Court Opinion

ID: 9453542
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:16:50.193699+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:42.314239
License: Public Domain

GODBOLD, Circuit Judge
(concurring in part and dissenting in part):
I concur as to all appellants except Sandra Adickes. As to her, I respectfully dissent. Factually Miss Adickes is somewhere between State of Georgia v. Rachel 1 and City of Greenwood, Miss. v. Peacock.2 But her case is removable only if it is within Rachel.
The vagrancy charges against Miss. Adickes were shown to be baseless and an unsophisticated subterfuge. But that does not determine whether her case was removable under § 1443(1). The vagrancy charge against her was that she did “unlawfully, wilfully and knowingly become a vagrant by habitually loafing and loitering in idleness on the street and avenues in public places of said city [of Hattiesburg] the greater portion of her time without any regular employment and without any visible means of support.”
All appellants were participants in a “freedom school” program in Mississippi. The appellants other than Miss Adickes were arrested three days after her arrest, while sitting in the Hattiesburg public library, having insisted upon their right to use it and having declined to accept use of the Negro library as a substitute. The only conduct they engaged in was the use of an “establishment or place” at which segregation was purported to be *476required by a subdivision of the state. See § 202 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a-l. See also note 1 to majority opinion. Their cases are controlled by Rachel. The use of the label “vagrancy” in the charges against them instead of the label “trespass” does not require a result different from Rachel. The inquiry is to the scope and character of the conduct engaged in by the accused, not to categorizations, accurate or inaccurate, given to that conduct in the making of criminal charges.3
The case of Miss Adickes is governed by Peacock. Se went with six Negro students to the library to seek library service. Requests of one or more of the students to be issued cards were denied. Some of the students obtained magazines and sat in lounge chairs, others and Miss Adickes sat at a table. After about half an hour a police officer came and told all Negroes and white persons in the library to leave, that it was being closed. Miss Adickes and the students left the library, stopped outside to ascertain that it actually was being closed, walked down Main Street, turned onto Pine Street, and went to Woolworth’s, intending to have lunch. The tables and booths at Woolworth’s were filled. They walked to the back of the store and looked at fish, and went to the front again, but the one booth then empty was taken before they got to it. The group then decided to leave the Woolworth store and go to the Kress store. As they entered Kress they saw a police car parked across Main Street. The group went inside and were seated in booths. The Kress waitress took the orders of the Negro children but refused to serve Miss Adickes; the children said they did not wish to be served if she could not be served, and all left the store together. As they did so the police car pulled across the street and an officer alighted and arrested Miss Adickes on a charge of vagrancy.
From the removal petition and the hearing thereon it is plain that the vagrancy charge was baseless and the arrest a flagrant wrong. But — “It is not enough to support removal under § 1443 (1) to allege or show that the defendant’s federal equal civil rights have been illegally and corruptly denied by state administrative officials in advance of trial, that the charges against the defendant are false, or that the defendant is unable to obtain a fair trial in a particular state court.” Peacock, 384 U.S. at 828, 86 S.Ct. at 1812. An outrageous denial of federal rights is not coterminous with a right to remove under § 1443(1). Peacock, 384 U.S. at 828, 86 S.Ct. 1800. As Peacock points out, the federal courts are not powerless to redress the wrong done to the victim of a baseless charge, and the court (384 U.S. at 828-829, 86 S.Ct. 1800) discusses some of the remedies.
For Miss Adickes removability is the wrong remedy. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 “substitutes a right for a crime.” Hamm v. City of Rock Hill, 379 U.S. 306, 85 S.Ct. 384, 13 L.Ed.2d 300, 307 (1964). Miss Adickes’ conduct was broader in its scope than enjoyment of use of the library and of the public accommodations 4 at the two stores. On the particular day her presence on and movement about the streets of Hattiesburg, and into and out of the library and the stores, was close in time and in place with her efforts to use the library and the restaurant facilities of the two stores. But closeness or even concurrence is not the test — scope and quality of conduct charged to be a violation of law, measured against the four corners of conduct the exercise of which is guaranteed by the 1964 Act, is the test. There is no federal right to be a vagrant or a federal immunity from groundless arrest on a vagrancy charge.
*477The petitioners in Peacock were civil rights workers in Mississippi. Some were engaged in getting Negroes registered as voters — they were charged with obstructing the public streets. Others alleged that while peacefully picketing they were arrested and charged with assault and battery or interfering with an officer. Others were charged with parading without a permit, illegal operation of a motor vehicle, or contributing to delinquency of a minor. Some were charged with disturbing the peace or inciting to riot. The relation of cause and effect between protected civil rights activities of the Peacock petitioners and their baseless arrest is not subject to rational doubt.5 But cause and effect was rejected as the yardstick. Criminal charges are not removable on the ground they are baseless and made to punish and deter exercise of protected rights. Charges are removable if quantitatively and qualitatively they involve conduct coterminous with activity protected under the Civil Rights Act, i. e., “substitution of right for crime.”
