U.S. v. Youngdahl

In a crowded courtroom last week, U.S. District Judge Luther Youngdahl listened quietly to an unprecedented attack. Lawyers often accuse judges of prejudice against the defense, but it was unheard of for a federal prosecutor to accuse a federal judge of "personal bias and prejudice . . . against the Government." The charge grew out of the case of Owen Lattimore, who once exerted much influence on American policies in China and who has since been accused of promoting Communism. Last year Judge Youngdahl dismissed four perjury indictments against Lattimore. Last week, with new indictments coming up for trial, U.S. Attorney Leo Rover looked Judge Youngdahl in the eye and dramatically intoned: "I ask you under the law ... to withdraw from the case."

A good many attorneys, fascinated by the issue, had gathered for the hearing. Sternly, Prosecutor Rover accused Judge Youngdahl of "astounding language" in his 1953 opinion (which cautioned against requiring "conformity in thought"). "The Government is not trying to put Lattimore's mind in a straitjacket," roared Rover. "We are trying to convict him for lying under oath." Youngdahl's 1953 opinion was "a gratuitous insult to the Government," he declared. "You picked out what was favorable to the defendant and left out what was unfavorable. I want a judge with an open mind and not a judge who has already expressed himself as Your Honor has done."

Judge Youngdahl, 17 years a jurist, was Minnesota's three-time Republican governor when appointed to the U.S. District Court in 1951 by Harry Truman (in a neat political double play to behead Minnesota's Republican Party and help the state's Fair Dealing Senator Hubert Humphrey). In last week's hearing he was the sole judge of his own fitness. The next day, in an outraged memorandum, he judged himself fit, retained the Lattimore case, rebuked federal prosecutors for acting "irresponsibly and recklessly." Their purpose, he concluded, was "to discredit, in the public mind, the final action of our courts, or to intimidate the courts themselves." Far from intimidated, Youngdahl proclaimed: "Under my oath to preserve sacred constitutional principles, I can properly do no less than to strike the [Government] affidavit as scandalous."

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