Court Opinion

ID: 9693650
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 16:54:27.794155+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:48.186279
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Justice,
dissenting.
I find it abhorrent to send this child to county jail.
The result which today’s majority reaches is reminiscent of a long-ago day when children were regularly punished as adults and incarcerated with adults. The result suggests a return to “the dark world of Charles Dickens.”1
I find almost incredible the majority’s assertion, unsupported by authority, that “[T]he rehabilitative processes of the Juvenile Court ... are unnecessary and irrelevant to vindicating the dignity of our courts.”
A few jurisdictions have, against different statutory backgrounds, permitted trial courts to punish child witnesses for contempt.2 However, we live in a more en*884lightened day and in a state where the Legislature has enacted a Juvenile Code which in sweeping fashion ordains that exclusive and original jurisdiction over all “juvenile crimes” is vested, not in the Superior Court which asserted jurisdiction here, but in the Juvenile Court. Juvenile crimes are broadly defined in that Code to include:
Conduct which, if committed by an adult, would be defined as criminal by Title 17-A, the Maine Criminal Code, or by any other criminal statute outside that code, including any rule or regulation under a statute ....
15 M.R.S.A. § 3103(1)(A) (Supp.1982-1983). Clearly, criminal contempt of court, governed by M.R.Crim.P. 42, a rule promulgated pursuant to 4 M.R.S.A. § 9 (1979), comes within that section.3
I conclude that the Superior Court was without jurisdiction to try this child for the offense with which she was charged.4
Lack of jurisdiction alone should suffice to dispose of this appeal. We should note, however, certain other errors which are of a substantive nature.
First, the majority is led astray by an ardor for a summary proceeding. Such a proceeding under M.R.Crim.P. 42(a) is the exception; but for a narrow range of cases, a plenary proceeding pursuant to M.R. Crim.P. 42(b) is the rule. “Summary punishment always, and rightly, is regarded with disfavor.” Sacher v. United States, 343 U.S. 1, 8, 72 S.Ct. 451, 454, 96 L.Ed. 717 (1952). The power to proceed summarily is not something to be invoked in every case, or even in a majority of cases. Instead, as Judge Coffin has put it, it is a power which “must be used with restraint.” Baker v. Eisenstadt, 456 F.2d 382, 390 (1st Cir.1972). Summary disposition is to be reserved for “exceptional circumstances.” In re Chaplain, 621 F.2d 1272, 1277 (4th Cir.1980). It is a power not to be routinely employed in contempt cases. Rather, it is a power of “last resort.” Farmer v. Strickland, 652 F.2d 427, 439 (5th Cir.1981). It was error, I submit, to proceed summarily in this case.
The majority suggests that when a juvenile has “impugned the court’s dignity and authority” it would somehow “emasculate the immediate punishment” if the offender were given a hearing before another judge in Juvenile Court. I would respond that a fair hearing, and not necessarily an immediate hearing, should be the goal. A summary proceeding may sometimes be appropriate, but there is no transcendent value in such a proceeding. The United States Supreme Court has declared,
“[W]e place little credence in the notion that the independence of the judiciary hangs on the power to try contempts summarily ....”
*885Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 194, 208, 88 S.Ct. 1477, 1485, 20 L.Ed.2d 522 (1968).5
