Court Opinion

ID: 9841936
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-22 20:11:48.343724+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:06:25.723419
License: Public Domain

Dissenting opinion of
Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
in which the Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Reed concur.
The device of probation grew out of a realization that to make the punishment fit the criminal requires wisdom seldom available immediately after conviction. Imposition of sentence at that time is much too often an obligation to exercise caprice, and to make convicted persons serve such a sentence is apt to make law a collaborator in new anti-social consequences. Probation is an experimental device serving both society and the offender. It adds the means for exercising wisely that discretion which, within appropriate limits, is given to courts. The probation system was devised to allow persons guilty of antisocial conduct to continue at large but under appropriate safeguards. The hope of the system is that the probationer will derive encouragement and collaboration in his endeavors to remain in society and never serve a day in prison. The fulfillment of that hope largely rests on the efficacy of the probation system, and that depends on a sufficient number of trained and skilful probation officers. Thus the probation system is in effect a reliance on the future to reveal treatment appropriate to the probationer. In the nature of things, knowledge which may thus be gained is not generally available when the moment for conventional sentencing arrives. Since assessment of an appropriate punishment immediately upon conviction becomes very largely a judgment based on speculation, the function of probation is to supplant such speculative judgment by judgment based on experience. For this *274reason probation laws fix a tolerably long period of probation, as, for instance, the five-year period of the Federal Probation Act.
In view of all that led to the adoption of probation and the light its workings have cast, the imposition of a suspended term sentence is meaningless if indeed it does not contradict the central idea underlying probation. A convicted person who is given a term sentence and then placed on probation hopes never to spend a day in prison. The court returning the probationer to the community likewise assumes that the influence of probation will save the probationer from future imprisonment. To treat the pronouncement of a term sentence as a kind of bargain whereby the probationer knows that, no matter what, he cannot be put in prison beyond the term so named is to give a wholly unreal interpretation to the procedure. We certainly should not countenance the notion that a probationer has a vested interest in the original sentence nor encourage him to weigh the length of such a sentence against any advantages he may find in violating his probation. To bind the court to such a sentence is undesirable in its consequences and violative of the philosophy of probation. As we pointed out very recently, the difference to a probationer between imposition of sentence followed by probation and suspension of the imposition of sentence “is one of trifling degree.” Korematsu v. United States, 319 U. S. 432, 435. The fact is that term sentences of which the execution is suspended are likely to be as full of vagaries and as unrelated to insight relevant to treatment for particular individuals, as are term sentences. the execution of which is not suspended. The capricious nature of such defined sentences dominates all statistical and other evidence regarding conventional judicial sentencing, e. g., Criminal Justice in Cleveland (1922) 303 et seq. and particularly Tables 20 and 21, and Ambard v. Attorney General for Trinidad and Tobago [1936] A. C. 322, and *275has led to suggestions for more scientific methods of sentencing, see Smith, Alfred E., Progressive Democracy (1928) 209 et seq.; Warner and Cabot, Judges and Law Reform (1936) 156 et seq.; Cantor, Crime and Society (1939) 254 et seq.; Glueck, Criminal Careers in Retrospect (1943) c. XVII.
If the experience of the District Court for the Southern District of New York — the district having the heaviest volume of federal criminal prosecutions — is a fair guide, the imposition of sentence is more frequently suspended than is its execution. The only practical result of the strained reading of the powers of the district courts by the decision today may well lead trial judges generally to place probationers on probation without any tentative sentence. A construction which leads to such a merely formal result, one so easily defeated in practice, should be avoided unless the purpose, the text and the legislative history of the Act converge toward it. The policy of probation clearly counsels against it, and neither the words of the Act nor their legislative history contradict that policy. So far as it is significant on this phase, the legislative history looks against rather than for such an undesirable construction. In contrast to the present Act, the first measure passed by Congress conferred only the power to suspend execution of sentence and upon its revocation required the defendant “to serve the sentence . . . originally imposed.” H. R. 20414, 64th Cong., 2d Sess. (1917). This enactment suffered a pocket veto. In reporting the present legislation to the House of Representatives, its Committee on the Judiciary explained that “In case of failure to observe these conditions [of probation], those on probation may be returned to the court for sentence.” H. Report No. 1377, 68th Cong., 2d Sess., 2.
And the text of the legislation does not defeat this policy. Indubitably petitioner was arrested and brought before the court during his period of probation. In that event *276the statute is explicit in its direction that “the court may revoke the probation . . . and may impose any sentence which might originally have been imposed." The court having followed the mandate of the statute, it seems irrelevant and unimportant whether petitioner became a probationer either by a postponement of sentence or by a suspension of a sentence already imposed. We cannot say that the statute does not contemplate that the new sentence which it authorizes shall be effective. The obvious purpose is that it should become so either by superseding any sentence earlier imposed or by revoking the suspension of imposition of sentence if none was imposed. Such is the plain meaning and effect of the direction that upon the arrest of the probationer “the court may revoke the probation or the suspension of sentence, and may impose any sentence which might originally have been imposed." In other words, suspension whether of the sentence or of its execution leaves a trial court free to commit the criminal to prison if he fails to meet the test of freedom during the probationary period.
It would be strange if the Constitution stood in the way of a system so designed for the humane treatment of offenders. To vest in courts the power of adjusting the consequences of criminal conduct to the character and capacity of an offender, as revealed by a testing period of probation, of course does not offend the safeguard of the Fifth Amendment against double punishment. By forbidding that no person shall “be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb," that Amendment guarded against the repetition of history by trying a man twice in a new and independent case when he already had been tried once, see Holmes, J., in Kepner v. United States, 195 U. S. 100, 134, or punishing him for an offense when he had already suffered the punishment for it. But to set a man at large after conviction on condition of his good be*277havior and on default of such condition to incarcerate him, is neither to try him twice nor to punish him twice. If Congress sees fit, as it has seen fit, to employ such a system of criminal justice there is nothing in the Constitution to hinder.