Court Opinion

ID: 9421041
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:56:46.189756+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:27.517896
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Black,
with whom Mr. Justice Douglas concurs, dissenting.
I would reverse this conviction because the petitioner Irvine was found guilty of a crime and sentenced to prison on evidence extorted from him by the Federal Government in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Federal law makes it a crime punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both, for a person to run a gambling business without making a report to the Government and buying a federal wagering tax stamp, both of which reveal his gambling operations.1 Petitioner made the necessary report of his gambling activities in California and bought the required tax stamp. The information he gave and the stamp he bought were used in this case to convict and sentence him to prison for violating California’s antigambling law. For reasons given in my dissent in United States v. Kahriger, 345 U. S. 22, 36, I believe the federal law that extracted the disclosures and required the tax stamp violates the Fifth Amendment’s command that a person shall not be compelled to be a witness against himself. But even though the law is valid, as the Court held, use of such forced confessions to convict the confessors still amounts to compelling a person to testify against himself in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
*140I cannot agree that the Amendment’s guarantee against self-incrimination testimony can be spirited away by the ingenious contrivance of using federally extorted confessions to convict of state crimes and vice versa.2 Licensing such easy evasion of the Amendment has proven a heavy drain on its vitality although no such debilitating interpretation was given the Amendment by this Court until it decided United States v. Murdock in 1931, one hundred and forty years after the Bill of Rights was adopted.3 That construction was rested on the premise that a state and the United States are so separate and foreign to one another that neither of them need protect witnesses against being forced to admit offenses against the laws of the other.4 This treatment of the states and the Federal Government as though they were entirely foreign to each other is wholly eonceptualistic and cannot justify such a narrow interpretation of the Fifth Amendment’s language and the resulting frustration of its purpose.
1 think the Fifth Amendment of itself forbids all federal agents, legislative, executive and judicial, to force a person to confess a crime; forbids the use of such a federally coerced confession in any court, state or federal; and forbids all federal courts to use a confession which a person has been compelled to make against his will.
*141The Fifth Amendment forbids the Federal Government and the agents through which it acts — courts, grand juries, prosecutors, marshals or other officers — to use physical torture, psychological pressure, threats of fines, imprisonment or prosecution, or other governmental pressure to force a person to testify against himself. And if the Federal Government does extract incriminating testimony, as the Court has held it may in compelling gamblers to confess, the immunity provided by the Amendment should at the very least prevent the use of such testimony in any court, federal or state.5 The use of such testimony is barred, even though the Fifth Amendment may not of itself prohibit the states or their agents from extorting incriminating testimony.6 The Amendment does plainly prohibit all federal agencies from using their power to force self-incriminatory statements. Consequently, since the Amendment is the supreme law of the land and is binding on all American judges, the use of federally coerced testimony to convict a person of crime in any court, state or federal, is forbidden.
The Fifth Amendment not only forbids agents of the Federal Government to compel a person to be a witness against himself; it forbids federal courts to convict persons on their own forced testimony, whatever “sovereign” — federal or state — may have compelled it. Otherwise, the constitutional mandate against self-incrimination is an illusory safeguard that collapses whenever a confession is extorted by anyone other than the Federal Government.
Though not essential to disposition of this case, it seems appropriate to add that I think the Fourteenth Amendment makes the Fifth Amendment applicable to states *142and that state courts like federal courts are therefore barred from convicting a person for crime on testimony which either state or federal officers have compelled him to give against himself.7 The construction I give to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments makes it possible for me to adhere to what we said in Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U. S. 143, 155, that “The Constitution of the United States stands as a bar against the conviction of any individual in an American court by means of a coerced confession.”
So far as this case is concerned it is enough for me that Irvine was convicted in a state court on a confession coerced by the Federal Government. I believe this frustrates a basic purpose of the Fifth Amendment — to free Americans from fear that federal power could be used to compel them to confess conduct or beliefs in order to take away their life, liberty or property. For this reason I would reverse Irvine’s conviction.
It has been suggested that the Court should call on the Attorney General to investigate this record in order to start criminal prosecutions against certain California officers. I would strongly object to any such action by this Court. It is inconsistent with my own view of the judicial function in our government. Prosecution, or anything approaching it, should, I think, be left to government officers whose duty that is.

 65 Stat. 529, 26 U. S. C. (Supp. V) §§ 3285, 3287.

 See my dissent in Feldman v. United States, 322 U. S. 487, 494.

 284 U. S. 141, and see United States v. The Saline Bank of Virginia, 1 Pet. 100; Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591, 606, 608; Ballmann v. Fagin, 200 U. S. 186; Vajtauer v. Commissioner of Immigration, 273 U. S. 103; United States v. Murdock, 290 U. S. 389, 396.

 Reliance for this view was placed mainly on two English cases, King of the Two Sicilies v. Willcox, 7 State Trials (N. S.) 1049, and Queen v. Boyes, 1 B. & S. 311. 284 U. S., at 149. See discussion of these two cases as related to the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination in Grant, Immunity from Compulsory Self-Incrimination, 9 Temp. L. Q. 57-70 and 194-212, particularly 59-62 and 196-204.

 Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U. S. 547.

 See Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Pet. 243.

 Adamson v. California, 332 U. S. 46, 68 (dissenting opinion); Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165, 174 (concurring opinion).