Court Opinion

ID: 9691957
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 15:32:54.098257+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:29.104964
License: Public Domain

*557Brady, J.,
specially concurring:
I concur in the opinion of my colleagues, and suggest these additional reasons why the verdict and sentence of the trial court should be affirmed.
An objective, factual analysis of the circumstances which existed at the time appellant was arrested clearly and unequivocally distinguishes this case from the cases relied upon by appellant in support of his contention that his arrest was illegal, and violated his constitutional rights of speech, assembly, non-segregated travel in interstate commerce, and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The cases cited in the majority opinion are Garner v. Louisiana, where two Negro students took seats at a lunch counter in a drugstore; Briscoe v. Louisiana, where seven students sought service in the restaurant portion of a Greyhound Bus Terminal; Hoston v. Louisiana, where seven Negro students took seats at a lunch counter in a variety store; and Taylor v. Louisiana, where four Negroes went into the white waiting room of a bus depot leaving two companions outside sitting in the car which had brought all six to the station.
The records prove that in all of the four cases cited above the petitioners did absolutely nothing but seat themselves and ask to be served. There is no trail of turmoil and violence following the petitioners along their routs to their destinations. No national racial organizations were financing and master-minding their courses of action as in the case at bar. No National Guardsmen accompanied the other petitioners, in a bus, in order that safe travel might be afforded them, as was the case here. In these four cases and all others cited by appellant there were no anticipated, large-scale, exacerbated conflicts, no deliberate mass generation of strife and turmoil, no sectional campaign strategy involving several sovereign states with premeditated interstate movements synchronized and methodically executed *558step by step, which, when interrupted by mob violence, required a retreat and reforming of plans and procedures and a recoaching and retntoring of the participants — all of which is shown to exist in the case at bar.
In the four above cited cases, and in all the other cases cited by appellant, we find the foregoing evidentiary facts wanting. In addition thereto, in the cases relied upon by appellant there was not, as is in the case at bar, a nationwide, hourly publicity program carried on through the media of television and radio hook-ups, which on the hour or half-hour interrupted all programs to propagandize and publicize the misnamed “Freedom Riders” sorties. In the cases cited by appellant there were no fourteen hundred National Guardsmen called into service to prevent mob violence, — or seventy-five policemen who had to be detailed to the bus stations to isolate the same by a cordon from contact with any persons save those properly using the terminal.
The Attorney General’s Office and the Justice Department played no part in the four and other cases, but in the case at bar a vital role was played and Department of Justice officers accompanied the riders. In the four and other cases cited by appellant there was little or no concern or excitement, while in the case at bar, because of the publicity, propaganda, trail of violence aforesaid, excitement and feeling had risen to a fever pitch so that when the buses arrived carrying appellant (and his fourteen confederates), all appellant had to do was to demurely enter the bus station like a marionette with his fourteen confederates. The stage of violence had already been set.
The perfectly executed, premeditated scheme of appellant, his associates, and affiliates, in which he played a leading role, had already created by the aforesaid propaganda a highly volatile and explosive condition at the bus station in Jackson, Mississippi, and the slightest incident would have triggered the potential violence which would have generated into a bloody riot.
*559The evidentiary support essential to justify the arrest of the appellant was present. The order of the policeman to move on was justified, not because of any subjective conclusion in his mind, but by the objection realization that a violent breach of the peace was imminent.
The case of Edwards v. South Carolina can afford but little benefit to appellant for the reason that although there were one hundred and eighty-seven Negroes who had left their church and had walked single file or two abreast around the Capitol grounds in an orderly manner carrying placards protesting discriminatory action against Negroes, the case is completely devoid of any of the premeditation, propaganda, exciting of public feeling, acts of violence, and impending bloodshed as was present in this case. In Edwards the police acted after thirty or forty minutes of continuous parading because a curious crowd of some two or three hundred persons had collected on the streets to watch the picketing. The officers subjectively decided that the marching would have to stop and the marchers disperse within fifteen minutes or be arrested. The marchers did not desist and were arrested. There was absolutely no impending violence shown at the time of the arrest, but only the possibility that it might arise. The distinction between Edwards and this case is too obvious to merit further consideration.
The transcendent issue presented here is: Can a nonresident citizen, in a deliberate effort to prove a statute of a state unconstitutional, while traveling in interstate commerce, violate with impunity that statute and other statutes regulating the maintenance of peace, order and tranquility within that State, and thus supersede or nullify the State’s right to regulate and control its internal domestic affairs?
It is a corollary of durable judicial administration that the judiciary must guard and protect the respec*560tive limited powers of the separate branches of our State and Federal governments, of which it is a part, and not be an instrument for, or participate in, any procedure or function which is deliberately calculated to alter or destroy by judicial decree or fiat the very foundations upon which that representative government reposes, and which likewise insures the continued lawful and wise operation of that judiciary. It is inherent in self-government that a State shall possess the essential police powers and the right to exercise the same in the maintenance of peace and order and in regulating and conducting its domestic affairs. Mass demonstrations, or threats thereof, intimidations, altercations and violence, or conduct calculated to incite and produce the same, are the antithesis of self-government under the law geared to the maintenance of peaceful and orderly existence.
These strife-fomenting junkets, planned by individuals and groups erroneously called “freedom riders,” and poorly disguised as an exercise of constitutional guarantees, are the harbingers of government operation, not under law but under groups of men or committees, the highest expression of which is represented by the Communist order, throughout the world.
The collective rights of the citizens to enjoy peace and order and be protected from breaches thereof are synonomous with the State’s duty and right to maintain peace, order and tranquility in its domestic affairs. There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States or amendments thereto, and particularly the fourteenth amendment, which gives preference to the individual rights of the citizens of the various States over their collective rights as citizens thereof. As yet the rights of the individual citizen of this country are not absolute and must yield to the rights of the majority of citizens.
