Court Opinion

ID: 9444855
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:14:38.861038+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:02.624699
License: Public Domain

JOHNSEN, Circuit Judge
(concurring specially).
Except for the previous holding of this Court, in Brownson v. United States, 8 Cir., 32 F.2d 844, I should not be willing to regard sections 3614(a) and 3633 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1939, 26 U.S.C.A., as authorizing applications for personal arrests to be made, in enforcement of a Revenue Agent’s investigative summons or subpoena.
Contempt or contumacy in the nature of contempt, as the basis for such an application, does not, and can not, in my opinion, legally exist in the administrative or executive branch of government— as it inherently does in the judicial field —except by virtue of an express legislative act directly creative of it.
Congress has, as to a few specific administrative summons and subpoenas, seen fit to create the right to an attachment against the person “as for a contempt”. See e. g. § 3615(e), Int.Rev. Code 1939, and § 7604, Int.Rev.Code 1954. But in each instance, it has made the grant in unmistakable language, has restricted its application to the summons authorized by a named statutory section, and has prescribed the safeguards of a preliminary hearing on the application and an immediate hearing after the sei-. zure, in relation to any exercise of the right. Sections 3614(a) and 3633 are without either language of such a grant or prescription of such safeguards.
I should not have supposed that a court would lend its sanction to any laying of hands upon an individual’s person and the dragging of him bodily before a magisterial bench, for an administrative purpose and as an administrative incident, without being able to read, both for itself and to him, language from a *687statute, which expressly spelled out the administrative right thus to have his liberty imposed upon and to have these indignities inflicted upon him.
The Brownson case, however, has done just this, and the majority here have both accepted that decision and approved its basis.
In this situation, I must officially bow to the established law of the Court, so far as the immediate statute involved is concerned.