JURY TRIALS & CONTEMPT

The Senate Is Off on a Radical Tack

If it has ever been understood that proceedings . . . for contempt of court have been subject to the right of trial by jury, we have been unable to find any instance of it.

SO declared the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890, and at least a dozen other Supreme Court opinions over the years have made the point unmistakably clear: the power of a court to enforce its judgments and orders with contempt penalties is not limited by any right to trial by jury. Underlying this oft-restated principle is the Supreme Court's recognition that unless courts can enforce their judgments and orders, the administration of justice in a society would break down.

Based squarely on the federal courts' power to punish contempt is an essential function of the Federal Government: the use of injunctions and restraining orders to prevent acts that would damage an individual or the public interest. The injunction is the Government's principal means of enforcing more than two dozen federal statutes, including the antitrust laws, the Atomic Energy Act and the Securities Exchange Act. Not one of these 20-odd statutes carries a jury-trial provision, and expert opinion holds that many of them, because of their complexity, would be unenforceable if it took a jury trial to convict a defendant of contempt.

Keys to the Prison

In their assault on the Administration's civil rights bill, Senate Southerners attacked the injunction as a sweeping and arbitrary weapon. In fact, it is well hedged with safeguards. A court--though it may issue a temporary restraining order when it deems it necessary to move promptly against the threat of damage or disorder--may issue a permanent injunction only after a public hearing at which the respondent has full rights of counsel, cross-examination and confrontation of witnesses. When it is issued, the injunction demands only that the defendant stop offending. Contempt convictions for failure to comply with injunctions are, like any other convictions, appealable to higher courts.

The law draws a distinction between two grades of contempt. A court imposes "civil contempt" penalties to enforce compliance with its order, and the defendant "carries the keys to his prison in his own pocket," i.e., he can free himself by complying. But if the offender persists in evading the order, the court may sentence him for "criminal contempt." Then he no longer carries the keys. If Congress took the criminal-contempt reserve weapon away from the courts, the offender could put off complying without running any risk.

Congress has never in its history tampered with the courts' power to convict for civil contempt without trial by jury. But Congress has twice provided for jury trials in certain criminal-contempt cases. The Clayton Act of 1914 entitled the defendant to a jury trial when the same act or omission that brought him into contempt was in itself a criminal offense, e.g., assault in violation of an injunction. But the Clayton Act explicitly made an exception for federal injunction cases, i.e., Congress recognized that the Federal Government needed the injunction, enforced without any jury-trial limitation, as an indispensable tool of justice.

Lonely Precedent

But the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, in requiring jury trials in contempt cases "involving or growing out of a labor dispute," did not make an exception for the Federal Government. Again and again, opponents of the civil rights bill pointed to the Norris-La Guardia Act as a precedent for a jury-trial amendment, but it was a lonely precedent. Since the act in effect barred labor injunctions, it left very little scope for its jury-trial provision. Furthermore, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 overturned the Southerners' one and only precedent by exempting federal injunctions from the Norris-La Guardia jury-trial provision.

Thus, in nailing a broad jury-trial provision to the civil rights bill last week, the Senate departed radically from what over the years the Supreme Court has said and Congress has done.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.