If there be a paramount right essential to the maintenance of orderly and peaceful self-government in the *561various states, it must be the right of the State to see that its citizens are safe in their persons and in their property from nationwide mass demonstrations, intimidations, breaches of the peace and from disorderly conduct deliberately planned and calculated to cause breaches of the peace and actual violence. The degree to which this collective right of the citizens is successfully protected by the States and subdivisions thereof varies directly with their respective authority and power to maintain peaceful and orderly conduct among all citizens ■ — • the primary objective of self-government.
In order that the sacred individual rights of the citizens may not be impaired and may endure, it is imperative that the various states be permitted to perform their inherent, common-law duties and prerogatives of maintaining peace and order among their citizens in all their varied personal contacts and associations. The failure, refusal, or prohibition of performance of this high duty of maintaining peace, tranquility, law and order on the part of the States or the political subdivisions thereof is a positive, certain and swift way to destroy completely all local and State governments which compose this nation, and thus create uncontrollable, endless turmoil and violence and its inescapable ultimate — a ruthless, totalitarian or monolithic State where the rights of the regimented individual count for naught.
Today when whirlwinds of strife, rebellion and revolution are shaking the foundations of most of the civilized nations of the world, because of the inability, or a complete failure on the part of those nations and subdivisions thereof to maintain peaceful and orderly conduct in the usual and customary life of its citizens, we solemnly assert that the premeditated plans of a group of nonresident citizens, regardless of their social beliefs, political power or philosophy, economic or ethnic status to create strife and violence in order to test the constitutionality of State laws or city ordinances, can*562not thereby vitiate or destroy the sacred, nondelegable, inexorable duty which a city or State owes to all its citizens to maintain peace and order. We hold this to be true even though the group of nonresident citizens assert the subtle subterfuge that they are merely exercising their constitutional rights of freedom of speech, assembly, and uninhibited passage in interstate commerce in justification of their premeditated and well executed conspiratory scheme.
A State which cannot, or will not, protect the safety of all citizens and their property rights, which cannot, or will not, exercise its inherent common-law police powers reserved and guaranteed to it, to regulate its internal domestic affairs in such a situation as is presented here, has already lost its attributes and characteristics as a sovereign state. It is, in fact, no longer a State but some type of unautonomous association which exists merely because of the sufferance of an all-powerful entity which tolerates its existence.
With proper deference to all concerned, regardless of constitutional subterfuge, legal sophistry, or judicial legerdemain, the communal, sinister and divisive plots to create antagonisms, to breed hatred, and produce violence and bloodshed in this State among peoples of different racial origin who have lived together harmoniously for almost 200 years shall not become stark realities through failure of this Court to recognize the inviolate constitutional rights of the citizens of this and other states to lawfully maintain peace, order and tranquility in their domestic affairs by punishing those persons who deliberately flaunt and violate their laws governing the same, and who simultaneously demand constitutional immunity to do so.
For these additional reasons, in my opinion, the judgment of the trial court is affirmed.
McElroy and Rodgers, JJ., join in this opinion.
*563ON MOTION FOE ENTEY OF JUDGMENT
Eodgers, J.:
Each of the following appellants appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States from a judgment of this Court in the respective causes, wherein this Court affirmed judgments of the County and Circuit-Courts of the First Judicial District of Hinds County, Mississippi, in which each respective appellant was convicted of a breach of the peace.
The judgment of this Court has been reversed by the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States in each of the causes, and the mandate of that Court has been filed with this Court, wherein each of the respective appellants has been allowed costs of appeal in the sum of $100.00.
Now, therefore, in obedience to the mandate of the United States Supreme Court, each of the following-named defendants is discharged, and his appearance bond released:
Henry J. Thomas v. State of Mississippi No. 42,987
James L. Farmer v. State of Mississippi No. 42.983
John Lee Copeland v. State of Mississippi No. 42.722
Ernest Patton, Jr. v. State of Mississippi No. 42,956
Grady H. Donald v. State of Mississippi No. 42,951
Peter M. Ackerberg v. State of Mississippi No. 42.984
James Luther Bevel v. State of Mississippi No. 42,960
Charles David Myers v. State of Mississippi No. 42,968
Carolyn Yvonne Seed v. State of Mississippi No. 43.031
John J. McDonald v. State of Mississippi No. 42,970
Eaymond B. Eandolph, Jr. v. State of Mississippi No. 43.032
Alexander M. Anderson v. State of Mississippi No. 42.985
William E. Harbour v. State of Mississippi No. 42,963
Zev Aelony v. State of Mississippi No. 42,980
Marion Allen Davido v. State of Mississippi No. 42.723
*564No. Claire O’Conner v. State of Mississippi 42,982
No. David Kerr Morton v. State of Mississippi 42,973
No. Katherine A. Plenne v. State of Mississippi 42,957
No. Robert Earl Filner v. State of Mississippi 42,978
No. Sanda M. Nixon v. State of Mississippi 42,966
Terry Susan Perlman v. State of Mississippi No. 42,961
Lestra Aleñe Peterson v. State of Mississippi No. 43,034
Thomas Van Roland v. State of Mississippi No. 43,029
Joan Frances Pleune v. State of Mississippi No. 43,036
Grant Harlan Muse, Jr. v. State of Mississippi No. 42,975
Pauline Edythe Knight v. State of Mississippi No. 42,958
Edward J. Bromberg v. State of Mississippi No. 42,967
Lester G. McKinnie v. State of Mississippi No. 42,971
Elizabeth S. Adler v. State of Mississippi No. 42,999
Reversed, defendants discharged with their able costs. reason-
All Justices concur.