Court Opinion

ID: 9425836
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:15:56.525801+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:57.852934
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice joins as to Part II,
dissenting.†
These two cases are graphic illustrations of the manner in which constitutional limitations on the power of a trial judge to summarily punish for contempt have been fashioned virtually out of whole cloth by this Court in *524the course of only 20-odd years. In Sacher v. United States, 343 U. S. 1 (1952), the Court, speaking through Mr. Justice Jackson, said:
“Summary punishment always, and rightly, is regarded with disfavor and, if imposed in passion or pettiness, brings discredit to a court as certainly as the conduct it penalizes. But the very practical reasons which have led every system of law to vest a contempt power in one who presides over judicial proceedings also are the reasons which account for it being made summary. . . . The rights and immunities of accused persons would be exposed to serious and obvious abuse if the trial bench did not possess and frequently exert power to curb prejudicial and excessive zeal of prosecutors. The interests of society in the preservation of courtroom control by the judges are no more to be frustrated through unchecked improprieties by defenders.” Id., at 8.
The Court’s decisions today are the culmination of a recent trend of constitutional innovation which virtually emasculates this historic power of a trial judge. If the Court’s holdings in this area were the product of any new historical insight into the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, or if indeed they could be regarded as a desirable progression toward a reign of light and law, even though of dubious constitutional ancestry, there would be less occasion for concern. But from the hodgepodge of legal doctrine embodied in these decisions, which have irretrievably blended together constitutional guarantees of jury trial in criminal cases, constitutional guarantees of impartial judges, and fragments of the law of contempt in federal courts, the only consistent thread which emerges is this Court’s inveterate propensity to second-guess the trial judge.
*525I
In Taylor v. Hayes, ante, p. 488, the Court holds, squarely contrary to the holding in Sacher, supra, that the respondent trial judge was not entitled to proceed summarily against petitioner, even though all of the conduct in question occurred in the presence of respondent. The Court apparently concludes that since respondent did not sentence petitioner until after the proceedings at issue were completed, and at that point refused to permit petitioner to respond, petitioner’s due process rights were violated.
This conclusion is completely at odds with Sacher. That case involved the contempt convictions of various defense counsel as an aftermath of the trial of various Communist Party leaders on charges of violating the Smith Act. Upon receiving the guilty verdict, Judge Medina of the Southern District of New York at once filed a certificate under Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 42 (a), finding various defense counsel, including one defendant who had represented himself, guilty of contempt. Federal Rule Crim. Proc. 42 (a) provided then, as it does now, that “[a] criminal contempt may be punished summarily if the judge certifies that he saw or heard the conduct constituting the contempt and that it was committed in the actual presence of the court. The order of contempt shall recite the facts and shall be signed by the judge and entered of record.” The contemnors argued that since Judge Medina had waited until the end of the trial to sentence them, the power of summary punishment for direct contempts under Rule 42 (a) had expired, and the provisions of Rule 42 (b) requiring notice and hearing became applicable. This Court in Sacher rejected that contention:
“The Rule in question contemplates that occasions may arise when the trial judge must immediately *526arrest any conduct of such nature that its continuance would break up a trial, so it gives him power to do so summarily. But the petitioners here contend that the Rule not only permits but requires its instant exercise, so that once the emergency has been survived punishment may no longer be summary but can only be administered by the alternative method allowed by Rule 42 (b). We think 'summary' as used in this Rule does not refer to the timing of the action with reference to the offense but refers to a procedure which dispenses with the formality, delay and digression that would result from the issuance of process, service of complaint and answer, holding hearings, taking evidence, listening to arguments, awaiting briefs, submission of findings, and all that goes with a conventional court trial. The purpose of that procedure is to inform the court of events not within its own knowledge. The Rule allows summary procedure only as to offenses within the knowledge of the judge because they occurred in his presence.
“. . . To summon a lawyer before the bench and pronounce him guilty of contempt is not unlikely to prejudice his client. It might be done out of the presence of the jury, but we have held that a contempt judgment must be public. Only the naive and inexperienced would assume that news of such action will not reach the jurors. If the court were required also then to pronounce sentence, a construction quite as consistent with the text of the Rule as petitioners’ present contention, it would add t© the prejudice. . . .” 343 U. S., at 9-10.
At no point did the Court in Sacher suggest that the procedures set forth in Rule 42 (a) were subject to any constitutional infirmity. Yet by the decision in Taylor *527v. Hayes, the Court has now held that procedures upheld within the unitary confines of the federal court system only two decades ago may not now be constitutionally employed by a State. The decision in Taylor will surely come as something of a shock to federal judges who must now decide whether they may constitutionally utilize the provisions of Fed. Eule Crim. Proc. 42 (a) in punishing direct contempts.
