Court Opinion

ID: 9430983
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:31:03.726486+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:24.595279
License: Public Domain

Justice Scalia,
concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the Court that the District Court’s appointment of J. Joseph Bainton and Robert P. Devlin as special counsel to prosecute petitioners for contempt of an injunction earlier issued by that court was invalid, and that that action requires reversal of petitioners’ convictions. In my view, however, those appointments were defective because of a failing more fundamental than that relied upon by the Court. Prosecution of individuals who disregard court orders (except orders necessary to protect the courts’ ability to function) is not an exercise of “[t]he judicial power of the United States,” U. S. Const., Art. Ill, §§ 1, 2. Since that is the only grant of power that has been advanced as authorizing these appointments, they were void. And since we cannot know whether petitioners would have been prosecuted had the matter been referred to a proper prosecuting authority, the convictions are likewise void.
I
With the possible exception of the power to appoint inferior federal officers, which is irrelevant to the present cases,1 *816the only power the Constitution permits to be vested in federal courts is “[t]he judicial power of the United States.” Art. Ill, § 1. That is accordingly the only kind of power that federal judges may exercise by virtue of their Article III commissions. Muskrat v. United States, 219 U. S. 346, 354-356 (1911); United States v. Ferreira, 13 How. 40 (1852).
The judicial power is the power to decide, in accordance with law, who should prevail in a case or controversy. See Art. Ill, § 2. That includes the power to serve as a neutral adjudicator in a criminal case, but does not include the power to seek out law violators in order to punish them — which would be quite incompatible with the task of neutral adjudication. It is accordingly well established that the judicial power does not generally include the power to prosecute crimes. See United States v. Cox, 342 F. 2d 167 (CA5) (en banc), cert. denied, 381 U. S. 935 (1965), and authorities cited therein; 342 F. 2d, at 182 (Brown, J., concurring); id., at 185 (Wisdom, J., concurring); see generally United States v. Thompson, 251 U. S. 407, 413-417 (1920). Rather, since the prosecution of law violators is part of the implementation of the laws, it is — at least to the extent that it is publicly exercised2 — executive power, vested by the Constitution in the *817President. Art. II, § 2, cl. 1. See Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985); Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 138 (1976).
These well-settled general principles are uncontested. The Court asserts, however, that there is a special exception for prosecutions of criminal contempt, which are the means of securing compliance with court orders. Unless these can be prosecuted by the courts themselves, the argument goes, effi-caciousness of judicial judgments will be at the mercy of the Executive, an arrangement presumably too absurd to contemplate. Ante, at 796.
Far from being absurd, however, it is a carefully designed and critical element of our system of Government. There are numerous instances in which the Constitution leaves open the theoretical possibility that the actions of one Branch may be brought to nought by the actions or inactions of another. Such dispersion of power was central to the scheme of forming a Government with enough power to serve the expansive purposes set forth in the preamble of the Constitution, yet one that would “secure the blessings of liberty” rather than use its power tyranically. Congress, for example, is dependent on the Executive and the courts for enforcement of the laws it enacts. Even complete failure by the Executive to prosecute law violators, or by the courts to convict them, has never been thought to authorize congressional prosecution and trial. The Executive, in its turn, cannot perform its function of enforcing the laws if Congress declines to appropriate the necessary funds for that purpose; or if the courts decline to entertain its valid prosecutions. Yet no one sug*818gests that some doctrine of necessity authorizes the Executive to raise money for its operations without congressional appropriation, or to jail malefactors without conviction by a court of law. Why, one must wonder, are the courts alone immune from this interdependence?
The Founding Fathers, óf a certainty, thought that they were not. It is instructive to compare the Court’s claim that “[c]ourts cannot be at the mercy of another branch in deciding whether [contempt] proceedings should be initiated,” ante, at 796, with the views expressed in one of the most famous passages from The Federalist:
“[T]he judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the constitution; because it wall be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. . . . The judiciary. . . has no influence over either the sword or the purse, no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither Force nor Will but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” The Federalist No. 78, pp. 522-523 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton) (emphasis added).
