Court Opinion

ID: 9422153
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:01:28.901537+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:32.982908
License: Public Domain

MR. Justice Clark,
whom Mr. Justice Frankfurter joins,
concurring.
Because, as applied by the Georgia court, § 38-415 grants criminal defendants the opportunity to make unsworn statements in their own behalf, but withholds from the same defendants the assistance of their counsel in eliciting perhaps more effective statements, the Court today strikes down that section. It is held to be unconstitutional “in the context of § 38-416” which renders criminal defendants incompetent as witnesses at their own trials. The Court does not, however, treat § 38-416 as anything more substantial than “context,” and, while rendering its validity doubtful, fails to pass upon its constitutionality. The Court’s hesitancy to reach that question appears to be due to appellant’s tactic, at the trial, of offering his statement under § 38-415 and, in so doing, demanding the aid of his counsel, but not offering himself as a competent witness or challenging his exclusion under § 38-416. This has proven to be a perfect cast of appellant’s line, for the Court has risen to the bait exactly as anticipated. The resulting advantage of the Court’s present holding to the criminal defendant in Georgia is obvious — as matters now stand, the defendant may make an unsworn statement as articulate and convincing as the aid of counsel can evoke, but the prosecution may not cross-examine.
It is true that merely to defeat such a result is insufficient justification for this Court to reach out and decide additional constitutional questions otherwise avoidable. Nevertheless, the problem appellant poses under § 38-415 is so historically and conceptually intertwisted with the *602rule of § 38-416 that not only must they be considered together, as the Court expressly recognizes, but they must be allowed to stand or fall together, as a single Unitary concept, uncircumscribed by the accident of divisive codification. The section today struck down, § 38-416, is not even intelligible except in terms of the incompetency imposed by § 38-416.* Were the latter rule not codified, its proscription would have to be understood as § 38-415’s operative premise of common-law disability. The purported boon of § 38-415 was founded on that disability, against the hardships of which, nowhere else presently imposed, it was intended to at least partially relieve. I would not withhold adjudication because of the fact of codification, nor merely on account of the procedural dodge resorted to by counsel.
Reaching the basic issue of incompetency, as I feel one must, I do not hesitate to state that in my view § 38-416 does not meet the requirements of due process and'that, as an unsatisfactory remnant of an age gone by, it must fall as surely as does its palliative, § 38-415. Until such time as criminal defendants are granted competency by the legislature, the void created by rejection of the codified common-law rule of Georgia may be filled by state trial judges who would have to recognize, as secured by the Fourteenth Amendment, the right of a criminal defendant to choose between silence and testifying in his own behalf. In the same manner the state courts presently implement other federal rights secured to the accused, and therefore the fact that a void of local policy would be created is not an insuperable obstacle to the disposition I propose. Nor would past convictions be automatically rendered subject to fatal constitutional attack unless, as *603was, in my view, done here, the proper challenge had been preserved by appropriate objection to active operation of the concept embodied in the incompetency rule in either of its phases. In view of the certain fact that criminal prosecutions will continue to be had in Georgia, and that some defendant, if not appellant himself at his new trial, will demand the right to testify in his own behalf, in strict compliance with the procedural standard adhered to today, we will sooner or later have the question of the validity of § 38-416 back on our doorstep. The result, predictably, will be the same as that reached under § 38-415 today. If that proves in fact to be the Court’s future disposition of the claim I anticipate, the stability of interim convictions may well be jeopardized where related constitutional claims are preserved but, perhaps, not pressed. So too, on the reverse side of the coin, there may well be interim convictions where, had defendants been permitted to testify under oath in their own behalf, verdicts of acquittal would have been returned. This Court should not allow the administration of criminal justice to be thus frustrated or unreasonably delayed by such a fragmentation of the critical issue through procedural niceties made solely in the hope of avoiding a controlling decision on a question of the first magnitude.
For these reasons I deem it impractical as well as unwise to withhold for a future date a decision by the Court on the constitutionality of § 38-416.
Disagreeing with the distorted way by which the Court reverses the judgment, I join in its reversal only on the grounds stated here and in the opinion of my Brother FRANKFURTER which I join.

1 agree with my Brother Frankfurter that if § 38-415 is to be isolated from the incompeteney provision of § 38-416, “what is left of this mutilation should be dismissed for want of a substantial federal question.”