Our prior decisions have continuously adhered to the view that “[wjhere the contempt is committed directly under the eye or within the view of the court, it may proceed 'upon its own knowledge of the facts, and punish the offender, without further proof, and without issue or trial in any form.’ ” In re Savin, 131 U. S. 267, 277 (1889), quoting Ex parte Terry, 128 U. S. 289, 309 (1888). See Cooke v. United States, 267 U. S. 517, 535 (1925); Fisher v. Pace, 336 U. S. 155, 159-160 (1949).1 It is only when the contempt is not a direct one, i. e., observed *528by the judge himself, that the power to proceed summarily becomes subject to some qualification. In re Oliver, 333 U. S. 257, 274-276 (1948).
Groppi v. Leslie, 404 U. S. 496 (1972), relied upon by the Court, was a wholly different case from Taylor. In Groppi, the Assembly of the Wisconsin Legislature passed a resolution citing the petitioner there for contempt of that body, which had allegedly occurred two days previously. This Court reversed that conviction because petitioner had not been afforded adequate notice and hearing. The Court in Groppi noted that Sacher was a different case because it involved courtroom contempts by lawyers, with repeated warnings by the judge, and an opportunity on their behalf to speak. Taylor is no different from Sacher; respondent judge repeatedly warned petitioner of his contemptuous conduct, and when he informed petitioner that he was in contempt permitted petitioner an opportunity to speak. Indeed, the Court in Taylor indicates that it agrees with the Kentucky Court of Appeals that “ ‘[t]he contempt citations and the sentences coming at the end of the trial were not and could not have been a surprise to Taylor, because upon each occasion and immediately following the charged act of contempt the court informed Taylor that he was at that time in contempt of court.’ ” Ante, at 496-497, quoting 494 S. W. 2d 737, 741-742 (Ky. 1973).
Even were I in agreement with the Court’s conclusion that Taylor’s contempt conviction should be reversed, I nevertheless could not join in the holding that if petitioner is to be tried again, he may not be tried by respondent. While conceding that petitioner’s conduct did not constitute the kind of personal attack on respondent that would prevent the latter from maintaining the calm detachment necessary for fair adjudication, May-berry v. Pennsylvania, 400 U. S. 455 (1971), the Court holds that “it appears to us that respondent did become *529embroiled in a running controversy with petitioner.” Ante, at 501. This portion of the Court’s holding can only be described as a total repudiation of the principle laid down in Sacher:
“A construction of the Rule is advocated which would deny a judge power summarily to punish a contempt that is personal to himself except, perhaps, at a moment when it is necessary to forestall abortion of the trial. His only recourse, it is said, is to become an accuser or complaining witness in a proceeding before another judge.
“The Rule itself expresses no such limitation, and the contrary inference is almost inescapable. It is almost inevitable that any contem-pt of a court committed in the presence of the judge during a trial will be an off eme against his dignity and authority. At a trial the court is so much the judge and the judge so much the court that the two terms are used interchangeably in countless opinions in this Court and generally in the literature of the law, and contempt of the one is contempt of the other. It cannot be that summary punishment is only for such minor contempts as leave the judge indifferent and may be evaded by adding hectoring, abusive and defiant conduct toward the judge as an individual. Such an interpretation would nullify, in practice, the power it purports to grant.” 343 U. S., at 11-12 (emphasis added).
The Court in Sacher was interpreting the language of Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 42 (a), and, without the slightest suggestion that there might be constitutional infirmities in such procedures, refused to require retrial of the con-temnors there before a different judge. Twelve years later, in a state case, Ungar v. Sarafite, 376 U. S. 575 *530(1964), the Court reaffirmed the principles of Sacher, in the face of an argument that the Constitution required something different. The Court in Ungar indicated that it was “unwilling to bottom a constitutional rule of disqualification solely upon . . . disobedience to court orders and criticism of its rulings during the course of a trial.... We cannot assume that judges are so irascible and sensitive that they cannot fairly and impartially deal with resistance to their authority or with highly charged arguments about the soundness of their decisions.” Id., at 584.
