Court Opinion

ID: 9425835
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:15:56.521719+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:57.845914
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
with whom The Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Stewart, and Mr. Justice Rehnquist join,
dissenting.
In Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U. S. 194 (1968), this Court established a constitutional right to a jury trial of a charge for a criminal contempt where the penalty imposed exceeded six months. There the contempt consisted of a lawyer’s filing a spurious will for probate. It was not a direct contempt in open court. Where, as in Bloom, the criminal contempt takes place outside the presence of the court, there is little to distinguish the contempt, for purposes of using a jury as the factfinder, from the run-of-the-mill criminal offense. In this respect, the result in Bloom was a logical one.
In the present case, however, the contempt took place in open court and the incident and all its details are fully preserved on the trial record. The Court’s opinion does not specify and leaves unclear what facts, if any, remain to be determined. I am at a loss, therefore, to see the role a jury is to perform. The perceived need to remove *523the case from the contemned judge is fully served by assigning the case to a different judge. See Taylor v. Hayes, ante, p. 488; Mayberry v. Pennsylvania, 400 U. S. 455 (1971). And, as Mr. Justice Rehnquist points out, since the new judge, not the jury, will impose the sentence, there is nothing the jury can do by way of mitigating an excessive punishment.
The determination of whether basically undisputed facts constitute a direct criminal contempt is a particularly inappropriate task for the jury. Before today, this determination has always been the exclusive province of the court, not the jury, and never before has this Court required a jury trial in a case involving a direct contempt.* Since I believe, as a practical matter, that there is no function for a jury to serve in a case such as this, I do not join the Court’s extension of Bloom to include direct, in-court contempts. I, therefore, respectfully dissent.

In Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U. S. 194, 210 (1968), the Court acknowledged “a strong temptation to make exception to the rule we establish today for disorders in the courtroom.” Although wholly unnecessary to its decision, the Court there resisted that temptation and declined to recognize the exception. In my opinion, the result in Bloom, an out-of-court contempt, does not lead inevitably to the result reached today in Codispoti’s case, and I decline to follow Bloom’s dictum that carries the contrary implication.