Piemonte v. United States/Dissent Douglas

by William O. Douglas

United States Supreme Court

367 U.S. 556

Piemonte  v.  United States

 Argued: March 21, 1961. --- Decided: June 19, 1961

Mr. Justice DOUGLAS, with whom Mr. Justice BLACK concurs, dissenting.

Petitioner, while a prisoner in a federal penitentiary serving a six-year sentence on a narcotics conviction, was summoned before a grand jury and interrogated about transactions in narcotics.

One series of questions was opened with the following: 'Mr. Piemonte, were you in the narcotics business in 1954?' Following the tender of immunity, petitioner was again asked a series of questions, some of them relating to transactions in narcotics in that year. Among the questions was the following: 'Have you supplied Jeremiah Pullings with any heroin?'

These questions and these refusals to answer were on August 10 and 14, 1959. The sentence for contempt was imposed on August 18, 1959. After that date and before February 29, 1960, the date when the Court of Appeals affirmed the appeal, the grand jury returned another indictment against petitioner. This was on September 2, 1959. This indictment charged petitioner and others with a conspiracy to buy and sell narcotics commencing in August 1954. One of the overt acts charged was a conversation in 1955 between Jeremiah Pullings and one of petitioner's co-conspirators under the September 2, 1959, indictment. These 1954 and 1955 transactions, for which petitioner now stands indicted, were ones on which he refused to testify and for which he has been committed for contempt.

Once an indictment was returned, the proceedings of this grand jury became a part of a criminal prosecution directed against petitioner. Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U.S. 547, 562, 12 S.Ct. 195, 197, 35 L.Ed. 1110; United States v. Monia, 317 U.S. 424, 427, 63 S.Ct. 409, 410, 87 L.Ed. 376. When the citizen is formally accused by indictment, he has a constitutional right to stand mute and to refuse to testify. His right not to take the stand in a federal criminal trial transcends his privilege against self-incrimination. No immunity statute, no pressure of government, no threats of the prosecution can be used to deprive the citizen of this right. See Wilson v. United States, 149 U.S. 60, 13 S.Ct. 765, 37 L.Ed. 650; Stewart v. United States, 366 U.S. 1, 81 S.Ct. 941, 6 L.Ed.2d 84. And it is unthinkable that a district judge would ever hold a defendant in contempt because he refused to take the stand at his own trial. The district judge did no such thing here. But that was the posture of the case when it was decided by the Court of Appeals. For by then the matters about which petitioner refused to answer had become in form and in effect an indictment against him.

There is no power in our free society to compel a person to talk about a matter on which he has been indicted or to penalize him for failure to do so. We might as well say that an accused can be committed for contempt for failure to take the stand at his own trial.

We are advised that after we granted certiorari the indictment against petitioner was dismissed on motion of the Government for lack of evidence. That seems irrelevant. The truth is that the grand jury before which petitioner was summoned did indict him. Petitioner was in fact held in contempt for refusal to testify in a criminal proceeding against him. That is not permissible under the procedures of our free society, whatever may have been the ultimate fate of that criminal proceeding.

I think the imposition of an eighteen months' sentence was beyond the power of a federal court in a summary proceeding. That was the view stated by Mr. Justice Black in his dissenting opinion in Green v. United States, 356 U.S. 165, 193, 78 S.Ct. 632, 648, 2 L.Ed.2d 672, with which I agreed then and still agree. There is nothing I can find in the Constitution which permits those who defy a court's decree to be tried in one way and those who defy a mandate of the Congress ^[1] or an order of the Executive ^[2] to be tried in another way. Whatever the criminal charge may be, an accused is entitled to the protections afforded by the Constitution-indictment by a grand jury and trial before a petit jury which sits to determine guilt. Determination of guilt by a judge, without these safeguards interposed between the accused and government, marks a continuing erosion of civil rights. The evil is compounded here by reason of the fact that contempt is used to increase a punishment already imposed for an offense as respects which no second indictment could ever be returned. Criminal contempt is used to undermine not only the guarantees of an indictment by a grand jury and a trial by one's peers but also to destroy the protection of double jeopardy.

Plainly this judgment of conviction should not stand.

Notes

1. See Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178, 77 S.Ct. 1173, 1 L.Ed.2d 1273.
2. See Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81, 63 S.Ct. 1375, 87 L.Ed. 1774; Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 65 S.Ct. 193, 89 L.Ed. 194.