Even as a purely analytic proposition the Court’s thesis is faulty, because it proves too much. If the courts must be able to investigate and prosecute. contempt of their judgments, why must they not also be able to arrest and punish those whom they have adjudicated to be in contempt? Surely the Executive’s refusal to enforce a judgment of contempt would impair the efficacy of the court’s acts at least as much as its failure to investigate and prosecute a contempt. Yet no one has ever supposed that the Judiciary has an inherent power to arrest and incarcerate.
*819HH HH
The Court appeals to a longstanding acknowledgment that the initiation of contempt proceedings to punish disobedience to court orders is a part of the judicial function.” Ante, at 795. Except, however, for a line of cases beginning in 1895 with In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564, whose holding and rationale we have since repudiated, no holding of this Court has ever found inherent judicial power to punish those violating court judgments with contempt, much less to appoint officers to prosecute such contempts. Our first reference to the special status of the federal courts’ contempt powers appeared in United States v. Hudson, 7 Cranch 32 (1812), where the question presented was whether circuit courts had the power to decide common-law criminal cases. Congress had not conferred such power, but the prosecution argued that it was part of the National Government’s inherent power to preserve its own existence. Id., at 33-34. The Court ruled that such an argument could establish, at most, that Congress had inherent power to pass criminal laws, not that the federal courts had inherent power without legislation to adjudge common-law crimes. At the end of its discussion, the Court noted:
“Certain implied powers must necessarily result to our Courts of justice from the nature of their institution. But jurisdiction of crimes against the state is not among those powers. To fine for contempt — imprison for contumacy — inforce the observance of order, &c. are powers which cannot be dispensed with in a Court, because they are necessary to the exercise of all others: and so far our Courts no doubt possess powers not immediately derived from statute; but all exercise of criminal jurisdiction in common law cases we are of opinion is not within their implied powers.” Id., at 34.
Thus, the holding of Hudson was against the existence of broad inherent powers in the federal courts. Its discussion *820recognized as inherent only those powers “necessary to the exercise of all others,” that is, necessary to permit the courts to function, among which it included the contempt power when used to prevent interference with the conduct of judicial business. It made no mention of the enforcement of judgments, much less of an investigative or prosecutory authority.
Nine years later, in Anderson v. Dunn, 6 Wheat. 204, 227 (1821), the Court reiterated its view that the contempt power was an inherent component of the judicial power. That case presented an issue more closely related to the questions of the source and scope of the federal courts’ contempt power, although still not directly on point: whether the House of Representatives could direct its Sergeant at Arms to seek out a person who had disrupted its proceedings, bring him before the House to be tried for contempt, and hold him in custody until completion of the proceedings. The Court noted that “there is no power given by the constitution to either House to punish for contempts, except when committed by their own members,” id., at 225, and that
“if this power ... is to be asserted on the plea of necessity, the ground is too broad, and the result too indefinite; . . . the executive, and every co-ordinate, and even subordinate, branch of government, may resort to the same justification, and the whole assume to themselves, in the exercise of this power, the most tyrannical licentiousness.” Id., at 228.
Nevertheless, the Court upheld the House’s action, concluding that any other course “leads to the total annihilation of the power of the House of Representatives to guard itself from contempts, and leaves it exposed to every indignity and interruption that rudeness, caprice, or even conspiracy, may meditate against it.” Ibid.
It was in the course of recognizing this limited power of self-defense in the House that the Court pronounced the dictum cited in today’s opinion that “[cjourts of justice are uni*821versally acknowledged to be vested, by their very creation, with power to impose silence, respect, and decorum, in their presence, and submission to their lawful mandates, and, as a corollary to this proposition, to preserve themselves and their officers from the approach and insults of pollution.” Id., at 227. Read in the context of the case, it seems to me likely that all the Court meant by “mandates” was orders necessary to the conduct of a trial, such as subpoenas. In any event, the statement was not a carefully considered opinion as to the outer limits of the federal courts’ inherent contempt powers. As was the case in Hudson, moreover, the statement did not suggest that the courts should play any role in the contempt process other than that of neutral adjudicator, and was dictum not only because the judicial contempt power was not at issue but because the Judiciary Act of 1789 had already conferred the authority said to be inherently possessed. § 17, 1 Stat. 83.
