Court Opinion

ID: 9421010
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:56:38.924048+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:28.163877
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Black,
with whom Mr. Justice Douglas joins,
concurring.
I concur in the judgment, but regret my inability to agree with the reasons for affirmance expressed in the opinion of Mr. Justice Jackson. The language of § 3 of the Act on which the charges rest requires dealers to report “all sales and deliveries of gambling devices . . . .” No other language in the Act, and nothing in its legislative history, indicates to me that Congress was not here hitting at “all sales,” including purely intrastate ones. In this situation I do not feel at liberty to read intrastate sales out of the Act, even if constitutional questions could thereby be avoided.*
Section 3 requires a gambling device dealer to register with the Attorney General “his name or trade name, the address of his principal place of business, and the ad*453dresses of his places of business in such district.” (Emphasis supplied.) Thereafter dealers must make detailed monthly reports of inventories, sales and deliveries for the “places of business” in the district. But the use of the phrase “such district” is bound to leave a dealer bewildered. Does the phrase refer to the place where a dealer is compelled to file his papers? Or does it simply force him to tell in what “district” he maintains “places”? If a dealer is able to solve this puzzle, how is he to find “such district”? The Act gives no hint as to where the “district” is or how a person can locate it. It never describes any “district.” Yet failure to comply with these unascertainable requirements is punishable by fine up to $5,000, imprisonment up to two years, or both. This punishment, at least, is certain. I would apply the established rule that “a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application, violates the first essential of due process of law.” Connolly v. General Construction Co., 269 U. S. 385, 391.
Nor can a criminal statute too vague to be constitutionally valid be saved by additions made to it by the Attorney General. Of course, Congress could have prescribed that reports should be made at reasonably accessible places designated by the Attorney General. Cf. United States v. Eaton, 144 U. S. 677. But the Act under consideration did not do this. The Attorney General did promulgate an attempted clarifying regulation under the purported authority of R. S. § 161, 5 U. S. C. § 22. That statute provides no more than a general authorization to the heads of all departments to prescribe regulations governing their departments, officers, clerks, records, papers, etc. There is certainly not sufficient specificity in this grant concerning routine departmental business to support the Attorney General’s attempt to *454infuse life into an Act of Congress unenforceable for vagueness. The vital omission in this criminal statute can be supplied by the legislative branch of government, not by the Attorney General. I would affirm these judgments.

Holding that the Act requires reports of interstate sales would raise a serious constitutional question. The Act makes it a crime to transport gambling devices in interstate commerce. Consequently, requiring monthly reports of sales and deliveries made by an interstate dealer would require him to make monthly reports of his own crimes. The Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall be compelled “to be a witness against himself.”