That Court has frequently acted to safeguard the rights of a contemnor to a fair hearing. For example, a hearing before a second and independent judge is constitutionally required whenever the first judge and the contemnor become “embroiled in a running controversy.” Taylor v. Hayes, 418 U.S. 488, 501-03, 94 S.Ct. 2697, 2704-06, 41 L.Ed.2d 897 (1974); Mayberry v. Pennsylvania, 400 U.S. 455, 465-66, 91 S.Ct. 499, 504-05, 27 L.Ed.2d 532 (1971). For a second example, when a contempt is to be punished by imprisonment of over six months, a jury trial is constitutionally required; such punishment cannot be imposed in a summary proceeding. Taylor v. Hayes, 418 U.S. at 495, 94 S.Ct. at 2701; Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U.S. at 210, 88 S.Ct. at 1486.6
In the case before us, as in those examples, why should not the charge of criminal contempt be heard by a second judge? Under the Juvenile Code, after all, the Legislature has created a separate system for juveniles. Why should the Legislature’s benevolent purposes be brushed aside as “irrelevant” to vindicating the dignity of the courts? Important though the dignity of our courts may be, it is not a value to be elevated above sanctity of person or inviolability of property. Offenses by a juvenile against the person or property of another, all would agree, must today be heard in Juvenile Court.
In the second place, I submit that sending this child to county jail violates the guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment provided by both the Maine Constitution and the United States Constitution. Me. Const, art. I, sect. 9; U.S. Const, amends. VIII & XIV.
These important safeguards are not static. Instead they “must draw their meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 242, 92 5.Ct. 2726, 2728, 33 L.Ed.2d 346 (1972) (Douglas, J., concurring) (quoting Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 101, 78 S.Ct. 590, 598, 2 L.Ed.2d 630 (1958)).7
In the light of the Legislature’s mandate that the offenses of juveniles be dealt with according to the Juvenile Code, no one can gainsay that in this day it is “unusual” punishment to send a child to county jail. I suggest that, measured by “broad and idealistic concepts of dignity, civilized standards, humanity and decency,”8 the incarceration of this girl is “cruel” as well as “unusual.”
We have noted heretofore that the State’s rehabilitative purposes are tangibly demonstrated in the statutes creating and governing the operation of the Maine Youth Center. State v. Gleason, 404 A.2d 573, 582 (Me.1979). There is nothing in the record before us to justify the justice’s choice to incarcerate this child in a penal institution for adults.
*886Had it been an instance of civil contempt, the justice could have had in mind that during the period of her sentence the con-temnor might purge herself of the contempt. This was a case, however, of criminal contempt, as the justice made crystal clear. Because the punishment is for past disobedience, sanctions imposed for criminal contempt are determinate. The contemnor has no opportunity to purge herself. Gompers v. Buck Stove & Range Company, 221 U.S. 418, 442-43, 31 S.Ct. 492, 498-99, 55 L.Ed. 797 (1911); Town of Nottingham v. Cedar Waters, Inc., 118 N.H. 282, 385 A.2d 851, 853-54 (1978).
In the context of this case a sentence to jail has no redeeming value.9 On the contrary, such a sentence flatly contradicts the “benevolent purposes” of our Legislature in enacting Maine’s Juvenile Code. State v. Gleason, 404 A.2d at 582.
In the third place, even if the Superior Court had jurisdiction to summarily try this child as if she were an adult, the justice failed to issue the certificate expressly required by M.R.Crim.P. 42(a). That certificate is constitutionally required as a matter of due process. In re Steinberger, 387 A.2d 1121, 1123 (Me.1978). Without the certificate, the Defendant and Defendant’s counsel cannot be certain of the precise charge asserted, nor can the reviewing court accurately determine whether the action of the committing court was just or arbitrary.
I find it anomalous indeed that in this case of alleged sexual misconduct it is the • young victim of that misconduct who now goes off to county jail.