I recognize, however, that the narrow principle of necessity underlying Anderson — that the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches must each possess those powers necessary to protect the functioning of its own processes, although those implicit powers may take a form that appears to be nonlegislative, nonexecutive, or nonjudicial, respectively— does have logical application to the federal courts’ contempt powers. But that principle would at most require that courts be empowered to prosecute for contempt those who interfere with the orderly conduct of their business or disobey orders necessary to the conduct of that business (such as subpoenas). It would not require that they be able to prosecute and punish, not merely disruption of their functioning, but disregard of the product of their functioning, their judgments. The correlative of the latter power, in the congressional context, would be an inherent power on the part of Congress to prosecute and punish disobedience of its laws — which neither Anderson nor any rational person would suggest. I can imagine no basis, except self-love, for limiting *822this extension of the necessity doctrine to the courts alone. And even if illogically limited to the courts it is pernicious enough. In light of the broad sweep of modern judicial decrees, which have the binding effect of laws for those to whom they apply, the notion of judges’ in effect making the laws, prosecuting their violation, and sitting in judgment of those prosecutions, summons forth much more vividly than Anderson could ever have imagined the prospect of “the most tyrannical licentiousness.” Anderson, supra, at 228.
I — I HH HH
Our only holdings conferring an inherent contempt power to enforce judgments emanate from In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564 (1895), whose outcome and reasoning we have disapproved. There a Circuit Court, which had enjoined union officers and organizers from engaging in activities disruptive of interstate rail traffic, held them in contempt for failing to comply with the injunction and sentenced them to jail for terms from three to six months. This Court rejected the argument that they had thereby been deprived of their right to a jury trial, stating:
“[T]he power of a court to make an order carries with it the equal power to punish for a disobedience of that order, and the inquiry as to the question of disobedience has been, from time immemorial, the special function of the court. And this is no technical rule. In order that a court may compel obedience to its orders it must have the right to inquire whether there has been any disobedience thereof. To submit the question of disobedience to another tribunal, be it a jury or another court, would operate to deprive the proceeding of half its efficiency.” Id., at 594-595.
At the time, many considered Debs a dangerous decision, see Dunbar, Government by Injunction, 13 L. Q. Rev. 347 (1897); Gregory, Government by Injunction, 11 Harv. L. Rev. 487 (1898); Lewis, Strikes and Courts of Equity, 46 Am. *823L. Reg. 1 (1898); Lewis, A Protest Against Administering Criminal Law by Injunction, 42 Am. L. Reg. 879 (1894); and the opinion continued to be criticized long after it was handed down. See Green v. United States, 356 U. S. 165, 193-216, especially 196, and n. 6 (1958) (Black, J., dissenting). Ultimately, its holding was repudiated in Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U. S. 194 (1968), where we ruled that courts are required to afford persons charged with criminal contempt a jury trial to the same extent they are required to afford a jury trial in other criminal cases. But Bloom repudiated more than Debs’ holding. It specifically rejected Debs’ rationale that courts must have self-contained power to punish disobedience of their judgments, because “‘[t]o submit the question of disobedience to another tribunal, be it a jury or another court, would operate to deprive the proceeding of half its efficiency.’” 391 U. S., at 208, quoting Debs, supra, at 595. The Bloom Court, to the contrary, “place[d] little credence in the notion that the independence of the judiciary hangs on the power to try contempts summarily and [was] not persuaded that the additional time and expense possibly involved in submitting serious contempts to juries will seriously handicap the effective functioning of the courts.” Bloom, supra, at 208-209.
The Court argues that Bloom does not control these cases, because “[t]he fact that we have come to regard criminal contempt as ‘a crime in the ordinary sense,’ Bloom, supra, at 201, does not mean that any prosecution of contempt must now be considered an execution of the criminal law in which only the Executive Branch may engage.” Ante, at 799-800. To this argument it could be added that Bloom did not draw the distinction relied on here between the narrow Anderson necessity principle, that the courts must be able to conduct their business free of interference, and the broad necessity principle, that courts must be able to do anything required to give effect to their decisions.
