Thiel v. Southern Pacific Company/Dissent Frankfurter

by Frank Murphy

United States Supreme Court

328 U.S. 217

Thiel  v.  Southern Pacific Company

 Argued: March 25, 1946. --- Decided: May 20, 1946

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, with whom Mr. Justice REED concurs, dissenting.

This was a suit brought by the petitioner, a salesman, against the Southern Pacific Company for injuries suffered by him while a passenger on one of the Railroad's trains, and attributed to the Company's negligence. The trial was in the United States District Court sitting in San Francisco. The jury rendered a verdict against the petitioner. The District Court found no ground for setting it aside and entered judgment on the verdict. Upon full review of the trial, the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment. 149 F.2d 783. Thus, a verdict arrived at by a jury whose judgment on the merits the District Court has found unassailable, which the Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed on the merits, and which this Court has refused to review on the merits, 326 U.S. 716, 66 S.Ct. 472, is here nullified because of an abstract objection to the manner in which the district judges for the Northern District of California have heretofore generally discharged their duty, with the approval of the reviewing judges of the Ninth Circuit, to secure appropriate jury panels.

The process of justice must of course not be tainted by property prejudice any more than by race or religious prejudice. The task of guarding against such prejudice devolves upon the district judges, who have the primary responsibility for the selection of jurors, and the circuit judges, whose review of verdicts is normally final. It is embraced in the duty, formulated by the judicial oath, to 'administer justice without respect to persons, and to equal right to the poor and to the rich * * *.' 1 Stat. 73, 76, 36 Stat. 1087, 1161, 28 U.S.C. § 372, 28 U.S.C.A. § 372. But it is not suggested that the jury was selected so as to bring property prejudice into play in relation to this specific case or type of case, nor is there the basis for contending that the trial judge allowed the selective process to be manipulated in favor of the particular defendant. No such claim is now sustained. Neither is it claimed that the district judges for the Northern District of California, with the approval of the circuit judges, designed racial, religious, social, or economic discrimination to influence the makeup of jury panels, or that such unfair influence infused the selection of the panel, or was reflected in those who were chosen as jurors in this case. Nor is there any suggestion that the method of selecting the jury in this case was an innovation. What is challenged is a long standing practice adopted in order to deal with the special hardship which jury service entails for workers paid by the day. What is challenged, in short, is not a covert attempt to benefit the propertied but a practice designed, wisely or unwisely, to relieve the economically least secure from the financial burden which jury service involves under existing circumstances.

No constitutional issue is at stake. The problem is one of judicial administration. The sole question over which the Court divides is whether the established practice in the Northern District of California not to call for jury duty those otherwise qualified but dependent on a daily wage for their livelihood requires reversal of a judgment which is inherently without flaw.

Trial by jury presupposes a jury drawn from a pool broadly representative of the community as well as impartial in a specific case. Since the color of a man's skin is unrelated to his fitness as a juror, negroes cannot be excluded from jury service because they are negroes. E.g., Carter v. Texas 177 U.S. 442, 20 S.Ct. 687, 44 L.Ed. 839. A group may be excluded for reasons that are relevant not to their fitness but to competing considerations of public interest, as is true of the exclusion of doctors, ministers, lawyers, and the like. Rawlins v. Georgia, 201 U.S. 638, 26 S.Ct. 560, 50 L.Ed. 899, 5 Ann.Cas. 783. But the broad representative character of the jury should be maintained, partly as assurance of a diffused impartiality and partly because sharing in the administration of justice is a phase of civic responsibility. See Smith v. Texas, 311 U.S. 128, 130, 61 S.Ct. 164, 165, 85 L.Ed. 84.

Obviously these accepted general considerations must have much leeway in application. In the abstract the Court acknowledges this. 'The choice of the means by which unlawful distinctions and discriminations are to be avoided rests largely in the sound discretion of the trial courts and their officers.' Congress has made few inroads upon this discretion. Its chief enactment underlines the importance of avoiding rigidities in the jury system and recognizes that ample play must be allowed the joints of the machinery. The First Judiciary Act adopted for the federal courts the qualifications and exemptions, with all their diversities, prevailing in the States where the federal courts sit. 1 Stat. 73, 88. That has remained the law. 36 Stat. 1087, 1164, 28 U.S.C. § 411, 28 U.S.C.A. § 411. (For a collection of federal statutes regulating the composition and selection of jurors, see 37 Harv.L.Rev. 1010, 1098, 1100.) We would hardly have taken this case to consider whether the federal court in San Francisco deviated from the requirements of California law, and nothing turns on that here. But it is not without illumination that under California law all those belonging to this long string of occupations are exempted from jury service: judicial, civil, naval, and military officers of the United States or California; local government officials; attorneys, their clerks, secretaries, and stenographers; ministers; teachers; physicians, dentists, chiropodists, optometrists, and druggists; officers, keepers, and attendants at hospitals or other charitable institutions; officers in attendance at prisons and jails; employees on boats and ships in navigable waters; express agents, mail carriers, employees of telephone and telegraph companies; keepers of ferries or tollgates; national guardsmen and firemen; superintendents, engineers, firemen, brakemen, motormen, or conductors of railroads; practitioners treating the sick by prayer. California Code of Civil Procedure, § 200.

