Court Opinion

ID: 9476350
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:53:53.205568+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:16.334962
License: Public Domain

*1198CORNELIA G. KENNEDY, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur generally in Judge Merritt’s opinion. However, because he adopts a totally subjective standard of involuntariness, I think there needs to be some mention of the relationship of the standard to the intent of the defendants. Psychological coercion which can be established only through testimony of expert witnesses presents a significant problem with respect to a. defendant’s intent and knowledge. Can a master be guilty of holding someone in involuntary servitude where the master, a lay person, doesn’t know that the servant remains involuntarily? If expert testimony is necessary for the jury to find the servitude involuntary, it would seem that a defendant also needs that expert knowledge.
Where the master uses force or the threat of force or state-imposed legal coercion to require the servant to remain, the intent to hold the servant in involuntary servitude is apparent. Here evidence that the master treated the servants cruelly and provided deplorable living conditions was relevant to establishing involuntariness only because of the clinical psychologist’s testimony that such treatment, alternated with kind treatment, such as providing a nice Sunday dinner, made the servants dependent and unable to leave. Conduct which had such effect, but without evidence that the master knew or should have known of that effect, does not tend to prove intent. In the case of psychological coercion, the jury should be required to find that the defendant knew his conduct would cause the victim to remain involuntarily. The master does not hold the servant to involuntary servitude unless the master knows that the servant serves involuntarily.
I agree that the case should be remanded for a new trial because of defendants’ acts which made it less likely that others would help Fulmer and Molitoris to leave the farm; the jury could find these acts were intended to keep them there and that the victims were incapable of acting on their own initiative. Representation by the Kozminskis that Fulmer and Molitoris were wards of the court, acts which isolated the victims from their families and the community, and telling the victims that they had no place to go or would have to return to an institution, could be found to be fraud or deceit which prevented Fulmer and Molitoris from leaving the farm and prevented others in the community from assisting them to do so, when they were incapable of acting on their own.