Court Opinion

ID: 9426223
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:09.8798+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:59.646794
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stewart,
with whom Mr. Justice Marshall concurs, dissenting.
I would have denied the petition for certiorari in this case, but, now that the writ has been granted, I would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.
This case is not of a piece with Wainwright v. Stone, 414 U. S. 21, upon which the Court so heavily relies. There the Florida courts had repeatedly and explicitly ruled that the state law in question prohibited precisely the conduct in which the defendants were found to have engaged. Here, by contrast, the Tennessee courts had never ruled that the act that Locke was found to have committed was covered by the vague and cryptic language of the Tennessee statute, Tenn. Code -Ann. § 39-707. The Court today emphasizes that a previous Tennessee court opinion had cited a decision of a Maine court construing a similar statute “broadly,”-but even the cited Maine decision had not construed the statute to cover the conduct in question here. And a later Tennessee decision would have supported the inference that this conduct was not proscribed by the Tennessee statute. Stephens v. State, 489 S. W. 2d 542 (1972).
*60In the Stone case, supra, the Florida statute had “been construed to forbid identifiable conduct so that 'interpretation by [the state court] puts these words in the statute as definitely as if it had been so amended by the legislature 414 U. S., at 23. In the present case, by contrast, the state courts had never held that the statutory language here at issue covered the respondent’s conduct.
As the Court of Appeals pointed out, the respondent in this case could, and probably should, be prosecuted for aggravated assault and battery. But I think the Court of Appeals was correct in holding that the Tennessee statute under which the defendant was in fact prosecuted was unconstitutionally vague as here applied.