. See In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 79, 87 S.Ct. 1428, 1470-71, 18 L.Ed.2d 527 (1967) (Stewart, J., dissenting):
In that era there were no juvenile proceedings, and a child was tried in a conventional criminal court with all the trappings of a conventional criminal trial. So it was that a 12-year-old boy named James Guild was tried in New Jersey for killing Catherine Beakes. A jury found him guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was executed. It was all very constitutional.
Id. at 79-80, 87 S.Ct. at 1470-71. Stewart, J., goes on to quote Blackstone:
Thus, also, in very modern times, a boy of ten years old was convicted on his own confession of murdering his bed-fellow, there appearing in his whole behavior plain tokens of a mischievous discretion; and as the sparing this boy merely on account of his tender years might be of dangerous consequence to the public, by propagating a notion that children might commit such atrocious crimes with impunity, it was unanimously agreed by all the judges that he was a proper subject of capital punishment.
Id. at 80 n. 2, 87 S.Ct. at 1471 n. 2 (quoting 4 Blackstone, Commentaries 23 (Wendell ed. 1847)).

. See Young v. Knight, 329 S.W.2d 195 (Ky.1959); Re Balucan, 44 Hawaii 271, 353 P.2d 631 (1960); Thomas v. State, 21 Md.App. 572, 573, 320 A.2d 538, 541 (1974).

. After Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 194, 208, 88 S.Ct. 1477, 1485, 20 L.Ed.2d 522 (1968), in which the United States Supreme Court held that the jury trial guarantees of Article III and the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution apply to criminal contempts, it cannot be disputed that criminal contempt is a “crime.”. As Justice Holmes once stated, “con-tempts are infractions of law, visited with punishment as such. If such acts are not criminal, we are in error as to the most fundamental characteristic of crimes as that word has been understood in English speech.” Gompers v. United States, 233 U.S. 604, 610, 34 S.Ct. 693, 695, 58 L.Ed. 1115 (1914). See also New Orleans v. The Steamship Co., 87 U.S. 387, 392, 22 L.Ed. 354 (1874) (“Contempt of court is a specific criminal offense”); United States v. Williams, 622 F.2d 830, 837 (5th Cir.1980) (“criminal contempt is and always has been considered a crime”).

. It should be noted that our Juvenile Code expressly and categorically provides:
If during the pendency of any prosecution for a violation of law, in any court in the State against any person charged as an adult, it is ascertained that the person is a juvenile, or was a juvenile at the time the crime was committed, the court shall forthwith dismiss the case.
15 M.R.S.A. § 3101(3)(A) (1980). Patently, this girl was a juvenile at the time of the commission of the “crime” with which the Superior Court justice was charging her. The Superior Court should have followed this statute and dismissed the case.

.If fundamental fairness is our goal, it should not go unnoticed that even before the Superior Court commenced its hearing on the contempt charge, the justice’s mind was already made up to the point of telling the little girl, “[A] refusal to testify would be what they call contempt of court, and that is punishable in fact by up to six months in jail.”
Although the justice had received a letter from the child’s physician indicating that forcing this child to testify might be emotionally damaging, the justice brushed it aside with a remark to the child, “I have to think that jail is going to be worse for you than trial.”
When counsel requested a psychiatric examination of the child, the justice dismissed it out of hand, pressing forward instead with a hearing on the charge of criminal contempt.

. See generally Note, Criminal Contempt in Maine: Constitutionally Protected or Neglected?, 34 Me.L.Rev. 407 (1982).

. The Eighth Amendment guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment was relied upon by the court in Swansey v. Elrod, 386 F.Supp. 1138 (N.D.Ill.1975), when it issued a sweeping preliminary injunction, removing all juveniles under the age of seventeen from the Cook County Jail.

. Swansey v. Elrod, 386 F.Supp. at 1142 (quoting Jackson v. Bishop, 404 F.2d 571, 579 (8th Cir.1968)).

. In choosing among statutorily permissible dispositions, the court should employ the least restrictive category and duration of disposition that is appropriate to the seriousness of the offense, as modified by the degree of culpability indicated by the circumstances of the particular case, and by the age and prior record of the juvenile. The imposition of a particular disposition should be accompanied by a statement of the facts relied on in support of the disposition and the reasons for selecting the disposition and rejecting less restrictive alternatives.
Institute of Judicial Administration American Bar Association, Juvenile Justice Standards Project: Standards Relating to Dispositions, 2.1 (Tentative Draft, 1977).