Taylor is not a federal case, where this Court, in the exercise of some perceived wisdom of the appropriate policy to be followed in the administration of justice in the federal courts, see Offutt v. United States, 348 U. S. 11 (1954); Cooke v. United States, 267 U. S. 517 (1925), may require retrial before another judge. By holding in Taylor that the respondent judge should be disqualified from trying petitioner’s contempt, the Court has now adopted the very constitutional rule it disavowed in Ungar v. Sarafite, supra, and found not even worthy of mention in Sacher. In Mayberry v. Pennsylvania, supra, a case in which the defendant’s conduct was so extraordinary that even the Court apparently concedes it affords no precedent for today’s decision in Taylor, the Court was at pains to state that “[a] judge cannot be driven out of a case.” 400 IT. S., at 463. Yet the teaching of Mayberry, and of today’s decision in Taylor, is precisely the opposite: a judge can be driven out of a case by any counsel sufficiently astute to read the new-found constitutional principles enunciated in these decisions. Whether as a matter of policy the added procedural rights conferred upon contemptuous lawyers are worth the sacrifice of the historic authority of the trial judge to control proceedings in his court may be open to debate, *531the total absence of any basis in the Fourteenth Amendment for the result which the Court reaches in Taylor v. Hayes, is to me clear beyond any doubt. Accordingly, I dissent from the Court’s reversal of the conviction in that case.2
II
The Codispoti litigation in this Court is worthy of a chapter in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Codispoti and Langnes were eodefendants with the petitioner in Mayberry v. Pennsylvania, 400 U. S. 455 (1971), on contempt charges in the Pennsylvania courts and were apparently beneficiaries of this Court’s judgment of reversal in that case.3 The Court’s concluding language in its opinion in that case was that “on remand another judge, not *532bearing the sting of these slanderous remarks and having the impersonal authority of the law [sit] in judgment on the conduct of petitioner as shown by the record.” Id., at 466. Pennsylvania carried out this mandate to the letter, and, as the Court points out in its opinion, Codispoti and Langnes were tried before a different judge, and received on retrial substantially more lenient sentences than had been imposed in the first instance. Nonetheless, the Court in its Codispoti opinion today, without so much as batting an eye, now decides that these petitioners were entitled to a jury trial. If that were the case, and Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145 (1968), and Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U. S. 194 (1968), each decided three years before Mayberry, require such a result, it would seem to have been appropriate to so indicate in Mayberry.
In holding that Duncan and Bloom require a jury trial for the petitioners in Codispoti, the Court does not sufficiently distinguish the analogous case of Jenkins v. Delaware, 395 U. S. 213 (1969), which at the very least strongly suggests that petitioners were not entitled to a jury trial upon their retrial for contempt. In Jenkins, the petitioner had been convicted in a state court of murder and burglary. During the pendency of his appeal in the Supreme Court of Delaware, this Court decided Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966), and Johnson v. New Jersey, 384 U. S. 719 (1966), which held that the decision in Miranda “applies only to cases in which the trial began after the date of [the Miranda] decision . . . .” Id., at 721 (emphasis added). In reversing the petitioner’s conviction on various state grounds, the Supreme Court of Delaware also determined, sua sponte, that under Johnson v. New Jersey, supra, a statement obtained from petitioner without fully advising him of his constitutional rights would be admissible at his *533retrial. Petitioner was retried and convicted of second-degree murder, and the Supreme Court of Delaware again affirmed. This Court affirmed the conviction, rejecting petitioner’s argument that the statement should have been excluded from evidence. We held that the Miranda standards do not apply to persons whose retrials have commenced after the date of that decision if their original trials had begun before that date.
Codispoti is a substantially similar case. Codispoti and Langnes were originally tried and convicted of criminal contempt in 1966. This Court did not decide Duncan v. Louisiana, supra, and Bloom v. Illinois, supra, until May 20, 1968. And in DeStefano v. Woods, 392 U. S. 631 (1968) (per curiam), the Court held that the decisions in Duncan and Bloom would not retroactively apply to “trials [begun] prior to May 20, 1968.” Id., at 635. Since the original trial of these petitioners began prior to the date of the decisions in Duncan and Bloom, under DeStefano they would not have been entitled to the benefit of those rulings at their original trials. And Jenkins v. Delaware, supra, certainly suggests that since petitioners’ original trial began prior to the decisons in Duncan and Bloom, they should not receive the benefit of those cases upon their retrial. The Court’s rejoinder is that Duncan and Bloom are different cases because they involve jury trials instead of “uncorreetable police conduct which occurred prior to trial and which, if illegal, would preclude the use of perhaps critical evidence gathered in reliance on then-existing law.” But our decision in Johnson v. New Jersey, supra, that Miranda was to have only prospective application did not turn on when the police conduct at issue occurred, but instead on when the trial of the defendant occurred. The Court does not tell us why the retrial rule of Jenkins v. Delaware, supra, is not equally applicable to the jury-trial requirements *534of Duncan and Bloom, which DeStefano says do not govern where the original trial began prior to the date of those decisions.
