Court Opinion

ID: 9419155
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:46:55.699354+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:15.728579
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Stone,
dissenting:
The court below did not pass on the question, mooted here, whether it acquired jurisdiction under the appeal provisions of the applicable section, 8 (e), of the Jurisdictional Act of February 13, 1925. Only four members of this Court are of opinion that it did. Assuming for present purposes that it had jurisdiction to decide the merits, I think its decision was right and that the judgment below should be affirmed.
We are concerned here only with the meaning and application of an act of Congress which has stood unamended on the statute books for one hundred and ten years. It gives statutory recognition to the power of the federal courts to punish summarily for contempt and provides that that power “shall not be construed to extend to any cases except the misbehavior of any person or persons in the presence of the said courts, or so near thereto as to obstruct the administration of justice.”
The issue is not whether this statute has curtailed an authority which federal courts exercised before its enactment. Concededly it has. The only question before us is whether it has so limited that authority as to preclude summary punishment of the contemptuous action of petitioner which, it is not denied, is “misbehavior” although not in the presence of the court, and which, it is admitted, seriously obstructed the administration of justice in a cause pending in the court. The question is important, for if conduct such as this record discloses may not be dealt with summarily the only recourse of a, federal court for the protection of the integrity of proceed*54ings pending before it, from acts of corruption and intimidation outside the court room, is to await the indictment of the offenders, with or without adjournment of the pending proceedings as the exigencies of the case may require.
It is not denied that the distance of the present contemptuous action from the court in miles did not lessen its injurious effect, and in that sense it was “near” enough to obstruct the administration of justice. The opinion of the Court supports its conclusion on the ground that “near” means only geographical nearness and so implicitly holds that no contempt is summarily punishable unless it is either in the presence of the court or is some kind of physical interference with or disturbance of its good order, so that the nearness to the court of the contemptuous act has an effect in obstructing justice which it would not have if it took place at a more distant point. From all this it seems to follow that the surreptitious tampering with witnesses, jurors or parties in the presence of the court, although unknown to it, would be summarily punishable because in its presence, but that if it took place outside the court room or while the witness, juror or party was on his way to attend court it would not be punishable because geographical nearness is not an element in making the contemptuous action an obstruction to justice.
These contentions assume that “so near thereto” can only refer to geographical position and they ignore the entire history of the judicial interpretation of the statute. “Near” may connote proximity in causal relationship as well as proximity in space, and under this statute, as the opinion seems to recognize, even the proximity to the court, in space, of the contemptuous action, is of significance only in its causal relationship to the obstructions to justice which result from disorder or public disturbances. This Court has hitherto, without a dissenting *55voice, regarded the phrase “so near thereto” as connoting and including those contempts which are the proximate cause of actual obstruction to the administration of justice, whether because of their physical nearness to the court or because of a chain of causation whose operation in producing the obstruction depends on other than geographical relationships to the court. See Savin, Petitioner, 131 U. S. 267; Cuddy, Petitioner, 131 U. S. 280; Toledo Newspaper Co. v. United States, 247 U. S. 402; Sinclair v. United States, 279 U. S. 749, 764, 765; Craig v. Hecht, 263 U. S. 255. Cf. McCann v. New York Stock Exchange, 80 F. 2d 211, 213. Contempts which obstruct justice because of their effect on the good order and tranquillity of the court must be in the presence of the court or geographically near enough to have that effect. Contempts which are surreptitious obstructions to justice, through tampering with witnesses, jurors and the like, must be proximately related to the condemned effect. We are pointed to no legislative history which militates against such a construction of the statute.
In the Savin, the Craig, and the Sinclair cases, as well as in the Toledo case, the contempts were of this latter kind. The contempt held summarily punishable by this Court in the Savin case, decided sixty years ago, was the attempted bribery of a witness at a place in the court house but outside the courtroom, without any disorder or disturbance of the court. The contemptuous acts in the other cases took place at points distant from the court in the city where it sat. In all, the injurious effect on the administration of justice was unrelated to the distance from the court. In holding that they were con-tempts within the summary jurisdiction of the court this Court definitely decided that “so near thereto” is not confined to a spatial application where the evil effect of the alleged contempt does not depend upon its physical nearness to the court.
*56The Savin and Sinclair cases were decided by a unanimous court. The dissenting judges in the Toledo and Craig cases, in which the acts held to be contemptuous were the publication, at a distance from the court, of comments derogatory to the judge, made no contention that the phrase imposed a geographical limitation on the power of the court. Their position was that the particular contemptuous acts charged did not in fact have the effect of obstructing justice, a contention which cannot be urged here. In the Toledo case, Justice Holmes said, page 423: “I think that ‘so. near as to obstruct’ means so near as actually to obstruct — and not merely near enough to threaten a possible obstruction.” And in the Craig case, after commenting on the fact that no cause was pending before the court, he said, p. 281: “Suppose the petitioner falsely and unjustly charged the judge with having excluded him from knowledge of the facts, how can it be pretended that the charge obstructed the administration of justice. . . .” Complete agreement with the dissents, in these- cases neither requires the- Court’s decision here nor lends it any support.
I do not understand my brethren to maintain that the secret bribery or intimidation of a witness in the court room may not be summarily punished. Cf. Savin, supra; Sinclair, supra. If so, it is only because of the effect of the contemptuous act in obstructing justice, which is precisely the same if the bribery or intimidation took place outside the court house. If it may be so punished I can hardly believe that Congress, by use of the phrase “so near thereto,” intended to lay down a different rule if the contemptuous acts took place across the corridor, the street, in another block, or -a mile away.
If the point were more doubtful than it seems to me, I should still think that we should leave undisturbed a construction of the ¡statute so long applied and not hitherto doubted in this Court. We recently declined to *57consider the contention that the Sherman Act can never apply to a labor union, because of long standing decisions of this Court to the contrary, a construction which Congress had not seen fit to change. See Apex Hosiery Co. v. Leader, 310 U. S. 469, 487, 488.
In view of our earlier decisions and of the serious consequences to the. administration of justice if courts are powerless to stop, summarily, obstructions like the present, I think the responsibility of departing from the long accepted construction of this statute should be left to the legislative branch of the Government, to which it rightfully belongs.
The Chief Justice and Mb. Justice Roberts concur in this opinion.