Court Opinion

ID: 9450761
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:56:53.081087+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:26.408593
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
This Court, almost if not quite unanimously, has recently declared1 that the Executive has the uncontrolled discretion to determine whether a prosecution once commenced must go forward. That principle, by way of analogy, is pertinent here. Criminal contempt, as the cases often and just recently point out, partakes much of a criminal proceeding. A major distinction, however, is the identity of the initiating agency — for traditional criminal proceedings, the Executive; for criminal contempt, the Court. Despite some fundamental differences, I think the parallel is close, and I therefore agree with the Court that a Court initiating a charge of criminal contempt must have the power to determine whether the proceeding once commenced must inevitably go forward to trial and resulting conviction or acquittal. The Judiciary clothed in this particular instance with awesome powers comparable to those of the Executive in criminal proceedings has the right, and probably the unreviewable duty, to determine whether the public interest will best be served by a discontinuance short of trial. My difference, therefore, is in the assessment of the public interest and how it will be furthered or hindered by this action.2
In concluding that the public interest requires that we continue on with the trial of the remaining charges we set in motion, I would emphasize, as does Judge Wisdom in Part V of his dissent, that I neither intimate guilt nor prejudge the outcome. Our dissents merely reiterate as echoes what our earlier order declared —there is probable cause and reasonable need for instituting and trying the charges. To conclude that we should adhere is no more a pre judgment than the entry of the order initiating the charges. Surely, the act of the Court in assaying the case and the public interest in its further continuance cannot transmute the dissenters’ voice of difference into a prejudgment on the merits.
The Court, without demonstrating any factual support for its conclusion that all should halt now, dismisses the proceedings. Within the Court’s announced opinion, I find no support for this gen*103eralized conclusion, nor can I find any when I examine all possible reasons.
We are dealing here with conduct of the State’s highest officer. That conduct —whatever might be its legal sufficiency to supply the essential ingredient of willfulness — was and was intended by Governor Barnett to be a physical obstruction to this Court’s decree that Meredith be admitted to the University. The conflict, on Governor Barnett’s own words,3 was the State of Mississippi versus The United States of America. Consequently, as articulated by Judge Wisdom in Part IV of his dissent, this is more than contempt of this Court. The “contempt charge” is “the contempt of a governor of a state against the Nation.”
Governor Barnett, for reasons officially proclaimed, undertook physically to prevent Meredith’s admission, the very thing specifically ordered by this Court. He was, in short, marshaling the whole force of Mississippi in opposing, not upholding, compliance with the Court’s orders. This parallels closely action of another and earlier governor whose conduct was the subject of Sterling v. Constantin, 1932, 287 U.S. 378, 53 S.Ct. 190, 77 L.Ed. 375. Of his effort to justify the use of state military force to prevent compliance with a positive order of a Federal Court, the United States Supreme Court had this to say:
“Instead of affording them protection in the lawful exercise of their rights as determined by the courts [.the Governor] sought, by his executive orders, to make that exercise impossible. In the place of judicial procedure, available in the courts which were open and functioning, he set up his executive commands which brooked neither delay nor appeal. In particular, to the process of the Federal court actually and properly engaged in examining and protecting an asserted federal right, the Governor interposed the obstruction of his will, subverting the federal authority. The assertion that such action can be taken as conclusive proof of its own necessity and must be accepted as in itself due process of law has no support in the decisions of this Court.” 287 U.S. at 402, 53 S.Ct. at 197.
Almost as if writing in 1932 of Governor Barnett's actions in 1962, that unanimous Court through Chief Justice Hughes clearly outlines where duty lies:
“If it be assumed that the Governor was entitled to declare a state of insurrection and to bring military force to the aid of civil authority, the proper use of that power in this instance was to maintain the federal court in the exercise of its jurisdiction, and not to attempt to override it; to aid in making its process effective and not to nullify it, to remove, and not to create, obstructions to the exercise by the complainants of their rights as judicially declared.” 287 U.S. at 404, 53 S.Ct. at 197.
Precisely because his duty was so high, the likely consequences of his interposition so devastating, the responsibilities of moral leadership in the maintenance of law and order in the face of unpopular situations so awesome, it is important that Governor Barnett be held accountable for his actions which he would be the first to minimize in importance. To be held accountable is not to forecast the outcome. To be held accountable is not to speak in terms of punishment or even the certainty of it. To be held accountable is merely to require that through an orderly, fair trial,4 it be determined whether the conduct of *104this high officer was or was not legally justifiable, was or was not a willful disobedience to a lawful order of this Court.
Now no one will ever know. The public — whose interest is at stake as we try to make constitutional federalism work— will know only that a governor successfully interposed himself to prevent compliance. It will know only that, save for skirmishes on procedural problems over the course of three years, such Governor never had to answer to the charges5 which this Court thought serious enough to warrant their being brought and substantial enough to occupy its attention and that of the Nation’s highest tribunal on several occasions, one of which concerned an issue of constitutional proportions closer in its 5-to-4 outcome than the 4-to-3 vote here. The chapter,6 with its death and violence, is indeed a regrettable one. But it is so not because a Court order was issued. Bather, it is because the Court order was not affirmatively, actively enforced by those now charged with obstruction of it. In the supremacy of the Constitution, in the supremacy of the rule of law, much suffers when a governor can do the things here charged without ever facing up to either the consequences 7 or even a judicial determination of legality or illegality.

. United States v. Cox [Jan. 26, 1965], Hauberg v. Cox [Jan. 26, 1965], 5 Cir., 1965, 342 F.2d 167.

. Although I think the proceeding against Ross Barnett should go forward, I would find it easy to join in a severance (and postponement) of the case against former Lieutenant Governor, now Governor, Paul B. Johnson, Jr.

. See note 2 and accompanying text Part VI of Judge Wisdom’s dissent.

. Although discussed candidly by Government counsel on its own motion in the briefs precipitated by the pretrial hearing held in the fall of 1964, none of the briefs (numbering in the hundreds of pages) filed by the highly skilled, energetic and responsible counsel for Governor Barnett even remotely hint at the disqualification of any one or more or all of the members of this Court to sit on this case, because the order charged to be violated was ours, or that we initiated *104the show cause order and the order charging criminal contempt. On the contrary, they have assiduously refrained from replying to, or discussing, Government counsel’s comments on this aspect or suggesting that we should recuse ourselves. To be sure, a jury trial, either mandatory or discretionary, either before this Court or upon a reference to the two District Courts in Mississippi, is earnestly sought. But if it is to be tried by Judges, no complaint is uttered that it falls to our lot, rather than imported, certified Judges, to assume the responsibility.

. During all of this jousting, Governor Barnett has not yet had to face up to a formal plea of guilty or not guilty and, for that matter, he has yet to appear before this Court (save by counsel) though repeatedly ordered in person to do so.

. I agree with Judge Wisdom’s analysis (Part III of his dissent) of Hamm v. City of Rock Hill, 1964, 379 U.S. 306, 85 S.Ct. 384, 13 L.Ed.2d 300.

. I agree with what Judge Wisdom says in Part IV of his dissent about interposition, the likely consequences of Governor Barnett’s acknowledged actions, and the necessity that all state officials from Governor to the constable “must know that they cannot with impunity flout federal law.” Likewise, I concur in Part VI which points out so clearly an unquestioned liability for accrued civil sanctions and the inescapable fact that Meredith was admitted, not by reason of the Governor’s “substantial compliance” with our decree, but by the superior force of military arms.