Court Opinion

ID: 9425832
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:15:56.22779+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:57.837314
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Marshall,
dissenting in part.
I join Parts II and III of the opinion of the Court, but I cannot join the holding in Part I that petitioner was not entitled to a jury trial. Petitioner was summarily convicted of contempt and sentenced to almost four and one-half years in prison. In my view, this sentence marked the contempt charges against petitioner as “serious” rather than “petty” and called into play petitioner’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial.
The Court, however, relies on the fact that the trial judge subsequently realized his error and reduced the sentence to six months. The Court characterizes this as a determination by the State that “the contempt is not so serious as to warrant more than a six-month sentence.” Ante, at 496. In my view, the trial judge’s reduction of petitioner’s sentence was a transparent effort to circumvent this Court’s Sixth Amendment decisions and to save his summary conviction of petitioner without the necessity of airing the charges before an impartial jury. It is hardly coincidence that petitioner’s sentence was reduced to the maximum that our decisions would permit.
Today’s decision represents an extraordinarily rigid and wooden application of the six-month rule that the Court has fashioned to determine when the Sixth Amend*505ment right is applicable. In permitting this obvious device to succeed, I think that the Court changes the nature of the six-month rule from a reasonable effort to distinguish between “serious” and “petty” contempts into an arbitrary barrier behind which judges who wish to protect their summary contempt convictions without exposing their charges to the harsh light of a jury may safely hide. The very fact that such a substantial contempt sentence was imposed, and then reduced to the six-month maximum, should be a warning to us that the fairness of the process which petitioner has received is suspect, and that the contempt charges involved here especially require the scrutiny of a jury trial. Statements in the plurality opinion in Cheff v. Schnackenberg, 384 U. S. 373, 380 (1966), to the contrary notwithstanding, I do not believe that petitioner could be deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to jury trial, once it attached through the imposition of a substantial sentence, by the subsequent action of the trial court or an appellate court in reducing the sentence.