In Peacock the Supreme Court has directed the Federal courts away from making factual inquiries approaching that of trial of the merits as an incident of determining removability. The problem is part of the larger question of preliminary determination of whether civil rights will be denied in the courts of the state. Rachel carves out a narrow exception to the Strauder-Rives 6 doctrine. The very act of bringing the Rachel defendants to trial inevitably denied them their civil rights because what was charged to be criminal had been expressly made a right. Once the four corners of the Rachel-Peacock test are departed from the federal courts edge into exactly the factual inquiries forbidden, just as has been done in this case — is the charge “baseless”; does the charge “arise from” exercise of guaranteed rights; is it “caused by” exercise of guaranteed rights; or, as appellants phrase it in their brief, is it “concerned with” guaranteed rights, or does arrest arise “as the result of protected conduct” ; is the charge a “subterfuge”; or, as the majority phrase it in this case, did the activities of Miss Adickes to use public accommodations “trigger” her arrest? We know that Miss Adickes was not loafing and loitering in idleness on the streets the greater portion of her time without regular employment and visible means of support, but our knowledge comes from the very factual inquiry the courts are directed not to make, and not from the fact that the activity, if engaged in, is a guaranteed right which replaces a crime.
Rachel and Peacock could have significantly expanded the removal statute. Instead, Rachel, as adversely clarified by Peacock, opened the Rives-Powers [Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Powers, 201 U.S. 1, 26 S.Ct. 387, 50 L.Ed. 633] barrier only a crack; removal is now available, apart from cases where a state statute on its face denies rights, only where a federal statute on its face prohibits prosecution of specified conduct. Thus, although removal is desirable in all cases such as Rachel and Peacock in which discriminatory application of valid laws deters the exercise of federally secured rights, it remains unavailable in most such cases.
Note, 41 Tul.L.Rev. 168, 181-182 (1966).
In Wyche v. State of Louisiana, No. 24,165, 394 F.2d 927 (5th Cir., Oct. 26, 1967), recently decided by this panel, the petitioner was accused of aggravated burglary by unauthorized entry of a restaurant with intent of committing a battery. The state charge involved the totality of *478activity protected by the Act plus other conduct committed at the same time and place and while engaged in the protected activity. The entire spectrum of protected activity was included in the scope of a wider spectrum of criminal conduct charged. If the federal right was removed there was no crime. In contrast, if the protected activity engaged in almost contemporaneously by Miss Adickes is removed there still can be a crime as charged.
Only recently this court has evidenced its intent to abide by the “substitution of right for crime” or “scope of conduct” test of Peacock despite efforts to have it move to the “causal relation” or “trigger” analysis employed by the majority. In Orange v. State of Alabama, 386 F.2d 829 (5th Cir., Nov. 22, 1967), Orange was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor because of his participation in marches protesting the arrests of 15 Negroes who had sought service in a restaurant and after refusal had been arrested on charges of trespass after warning. Other appellants were arrested for marching in the vicinity of the county jail to protest the arrests. Their removal petitions had been filed before Rachel and Peacock were decided. In this court these appellants asked their cases be remanded to the district court in the light of Rachel and Peacock to allow specific allegations that the purpose of their arrests and prosecutions was to punish them for attempting to secure nondiscriminatory treatment in places of public accommodation, although not necessarily at the precise time of the marches. This court refused to remand, saying that it was unwilling to extend the rationale of Rachel and Peacock. At the same time the court reversed as to the appellants who had been arrested while in the restaurant seeking service.
Factually the Orange appellants are further removed from Rachel than Miss Adickes, for she herself sought to use the library and restaurant, and her arrest was closer in time. Nevertheless Orange seems to me to represent the view that the Rachel-Peacock distinction will be adhered to by this court. The Supreme Court has articulated the distinction and what it considers the compelling reasons for it, and I consider myself bound to apply its mandate when the facts require.

. 384 U.S. 780, 86 S.Ct. 1783, 16 L.Ed.2d 925 (1966).

. 384 U.S. 808, 86 S.Ct. 1800, 16 L.Ed.2d 944 (1966).

. Wyche v. State of Louisiana, No. 24,165, 394 F.2d 927 (5th Cir., Oct. 26, 1967). See also Judge Sobeloff, concurring in North Carolina v. Hawkins, 365 F.2d 559, 563 (4th Cir. 1966): “The test of remov-ability is the content of the petition, not the characterization given the conduct in question by the prosecutor.”

. Section 201, Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a.

. Note the characterization of the majority opinion in Peacock, by the minority: “For reasons not clear, a baseless prosecution, designed to punish and deter the exercise of such federally protected rights as voting, is not seen by the majority to constitute a denial of equal civil rights.”

. Strauder v. State of West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 25 L.Ed. 664 (1880); State of Virginia v. Rives, 100 U.S. 313, 25 L.Ed. 667 (1880).