The Court’s decision in Bloom v. Illinois, supra, marked a sharp departure from prior constitutional holdings under the Fourteenth Amendment. Even were it clear that petitioners were entitled to the benefit of Bloom on retrial, final acceptance of Bloom’s, holding as governing Codispoti would first warrant examination as to its practical effects. Bloom, an attorney, was charged with contempt of a state court for having filed a spurious will for probate. Bloom was a classic case of “indirect contempt,” one which occurred outside of the presence of the court, and Bloom was accorded a full trial before the court. Evidence was received tending to show that a third party had engaged Bloom to draw a will after the death of the putative testator; Bloom was convicted of contempt by the court, and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Under Illinois law, no maximum punishment was provided for convictions for criminal contempt. This Court, relying on Duncan v. Louisiana, supra, held that where state law did not provide a maximum punishment for criminal contempt, the Fourteenth Amendment required that the penalty actually imposed on the contemnor be the constitutional indicator of the seriousness of the offense and the right of jury trial defined by Duncan. Since Duncan held that a prosecution for a crime with a maximum penalty of two years was one for a serious offense within the terms of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Court held that Bloom was entitled to a jury trial on the contempt charges.
As the Court’s opinion today in Taylor v. Hayes, ante, at 495-496, makes clear, the constitutional rule of Bloom has now evolved into a rule whereby a contemnor must be *535afforded a jury trial where either a penalty over six months is authorized by statute or where the penalty actually imposed exceeds six months. Presumably, the case-law support for this conclusion is Duncan v. Louisiana, supra, and Baldwin v. New York, 399 U. S. 66 (1970), since we deal here, not with a federal case, where this Court, in the exercise of supervisory authority over the administration of justice in the federal courts, has applied this six-month rule, see Cheff v. Schnackenberg, 384 U. S. 373 (1966), but with a state case where only the Constitution may dictate such a rule. Duncan v. Louisiana, supra, was a 7-2 opinion which held that where the crime for which a state court defendant was tried was punishable by a two-year sentence, the Fourteenth Amendment required the application of the Sixth Amendment guarantee of jury trial in serious criminal cases to state prosecutions. Mr. Justice Harlan, in dissent, joined by Mr. Justice Stewart, forcefully argued that there was no indication that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to make the Sixth Amendment applicable to the States. See Fairman, Does the Fourteenth Amendment Incorporate the Bill of Rights? The Original Understanding, 2 Stan. L. Rev. 6 (1949); Morrison, Does the Fourteenth Amendment Incorporate the Bill of Rights? The Judicial Interpretation, 2 Stan. L. Rev. 140 (1949). Baldwin v. New York, supra, of course, was a plurality opinion of three Members of this Court, which extended the constitutional jury-trial rule of Duncan v. Louisiana, supra, to any state criminal offense where the penalty permitted was over six months. Mr. Justice Harlan, Mr. Chief Justice Burger, and Mr. Justice Stewart dissented.
The Court in Codispoti woodenly applies this six-month rule to the facts of that case, without any regard to the significant differences between Codispoti and *536Bloom, and without regard to the import of its decision. In applying this six-month rule of dubious constitutional origin to consecutive sentences on counts of six months or less, it appears that the Baldwin plurality’s proposition that six months is the constitutional sine qua non of the jury-trial requirement under the Fourteenth Amendment now commands a majority of this Court almost sub silentio by passage of time rather than by force of reason.
Codispoti and Langnes were convicted on their retrial of various separate contemptuous acts and were sentenced for each act to terms of six months or less, with the direction that the sentences be served consecutively. The contemnor in Bloom was sentenced to two years for one contemptuous act. Bloom’s contempt was an indirect one, and he was entitled under Illinois law to the normal rights of any trial defendant save only the right to a jury trial. By awarding him a constitutional right to a jury trial, this Court in effect required that the fact-finding function be transferred from the judge to a jury. Whether right or wrong as a matter of constitutional law, the holding in Bloom was at least intelligible. But the contempts of Codispoti and Langnes were direct, committed in the presence of the trial judge. Upon retrial after our decision in Mayberry, supra, the case was tried before another Pennsylvania judge on the basis of the certificate of contempt filed by the judge who had presided at the original criminal trial of Mayberry, Co-dispoti, and Langnes. It does not appear that either Codispoti or Langnes seriously challenged the factual allegations in the certificate of contempt, and it would seem fair to surmise that this lack of factual dispute is typical of a trial based on a certificate of direct contempt.
