Court Opinion

ID: 9473299
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:25:34.944723+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:26.321580
License: Public Domain

FERGUSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in the opinion of the court but write separately to clarify a distinction between the necessity defense and civil disobedience which the majority appears not to consider. In addition, I cannot subscribe to any statement which purports to impose punishment on a defendant out of solicitude for the “validation of [the defendant’s] sincerity that lawful punishment provides.” At 432.
Civil disobedience has a long heritage in this country, beginning as far back as the Boston Tea Party. Moral motivations have frequently prompted citizens to violate laws they personally consider unjust. Some, like Thoreau, chose to refrain from society’s fundamental obligation to pay taxes for the common benefit in order to express their repugnance to a government that fostered slavery. Others, like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., choose to combat unjust laws directly by the nonviolent transgression of their terms. Regardless of the means chosen, those who practice civil disobedience do not challenge the rule of law or the incidents of an ordered society. Those engaged in civil disobedience acknowledge the validity of the pertinent law but find it personally offensive to their individual moral judgments.
Most of us refrain from picking and choosing those laws to which we would adhere. Those who practice civil disobedience transgress the law out of a conviction that a law or a set of laws are morally repugnant. The legitimacy that these laws have earned by virtue of their acceptance in society denigrates the moral authority attendant to the balance of society’s laws. While rejecting the moral validity of these laws, those who espouse civil disobedience do so precisely because these laws enjoy society’s imprimatur. They violate the law in order to obstruct its enforcement or to provide the catalyst for its subsequent abandonment by society. Their actions are not a denial of the legitimacy of the law or laws but rather an affirmation of the existence and applicability of the law in all its perceived iniquity.
Unlike the tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience, the necessity defense does not presuppose the applicability and legitimacy of any particular law as the factor precipitating the need to transgress society’s laws. The necessity defense is a defense of justification whereby a defendant contends that his conduct is not unlawful given the peculiar circumstances incident to his election to follow a particular course of *436conduct. Instead of the protester’s affirmation of the pernicious legitimacy of a particular law, the necessity defense purports to cloak the violation of an unchallenged law with the veneer of legality based on the context of a defendant’s calculated choice among treacherous alternatives. The defense, which we have inherited from early English common law, posits that “[a] man may break the words of the law, and yet not break the law itself ... where the words of them are broken ... through necessity.” Reninger v. Fagossa, 1 Plowd. 1, 75 Eng.Rep. 1 (1551). See Arnolds & Garland, The Defense of Necessity in Criminal Law: The Right to Choose the Lesser Evil, 65 J.Crim.L. & Criminology 289, 291 (1974) (noting the origins of the necessity defense in early English common law).
As a defense of justification, the necessity defense proclaims legal some conduct which, in other contexts, would plainly be illegal. Its unparalleled potency, however, counsels caution in its application to the array of human conduct brought before the courts. The defense is not aimed at. subverting existing laws or at hastening their demise. Rather, the defense simply recognizes that, in certain circumstances, the choice made by the defendant is a choice that society would also have made and now is given the opportunity to ratify.
Those who engage in civil disobedience to promote their individual moral judgments over those of society are willing to accept society’s judgment of their conduct because it is an allegedly flawed judgment. See United, States v. Moylan, 417 F.2d 1002, 1008 (4th Cir.1969). They take no comfort from the legal system’s willingness to punish them for their beliefs. Faced with the choice between their individual mores and the requirements of the law, they choose to follow their own lights. The necessity defense, on the other hand, involves the ratification of a defendant’s conduct by a society willing to make the same considered judgment.
In conclusion, the majority opinion fails to appreciate the essential difference between nonviolent civil disobedience as a means of challenging existing law and the assertion of necessity as a justification for otherwise unlawful conduct. References to the cathartic effect of punishment are, therefore, completely misplaced.