Court Opinion

ID: 9454494
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:48:02.882669+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:08.390886
License: Public Domain

McGOWAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
At the trial in the District Court, the Government put in evidence from which, in my view, a jury would be warranted in finding that (1) the practice of the asserted religion of Scientology involved the use of a mechanical device in association with certain publications which represented the device to have utility in the prevention, relief, or cure of physical illnesses such as cancer, and (2) the device in fact had no such capacity. The majority, as I understand it, holds that, because the Government did not go further and prove that Scientology was not a bona fide religion, the First Amendments, as interpreted in United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78, 64 S.Ct. 882, 88 L.Ed. 1148 (1944), bars any judicial inquiry whatsoever into whether the device had the healing powers claimed for it. Absent such a determination, the *1163majority logically concludes that a judgment tha't the device is misbranded can not be upheld.
This proceeding did not involve an inquisition into the validity of any personal religious beliefs, or the infliction of a punishment upon any person for holding or disseminating such beliefs. It was a proceeding against property under a Congressional statute aimed at protecting the unsophisticated against not only wasting their money but, more importantly, endangering their lives by relying upon misbranded machines. There is, as the majority points out, a well-recognized distinction between the good faith holding of a religious belief, however bizarre, and unlimited freedom to implement that belief by conduct. I do not believe that the Government was required, at least in a statutory in rem proceeding of the kind here involved, to show that, over and above the misbranding of the device, the religious pretensions of its sponsors were fraudulent.
I respect the difficulties my colleagues have with the Ballard case, but I do not think it compels the result they reach. That was a criminal prosecution for mail fraud of an individual who proclaimed as a religion the fact that he was a “divine messenger” endowed by the appointment of “St. Germain” with the power to cure all diseases. The ease, at least in its then posture, did not involve a practice of giving healing treatments for hire, much less the sale and use of devices like the meters with which we are concerned here. To the extent that there are expressions in Ballard that may conceivably point in the direction the majority goes, I would limit them to the peculiar facts of that ease, which, to repeat, .did not involve the use of misbranded devices and did result in criminal proceedings against the persons there involved.
I am not, however, satisfied that the Government officials did not sweep too broadly in this seizure. The meters are vulnerable to seizure only if they are misbranded, and the misbranding here must be found in separate, but associated, pieces of literature. The record before us is such as to support a finding that certain items of the Scientology literature did contain healing claims (i. e, “Cancer has been eradicated by auditing out conception and mitosis”); and that the association of these claims with the meter is sufficiently close as to justify the latter’s seizure. But this relationship in the case of one or more books or pamphlets would not necessarily mean that all the Scientology literature is subject to confiscation. Every aspect of the practice or preaching of a religion cannot be interfered with simply because one phase of it is exposed to legal action.
The District Court was at some pains to identify those items of literature which effected misbranding of the meters, and those which did not. It is not clear to me that this separation was uniformly successful in differentiating affirmations of faith, on the one hand, from representations as to the curative capacities of the meters, on the other. Indeed, it may be that, absent a special showing of need beyond that for evidentiary use, the Congressional purposes are exhausted by a seizure and permanent retention of the devices alone. Certainly, as a practical matter, the objectives of the statute would normally be realized thereby, and difficult problems of religion and speech, inherent in the wholesale seizure of printed matter, avoided.