Placed in its proper framework the question now before us comes to this: Have the district judges for the Northern District of California, supported by the circuit judges of the Ninth Circuit, abused their discretion in sanctioning a practice of not calling for jury duty those who are dependent upon a daily wage for their livelihood?

The precise issue must be freed from all atmospheric innuendoes. Not to do so is unfair to the administration of justice, which should be the touchstone for the disposition of the judgment under challenge, and no less unfair to a group of judges of long experience and tested fidelity. If workmen were systematically not drawn for the jury, the practice would be indefensible. But concern over discrimination against wage earners must be put out of the reckoning. Concededly those who are paid weekly or monthly wages were placed on the jury lists. And that no line was drawn against the wage earners because they were wage earners, and that there was merely anticipatory excuse of daily wage earners, is conclusively established by the fact that the wives of such daily wage earners were included in the jury lists. As to any claim of the operation of a designed economic bias in the method of selecting the juries, the Circuit Court of Appeals rightly found 'no evidence that the persons whose names were in the box, or the persons whose names were drawn therefrom and who thus becam members of the panel, were 'mostly business executives or those having the employer's viewpoint." 9 Cir., 149 F.2d 783, 786.

'When the question is narrowed to its proper form the answer does not need much discussion. The nature of the classes excluded was not such as was likely to affect the conduct of the members as jurymen, or to make them act otherwise than those who were drawn would act. The exclusion was not the result of race or class prejudice. It does not even appear that any of the defendants belonged to any of the excluded classes. The ground of omission, no doubt, was that pointed out by the state court that the business of the persons omitted was such that either they would have been entitled to claim exemption or that probably they would have been excused.' So this Court speaking through Mr. Justice Holmes answered a related question in Rawlins v. Georgia, 201 U.S. 638, 640, 26 S.Ct. 560, 50 L.Ed. 899, 5 Ann.Cas. 783. And the justification for the answer applies to the present situation.

It is difficult to believe that this judgment would have been reversed if the trial judge had excused, one by one, all those wage earners whom the jury commissioner, acting on the practice of trial judges of San Francisco, excluded. For it will hardly be contended that the absence of such daily wage earners from the jury panel removed a group who would act otherwise than workers paid by the week or the wives of the daily wage earners themselves. The exclusion of the daily wage earners does not remove a group who would, in the language of Mr. Justice Holmes, 'act otherwise than those who are drawn would act.' Judged by the trend of census statistics, laborers paid by the day are not a predominant portion of the workers of the country. See Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population, Vol. III, The Labor Force, Part 2, pp. 290 et seq. It certainly is too large an assumption on which to base judicial action that those workers who are paid by the day have a different outlook psychologically and economically than those who earn weekly wages. In the language of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes, 'Impartiality is not a technical conception. It is a state of mind.' United States v. Wood, 299 U.S. 123, 145, 57 S.Ct. 177, 185, 81 L.Ed. 78. And American society is happily not so fragmentized that those who get paid by the day adopt a different social outlook, have a different sense of justice, and a different conception of a juror's responsibility than their fellow workers paid by the week. No doubt the insecurities of a system of daily earnings, or generally of wages on less than an annual basis, raise serious problems as does, of course, also the question of guaranteed wage plans. See the letter of President Roosevelt to the Director of War Mobilization, James F. Byrnes, on the date of March 20, 1945, carrying out the suggestion of a report to the President by the War Labor Board for the creation of a Commission to study the question of guaranteed wage plans. And see Basic Steel Case, 19 W.L.B. 568, 653 et seq.; N.W.L.B. Research and Statistics Report No. 25, Guaranteed Employment and Annual Wage Plans (1944). But these are matters quite irrelevant to the problem confronting district judges in dealing with the present plight of daily wage earners when called to serve as jurors and the power of the judges, as a matter of discretion, to excuse such daily wage earners from duty.

