atrophied.
This necessary intervention, however, will be futile if courts disregard reality and misuse the principle that criminal statutes must be clear and definite. Here state officers have violated with reckless abandon a plain constitutional right of an American citizen. The two courts below have found and the record demonstrates that the trial was fair and the evidence of guilt clear. And § 20 unmistakably outlaws such actions by state officers. We should therefore affirm the judgment.