The Court’s opinion in Bloom spoke of the seriousness of an offense for which a sentence of more than six *537months was imposed, 391 U. S., at 196-197, and it might be thought from the Court’s opinion in Codispoti today that the jury was in some way expected to mitigate the harshness of the punishment which could be visited upon a contemnor. But there is no indication whatever in the record before us that Pennsylvania law allocates any role in the sentencing of a criminal defendant to the jury. The jury presumably will hear evidence as to relatively undisputed facts, and if it returns a verdict of guilty a sentence will be imposed by a judge trying the ease. If it is the length of sentence which is to be the controlling factor in determining whether a jury trial is to be awarded, and the severity of the possible sentence to be imposed by the judge which provides the constitutional basis for requiring a jury trial, the Court’s application of Bloom to a direct contempt seems questionable for more than one reason. The guarantee of jury trial accorded to these petitioners in no way limits the sentence which may be imposed by the trial judge in those cases where a guilty verdict is returned by the jury. The Court has succeeded only in requiring Pennsylvania to engraft onto its traditional procedures for adjudicating direct contempts a judicial “fifth wheel” without appreciably furthering the constitutional goals enunciated in Duncan v. Louisiana, supra, and Bloom v. Illinois, supra.
The application of Bloom to the consecutive sentences imposed for the separate contemptuous acts of Codispoti and Langnes is made even more questionable in light of the concession that the result would be different in other fact situations. It is indicated in the Part II opinion that a contemnor “may be summarily tried for an act of contempt during trial .and punished by a term of no more than six months. Nor does the judge exhaust his power to convict and punish summarily whenever the *538punishment imposed for separate contemptuous acts during trial exceeds six months.” Ante, at 514. The upshot of this, of course, is that trial judges are surely to be inclined to adjudicate and punish the contempt during the trial rather than awaiting the end of the trial. The answer that is made to this obvious result of the holding is the adjuration that “[sjummary convictions during trial that are unwarranted by the facts will not be invulnerable to appellate review.” Ante, at 517. What this statement portends for the future of the Court’s inveterate propensity to second-guess trial judges is, as they say, “anybody’s guess.”
I dissent from the Court’s reversal of the convictions in Codispoti v. Pennsylvania.

[This opinion applies also to No. 73-473, Taylor v. Hayes, ante, p. 488.]

 See also the more than 50 cases cited in United States v. Barnett, 376 U. S. 681, 694 n. 12 (1964).
The Court in Ex parte Terry, 128 U. S. 289 (1888), stated:
“We have seen that it is a settled doctrine in the jurisprudence both of England and of this country, never supposed to be in conflict with the liberty of the citizen, that for direct contempts committed in the face of the court, at least one of superior jurisdiction, the offender may, in its discretion, be instantly apprehended and immediately imprisoned, without trial or issue, and without other proof than its actual knowledge of what occurred; and that, according to an unbroken chain of authorities, reaching back to the earliest times, such power, although arbitrary in its nature and liable to abuse, is absolutely essential to the protection of the courts in the discharge of their functions. Without it, judicial tribunals would be at the mercy of the disorderly and violent, who respect neither the laws enacted for the vindication of public and private rights, nor the officers charged with the duty of administering them.” Id., at 313.
See also Cooke v. United States, 267 U. S., at 534.

 I agree with the Court’s conclusion that Taylor was not entitled to a jury trial on the contempt charges.

 These petitioners were originally convicted in 1966 of criminal contempt of a Pennsylvania state court. Their codefendant in those proceedings was Richard Mayberry, who was also convicted of contempt. From the affirmance of those convictions by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 434 Pa. 478, 255 A. 2d 131 (1969), only Mayberry sought review in this Court. In Mayberry v. Pennsylvania, 400 U. S. 455 (1971), this Court reversed Mayberry’s conviction and remanded for retrial before another Pennsylvania state court judge. Though the record in this Court is unclear how it came about, Pennsylvania somehow made both Codispoti and Langnes the beneficiaries of the remand in Mayberry. They were thus retried on newly filed charges of criminal contempt, before another judge; they were again convicted, and on subsequent appeal to the appellate courts of Pennsylvania, their convictions were affirmed. It is clear, however, that the reversal of Mayberry’s conviction and remand to the Pennsylvania courts for retrial, was not intended by this Court to disturb the original convictions of Codispoti and Langnes, nor to award them a retrial in the Pennsylvania courts. Whether or not petitioners here may, without further trial, now be incarcerated pursuant to the sentences imposed in the first contempt trial and affirmed on appeal by the Pennsylvania courts is, presumably, a matter of Pennsylvania law.