Court Opinion

ID: 9426097
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:16:49.91239+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:59.092642
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stewart,
with whom Mr. Justice Marshall and Mr. Justice Powell join, dissenting.
Although agreeing with much of what is said in the Court’s opinion, I dissent from the opinion and judgment, because the jury instructions in this case were not consistent with the law as the Court today expounds it.
As I understand the Court’s opinion, it holds that in order to sustain a conviction under § 301 (k) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act the prosecution must at least show that by reason of an individual’s corporate position and responsibilities, he had a duty to use care to maintain the physical integrity of the corporation’s food products. A jury may then draw the inference that when the food is found to be in such condition as to violate the statute’s prohibitions, that condition was “caused” by a breach of the standard of care imposed upon the *679responsible official. This is the language of negligence, and I agree with it.
To affirm this conviction, however, the Court must approve the instructions given to the members of the jury who were entrusted with determining whether the respondent was innocent or guilty. Those instructions did not conform to the standards that the Court itself sets out today.
The trial judge instructed the jury to find Park guilty if it found beyond a reasonable doubt that Park “had a responsible relation to the situation .... The issue is, in this case, whether the Defendant, John R. Park, by virtue of his position in the company, had a position of authority and responsibility in the situation out of which these charges arose.” Requiring, as it did, a verdict of guilty upon a finding of “responsibility,” this instruction standing alone could have been construed as a direction to convict if the jury found Park “responsible” for the condition in the sense that his position as chief executive officer gave him formal responsibility within the structure of the corporation. But the trial judge went on specifically to caution the jury not to attach such a meaning to his instruction, saying that “the fact that the Defendant is pres[id]ent and is a chief executive officer of the Acme Markets does not require a finding of guilt.” “Responsibility” as used by the trial judge therefore had whatever meaning the jury in its unguided discretion chose to give it.
The instructions, therefore, expressed nothing more than a tautology. They told the jury: “You must find the defendant guilty if you find that he is to be held accountable for this adulterated food.” In other words: “You must find the defendant guilty if you conclude that he is guilty.” The trial judge recognized the infirmities in these instructions, but he reluctantly con-*680eluded that he was required to give such a charge under United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U. S. 277, which, he thought, in declining to define “responsible relation” had declined to specify the minimum standard of liability for criminal guilt.1
As the Court today recognizes, the Dotterweich case did not deal with what kind of conduct must be proved to support a finding of criminal guilt under the Act. Dotterweich was concerned, rather, with the statutory definition of “person” — with what kind of corporate employees were even “subject to the criminal provisions of the Act.” Ante, at 670. The Court held that those employees with “a responsible relation” to the violative transaction or condition were subject to the Act’s criminal provisions, but all that the Court had to say with respect to the kind of conduct that can constitute criminal guilt was that the Act “dispenses with the conventional requirement for criminal conduct — awareness of some wrongdoing.” 320 U. S., at 281.
In approving the instructions to the jury in this case-instructions based upon what the Court concedes was a misunderstanding of Dotterweich — the Court approves a conspicuous departure from the long and firmly established division of functions between judge and jury in the administration of criminal justice. As the Court put the matter more than 80 years ago:
“We must hold firmly to the doctrine that in the courts of the United States it is the duty of juries *681in criminal cases to take the law from the court and apply that law to the facts as they find them to be from the evidence. Upon the court rests the responsibility of declaring the law; upon the jury, the responsibility of applying the law so declared to the facts as they, upon their conscience, believe them to be. Under any other system, the courts, although established in order to declare the law, would for every practical purpose be eliminated from our system of government as instrumentalities devised for the protection equally of society and of individuals in their essential rights. When that occurs our government will cease to be a government of laws, and become a government of men. Liberty regulated by law is the underlying principle of our institutions.” Sparf v. United States, 156 U. S. 51, 102-103.
More recently the Court declared unconstitutional a procedure whereby a jury, having acquitted a defendant of a misdemeanor, was instructed to impose upon him such costs of the prosecution as it deemed appropriate to his degree of “responsibility.” Giaccio v. Pennsylvania, 382 U. S. 399. The state statute under which the procedure was authorized was invalidated because it left “to the jury such broad and unlimited power in imposing costs on acquitted defendants that the jurors must make determinations of the crucial issue upon their own notions of what the law should be instead of what it is.” Id., at 403. And in Jackson v. Denno, 378 U. S. 368, the Court found unconstitutional a procedure whereby a jury was permitted to decide the question of the voluntariness of a confession along with the question of guilt, in part because that procedure permitted the submergence of a question of law, as to which appellate review was constitutionally required, in the general deliberations of a jury.
*682These cases no more than embody a principle fundamental to our jurisprudence: that a jury is to decide the facts and apply to them the law as explained by the trial judge. Were it otherwise, trial by jury would be no more rational and no more responsive to the accumulated wisdom of the law than trial by ordeal. It is the function of jury instructions, in short, to establish in any trial the objective standards that a jury is to apply as it performs its own function of finding the facts.
To be sure, “the day [is] long past when [courts] . . . parsed instructions and engaged in nice semantic distinctions,” Cool v. United States, 409 U. S. 100, 107 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting). But this Court has never before abandoned the view that jury instructions must contain a statement of the applicable law sufficiently precise to enable the jury to be guided by something other than its rough notions of social justice. And while it might be argued that the issue before the jury in this case was a “mixed” question of both law and fact, this has never meant that a jury is to be left wholly at sea, without any guidance as to the standard of conduct the law requires. The instructions given by the trial court in this case, it must be emphasized, were a virtual nullity, a mere authorization to convict if the jury thought it appropriate. Such instructions — regardless of the blameworthiness of the defendant’s conduct, regardless of the social value of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and regardless of the importance of convicting those who violate it — have no place in our jurisprudence.
We deal here with a criminal conviction, not a civil forfeiture. It is true that the crime was but a misdemeanor and the penalty in this case light. But under the statute even a first conviction can result in imprisonment for a year, and a subsequent offense is a felony *683carrying a punishment of up to three years in prison.2 So the standardless conviction approved today can serve in another case tomorrow to support a felony conviction and a substantial prison sentence. However highly the Court may regard the social objectives of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, that regard cannot serve to justify a criminal conviction so wholly alien to fundamental principles of our law.
The Dotterweich case stands for two propositions, and I accept them both. First, “any person” within the meaning of 21 U. S. C. § 333 may include any corporate officer or employee “standing in responsible relation” to a condition or transaction forbidden by the Act. 320 TJ. S., at 281. Second, a person may be convicted of a criminal offense under the Act even in the absence of “the conventional requirement for criminal conduct— awareness of some wrongdoing.” Ibid.
But before a person can be convicted of a criminal violation of this Act, a jury must find — and must be clearly instructed that it must find — evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that he engaged in wrongful conduct amounting at least to common-law negligence. There were no such instructions, and clearly, therefore, no such finding in this case.3
For these reasons, I cannot join the Court in affirming Park’s criminal conviction.

 In response to a request for further illumination of what he meant by “responsible relationship” the District Judge said:
“Let me say this, simply as to the definition of the ‘responsible relationship.’ Dotterweich and subsequent cases have indicated this really is a jury question. It says it is not even subject to being defined by the Court. As I have indicated to counsel, I am quite candid in stating that I do not agree with the decision; therefore, T am going to stick by it.”

 See ante, at 666 n. 10.

 This is not to say that Park might not be found guilty by a properly instructed jury in a new trial. But that, of course, is not the point. “Had the jury convicted on proper instructions it would be the end of the matter. But juries are not bound by what seems inescapable logic to judges.” Morissette v. United States, 342 U. S. 246, 276.