*824While both these points are true, it seems to me that Bloom is nonetheless highly relevant to the present cases. First, it eliminates this Court’s only holdings that the courts must have autonomous power to hold litigants in contempt as a means of enforcing their judgments. And second, it makes clear that the argument from necessity to the existence of an inherent power must be restrained by the totality of the Constitution, lest it swallow up the carefully crafted guarantees of liberty. 391 U. S., at 209. While this principle may have varying application to the jury-trial and separation-of-powers guarantees, it is inconceivable to me that it would not prevent so flagrant a violation of the latter as permitting a judge to promulgate a rule of behavior, prosecute its violation, and adjudicate whether the violation took place. That arrangement is no less fundamental a threat to liberty than is deprivation of a jury trial, since “there is no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.” 1 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws 181, as quoted in The Federalist No. 78, p. 523 (J. Cooke ed. 1961). Moreover, as a practical matter the impairment of judicial power produced by requiring the Executive to prosecute contempts is no more substantial than the impairment produced by requiring a jury. The power to acquit is as decisive as the power not to prosecute; and a jury may abuse the former power with impunity, whereas a United States Attorney must litigate regularly before the judges whose violated judgments he ignores.
Finally, the Court suggests that the various procedural protections that the Constitution requires us to provide con-temners undercut the separation-of-powers argument against judicial prosecution. Ante, at 799, n. 9. The reverse argument — that the structural provisions of the Constitution were not only sufficient but indeed were the only sure mechanism for protecting liberty — was made against adoption of a Bill of Rights. Ultimately, the people elected to have both checks. The Court is right that disregard of one of these raises less of a prospect of “tyrannical licentiousness” than *825disregard of both. But that is no argument for disregard of either.
I would therefore hold that the federal courts have no power to prosecute contemners for disobedience of court judgments, and no derivative power to appoint an attorney to conduct contempt prosecutions. That is not to say, of course, that the federal courts may not impose criminal sentences for such contempts. But they derive that power from the same source they derive the power to pass on other crimes which it has never been contended they may prosecute: a statute enacted by Congress criminalizing the conduct which has been on the books in one form or another since the Judiciary Act of 1789, supra, at 821. See 18 U. S. C. §401.
I — I O
I agree with the Court that the District Judge’s error in appointing Bainton and Devlin to prosecute these contempts requires reversal of the convictions. The very argument given for permitting a court to appoint an attorney to prosecute contempts — that the United States Attorney might exercise his prosecutorial discretion not to pursue the contem-ners — makes clear that that is the result required. In light of the discretion our system allows to prosecutors, which is so broad that we ordinarily find decisions not to prosecute unreviewable, see Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821 (1985), it would be impossible to conclude with any certainty that these prosecutions would have been brought had the court simply referred the matter to the Executive Branch.

 Article II, §2, cl. 2, provides that “Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, ... in the Courts of Law.” (Emphasis added.) There was some suggestion in the Solicitor General’s brief that the appointments in the present cases might be authorized by that provision. Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 17-19, and n. 14. The contention was abandoned at argument, however, Tr. of *816Oral Arg. 26-28, and properly so, since regardless of whether Congress could “by law” authorize judicial appointment of an officer of this sort — a question we need not decide here — it has in fact not done so. The closest thing to a law cited by the Government was Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 42(b), which, as the Court notes, ante, at 794-795, and n. 6, does not purport to bestow appointment power but rather assumes its preexistence. In any event the Rule could not confer Article II appointment authority, since it is a Rule of court rather than an enactment of Congress. See 18 U. S. C. §3772 (1982 ed. and Supp. III).

 In order to resolve the present cases it is only necessary to decide that the power to prosecute is not part of the “judicial power” conferred on Article III courts. It is not necessary to decide whether the Constitution’s vesting of the executive power in the President, Art. II, § 1, cl. 1, forbids Congress from conferring prosecutory authority on private persons. At the time of the Constitution, there existed in England a longstanding custom of private prosecution, see Comment, The Outmoded Concept of Pri*817vate Prosecution, 25 Am. U. L. Rev. 754, 758 (1976). I am unaware, however, of any private prosecution of federal crimes. The Judiciary Act of 1789 provided for the appointment in each judicial district of “a meet person learned in the law to act as attorney for the United States . . . whose duty it shall be to prosecute in such district all delinquents for crimes and offences, cognizable under the authority of the United States.” §35, 1 Stat. 92; see generally Comment, 25 Am. U. L. Rev., supra, at 762-764.