For it cannot be denied that jury service by persons dependent upon a daily wage imposes a very real burden. Judge John C. Knox, Senior District Judge of the Southern District of New York, thus described the problem:

'* * * when jurors' compensation is limited to $4 per day, and when their periods of service are often protracted, thousands upon thousands of persons simply cannot afford to serve. To require them to do so is nothing less than the imposition on them of extreme hardship.

'With respect to the item last-mentioned, it is easy to say that jury duty should be regard d as a patriotic service, and that all public-spirited persons should willingly sacrifice pecuniary rewards in the performance of an obligation of citizenship. With that statement I am in full accord, but it does not solve the difficulty. Adequate provision for one's family is the first consideration of most men. And if, with this thought predominant in a man's mind, he is required to perform a public service that means a default of an insurance premium, the sacrifice of a suit of clothes, or the loss of (t)his job, he will entertain feelings of resentment that will be anything but conducive to the rendition of justice. In other words, persons with a grievance against the Government or who serve under conditions that expose them to self-denial are not likely to have the spiritual contentment and mental detachment that good jurors require.' Hearings before H.R. Committee on the Judiciary on H.R. 3379, H.R. 3380, H.R. 3381, 79th Cong., 1st Sess. (1945) 8.

No doubt, in view of the changes in the composition and distribution of our population and the growth of metropolitan areas, a reexamination is due of the operation of the jury ststem in the federal courts. Just as the federal judicial system has been reorganized and administratively modified through a series of recent enactments (see Act of September 14, 1922, 42 Stat. 837, 838, 28 U.S.C. §§ 218 et seq., 28 U.S.C.A. § 218 et seq.; Act of February 13, 1925, 43 Stat. 936, 28 U.S.C. §§ 41 et seq., 28 U.S.C.A. § 41 et seq.; Act of August 7, 1939, 53 Stat. 1223, 28 U.S.C. §§ 444 et seq., 28 U.S.C.A. § 444 et seq., the jury system, that indispensable adjunct of the federal courts, calls for review to meet modern conditions. The object is to devise a system that is fairly representative of our variegated population, exacts the obligation of citizenship to share in the administration of justice without operating too harshly upon any section of the community, and is duly regardful of the public interest in matters outside the jury system. This means that the many factors entering into the manner of selection, with appropriate qualifications and exemptions, the length of service and the basis of compensation must be properly balanced. These are essentially problems in administration calling for appropriate standards flexibly adjusted.

Wise answers preclude treatment by rigid legislation or rigid administration. Congress has devised the appropriate procedure and instrument for making these difficult and delicate adjustments by its creation, in 1922, of the Conference of Senior Circuit Judges. The Conference, under the presidency of the Chief Justice of the United States, is charged with the duty of continuous oversight of the actual workings of the federal judicial system and of meeting disclosed needs, either through practices formulated by the Conference, or, when legislation is necessary or more appropriate, through proposals submitted to Congress. See 40 Harv.L.Rev. 431. That is precisely the course that has been followed in regard to the inadequacies in the operation of the federal jury system. In September, 1941, the late Chief Justice brought the matter before the Conference. As a result, Mr. Chief Justice Stone appointed a committee of experienced district judges, see Report of the Judicial Conference (1941) 16, under the chairmanship of Judge Knox who, because of the length and richness of his experience in the busiest district of the country, brought unusual equipment for devising appropriate reforms. In September, 1942, the Committee reported, Report to the Judicial Conference of the Committee on Selection of Jurors (1942) 1, and submitted proposals for legislation. Id. at 44, 62, 107. Bills to carry out these recommendations were introduced in the Senate on January 11, 1944, S. 1623, 1624, 1625, 78th Cong., 2d Sess., and in the House on June 5, 1945, H.R. 3379, 3380, 3381, 79th Cong., 1st Sess. Hearings were had upon the House Bills on June 12 and 13, 1945, and action on them is now pending.

The Court now deals by adjudication with one phase of an organic problem and does so by nullifying a judgment which, on the record, was wholly unaffected by difficulties inherent in a situation that calls for comprehensive treatment, both legislative and administrative. If it be suggested that until there is legislation this decision will be the means of encouraging the district judges to uncover a better answer than they have thus far given to a lively problem, an appropriate admonition from the Court would accomplish the same result, or common action regarding the practice now under review may be secured from the Conference of Senior Circuit Judges. To reverse a judgment free from intrinsic infirmity and perhaps to put in question other judgments based on verdicts that resulted from the same method of selecting juries, reminds too much of burning the barn in order to roast the pig.

I would affirm the judgment.

Notes