Court Opinion

ID: 9422097
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:01:17.251356+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:34.356262
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stewart,
whom The Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Black, and Mr. Justice Douglas join,
dissenting.
To be sure, it is now a commonplace of our law that the commission of a substantive crime and a conspiracy to commit it may be treated by Congress as separate offenses, cumulatively punishable. Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U. S. 640, 643. It is also true that Congress has often chosen to exercise its power to make separate offenses of the two.1 But neither of these generalities provides an answer to the question now before us. The question here is the meaning of this law, the Hobbs Anti-Racketeering Act. I do not agree that under this statute a man can be separately convicted and cumulatively pun*598ished for obstructing commerce by extorting money, and for conspiring to obstruct commerce by the same extortion. My view is based both upon the language of the statute and upon its history, considered in the light of principles that have consistently guided this Court’s decisions in related areas of federal criminal law.
The relevant section of the Act, repeated for convenience in the margin,2 is not a model of precise verbal structure. Purely as a matter of syntax, the section could be read as creating separate offenses for obstructing commerce, for delaying commerce, and for affecting commerce by any one of the proscribed means. It could be read, again merely as a matter of grammar, as creating distinct offenses for obstructing commerce by robbery, for threatening physical violence to property in connection with the same robbery, for committing the physical violence which had been threatened, for attempting to do so, and for conspiring to do so. Read in such a way the Act could be made to justify the imposition upon one man of separate sentences totalling more than a hundred years for one basic criminal transaction. To construe this statute that way would obviously be absurd, and I do not understand that the Court today even remotely suggests any such construction.
The Act, then, must mean something else. I think its language can fairly be read as imposing a maximum twenty-year sentence for each actual or threatened interference with interstate commerce accomplished by any one or more of the proscribed means. Such a reading of *599the Act does violence neither to semantics nor to common sense. It is fully justified by the legislative history, and it is consistent with settled principles governing the construction of ambiguous criminal statutes. If this is what the Act means, then the indictment in the present case charged but a single offense, and it was wrong to impose two separate sentences upon the petitioner.
The antecedent of the present Act was the Anti-Racketeering Act of 1934. That legislation was originally introduced after extensive hearings before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Commerce', popularly known as the Committee on Racketeering. The original bill did not contain any reference to conspiracy. S. 2248, 73d Cong., 2d Sess. The Committee Report consisted of a memorandum from the Department of Justice, stating that the purpose of the bill was to permit prosecution of so-called “racketeers” for acts constituting racketeering. Significantly, the memorandum stated “The accompanying proposed statute is designed to avoid many of the embarrassing limitations in the wording and interpretation of the Sherman Act, and to extend Federal jurisdiction over all restraints of any commerce within the scope of the Federal Government’s constitutional powers. Such restraints if accompanied by extortion, violence, coercion, or intimidation, are made felonies, whether the restraints are in jorm of conspiracies or not.” (Emphasis added.) S. Rep. No. 532, 73d Cong., 2d Sess., p. 1.
After the bill had passed the Senate fear was expressed that some of the provisions of the proposed legislation might endanger legitimate activities of organized labor. In response to these fears the bill was revised by the House Judiciary Committee along lines suggested by the Attorney General, and it was then that the statutory reference to conspiracy was added, without explanation. H. R. Rep. No. 1833, 73d Cong., 2d Sess. The bill was passed by the House after adoption of an amendment *600reducing the maximum punishment provision to ‘TO years or by a fine of $10,000 or both.” 78 Cong. Rec. 11403. Thereafter, the Senate approved the House bill without debate. 78 Cong. Rec. 11482.
In 1942 this Court considered the 1934 Act in United States v. Local 807, 315 U. S. 521, holding that under the statute’s labor exemption the petitioners there had been wrongly convicted. Within a few weeks after that decision, Representative Hobbs introduced a bill in the House designed to eliminate the labor exemption from the statute. Similar amendatory bills were introduced in succeeding sessions of Congress, and in 1946 the Act was finally amended by deletion of the provision exempting wages paid by an employer to an employee, the exemption upon which the decision in the Local 807 case had been based.
With that aspect of the 1946 amendment we are not here concerned. But the amendment made one other significant change in the Act: it increased the maximum penalty from ten to twenty years’ imprisonment. The congressional debates over that provision throw considerable light upon the problem now before us. For two conclusions can be drawn from a review of the discussions in Congress of the proposed increase in the penalty provision. First, it is clear that many Members of Congress were seriously concerned by the severity of a penalty of twenty years in prison for violation of this statute. Expressions such as “too drastic,” “too severe,” and “excessive” were used in describing what was referred to by one Member as “even a possible penalty of 20 years.” 89 Cong. Rec. 3162, 3194, 3201, 3229. Secondly, it is clear that there was general agreement among both the proponents and the opponents of the legislation that twenty years was to be the maximum penalty that could be imposed upon a defendant convicted of violating the *601statute. 89 Cong. Rec. 3226. No one ever suggested that cumulative penalties could be inflicted.
In sum, then, we have here a statute which, as a matter of English language, can fairly be read as imposing a single penalty for each interference or threatened interference with interstate commerce by any or all of the prohibited means. We have evidence stemming from the very origin of the legislation that the unit of prosecution under the statute was to be each restraint of commerce, not each means by which the restraint was accomplished. As the original Senate Committee Report stated, “restraints if accompanied by extortion, violence, coercion, or intimidation, are made felonies, whether the restraints are in form of conspiracies or not.” Finally, we have every indication that when the Act was amended in 1946 Congress was agreed that but a single maximum sentence of twenty years could be imposed upon conviction, and that many Members of Congress considered even that penalty far too severe.
It is said, however, that despite all this we must attribute to Congress a “tacit purpose” to provide cumulative punishments for conspiracy and substantive conduct under this statute. We are told that this presumption of a tacit purpose must prevail because there is no “specific language to the contrary” in the Act.3 But to indulge in such a presumption seems to me wholly at odds with principles firmly established by our previous decisions.
*602In Bell v. United States, 349 U. S. 81, we described the approach to be taken in a case such as this. “When Congress has the will it has no difficulty in expressing it ... . When Congress leaves to the Judiciary the task of imputing to Congress an undeclared will, the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of lenity.” 349 U. S., at 83. In Ladner v. United States, 358 U. S. 169, we said: “This policy of lenity means that the Court will not interpret a federal criminal statute so as to increase the penalty that it places on an individual when such an interpretation can be based on no more than a guess as to what Congress intended.” 358 U. S., at 178. In Prince v. United States, 352 U. S. 322, we spoke of the doctrine as one “of not attributing to Congress, in the enactment of criminal statutes, an intention to punish more severely than the language of its laws clearly imports in the light of pertinent legislative history.” 352 U. S., at 329. These recent expressions are but restatements in a specific context of the ancient rule that a criminal statute is to be strictly construed. I would not depart from that rule in the present case.

 “Whoever in any way or degree obstructs, delays, or affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce, by robbery or extortion or attempts or conspires so to do, or commits or threatens physical violence to any person or property in furtherance of a plan or purpose to do anything in violation of this section shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.” 18 U. S. C. § 1951 (a).

 The Court’s reliance upon American Tobacco Co. v. United States, 328 U. S. 781, seems to me misplaced. The discussion of multiple punishment in that opinion was in response to the contention that Congress could not, because of the double jeopardy provision of the Fifth Amendment, impose multiple punishment for substantive conduct and conspiracy. Moreover, to decide the meaning of this Act upon the basis of what Congress may have provided in another statute, would seem to me a dubious way to resolve the issue. Cf. Bell v. United States, 349 U. S. 81, 83.