| Powell v. Texas
(No. 405)
Held: The judgment is affirmed. Pp. 517-554. |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Syllabus
| Opinion
[ Marshall ] | Concurrence
[ Black ] | Concurrence
[ White ] | Dissent
[ Fortas ] |
| HTML version
PDF version | HTML version
PDF version | HTML version
PDF version | HTML version
PDF version | HTML version
PDF version |
Powell v. Texas
APPEAL FROM THE COUNTY COURT AT LAW No. 1 OF TRAVIS COUNTY, TEXAS
MR. JUSTICE BLACK, whom MR. JUSTICE HARLAN joins, concurring.
While I agree that the grounds set forth in MR. JUSTICE MARSHALLS opinion are sufficient to require affirmance of the judgment here, I wish to amplify my reasons for concurring.
Those who favor the change now urged upon us rely on their own notions of the wisdom of this Texas law to erect a constitutional barrier, the desirability of which is far from clear. To adopt this position would significantly limit the States in their efforts to deal with a widespread and important social problem and would do so by announcing a revolutionary doctrine of constitutional law that would also tightly restrict state power to deal with a wide variety of other harmful conduct.
I
Those who favor holding that public drunkenness cannot be made a crime rely to a large extent on their own notions of the wisdom of such a change in the law. A great deal of medical and sociological data is cited to us in support of this change. Stress is put upon the fact that medical authorities consider alcoholism a disease, and have urged a variety of medical approaches to treating it. It is pointed out that a high percentage of all arrests in America are for the crime of public drunkenness, and that the enforcement of these laws constitutes a tremendous burden on the police. Then it is argued that [p538] there is no basis whatever for claiming that to jail chronic alcoholics can be a deterrent or a means of treatment; on the contrary, jail has, in the expert judgment of these scientists, a destructive effect. All in all, these arguments read more like a highly technical medical critique than an argument for deciding a question of constitutional law one way or another.
Of course, the desirability of this Texas statute should be irrelevant in a court charged with the duty of interpretation, rather than legislation, and that should be the end of the matter. But since proponents of this grave constitutional change insist on offering their pronouncements on these questions of medical diagnosis and social policy, I am compelled to add that, should we follow their arguments, the Court would be venturing far beyond the realm of problems for which we are in a position to know what we are talking about.
Public drunkenness has been a crime throughout our history, and, even before our history, it was explicitly proscribed by a 1606 English statute, 4 Jac. 1, c. 5. It is today made an offense in every State in the Union. The number of police to be assigned to enforcing these laws and the amount of time they should spend in the effort would seem to me a question for each local community. Never, even by the wildest stretch of this Court's judicial review power, could it be thought that a State's criminal law could be struck down because the amount of time spent in enforcing it constituted, in some expert's opinion, a tremendous burden.
Jailing of chronic alcoholics is definitely defended as therapeutic, and the claims of therapeutic value are not insubstantial. As appellee notes, the alcoholics are removed from the streets, where, in their intoxicated state, they may be in physical danger, and are given food, clothing, and shelter until they "sober up," and thus at least regain their ability to keep from being run over by [p539] automobiles in the street. Of course, this treatment may not be "therapeutic" in the sense of curing the underlying causes of their behavior, but it seems probable that the effect of jail on any criminal is seldom "therapeutic" in this sense, and, in any case, the medical authorities relied on so heavily by appellant themselves stress that no generally effective method of curing alcoholics has yet been discovered.
Apart from the value of jail as a form of treatment, jail serves other traditional functions of the criminal law. For one thing, it gets the alcoholics off the street, where they may cause harm in a number of ways to a number of people, and isolation of the dangerous has always been considered an important function of the criminal law. In addition, punishment of chronic alcoholics can serve several deterrent functions -- it can give potential alcoholics an additional incentive to control their drinking, and it may, even in the case of the chronic alcoholic, strengthen his incentive to control the frequency and location of his drinking experiences.
These values served by criminal punishment assume even greater significance in light of the available alternatives for dealing with the problem of alcoholism. Civil commitment facilities may not be any better than the jails they would replace. In addition, compulsory commitment can hardly be considered a less severe penalty from the alcoholic's point of view. The commitment period will presumably be at least as long, and it might, in fact, be longer, since commitment often lasts until the "sick" person is cured. And compulsory commitment would, of course, carry with it a social stigma little different in practice from that associated with drunkenness when it is labeled a "crime."
Even the medical authorities stress the need for continued experimentation with a variety of approaches. I cannot say that the States should be totally barred from [p540] one avenue of experimentation, the criminal process, in attempting to find a means to cope with this difficult social problem. From what I have been able to learn about the subject, it seems to me that the present use of criminal sanctions might possibly be unwise, but I am by no means convinced that any use of criminal sanctions would inevitably be unwise, or, above all, that I am qualified in this area to know what is legislatively wise and what is legislatively unwise.
II
I agree with MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL that the findings of fact in this case are inadequate to justify the sweeping constitutional rule urged upon us. I could not, however, consider any findings that could be made with respect to "voluntariness" or "compulsion" controlling on the question whether a specific instance of human behavior should be immune from punishment as a constitutional matter. When we say that appellant's appearance in public is caused not by "his own" volition, but rather by some other force, we are clearly thinking of a force that is nevertheless "his" except in some special sense. [n1] The accused undoubtedly commits the proscribed act, and the only question is whether the act can be attributed to a part of "his" personality that should not be regarded as criminally responsible. Almost all of the traditional purposes of the criminal law can be significantly served by punishing the person who, in fact, committed the proscribed act, without regard to whether his action was "compelled" by some elusive "irresponsible" aspect of his personality. As I have already indicated, punishment of such a defendant can clearly be justified [p541] in terms of deterrence, isolation, and treatment. On the other hand, medical decisions concerning the use of a term such as "disease" or "volition," based as they are on the clinical problems of diagnosis and treatment, bear no necessary correspondence to the legal decision whether the overall objectives of the criminal law can be furthered by imposing punishment. For these reasons, much as I think that criminal sanctions should in many situations be applied only to those whose conduct is morally blameworthy, see Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246 (1952), I cannot think the States should be held constitutionally required to make the inquiry as to what part of a defendant's personality is responsible for his actions, and to excuse anyone whose action was, in some complex, psychological sense, the result of a "compulsion." [n2]
III
The rule of constitutional law urged by appellant is not required by Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962). In that case, we held that a person could not be punished for the mere status of being a narcotics [p542] addict. We explicitly limited our holding to the situation where no conduct of any kind is involved, stating:
We hold that a state law which imprisons a person thus afflicted as a criminal, even though he has never touched any narcotic drug within the State or been guilty of any irregular behavior there, inflicts a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
370 U.S. at 667. (Emphasis added.) The argument is made that appellant comes within the terms of our holding in Robinson because being drunk in public is a mere status or "condition." Despite this many-faceted use of the concept of "condition," this argument would require converting Robinson into a case protecting actual behavior, a step we explicitly refused to take in that decision.
A different question, I admit, is whether our attempt in Robinson to limit our holding to pure status crimes, involving no conduct whatever, was a sound one. I believe it was. Although some of our objections to the statute in Robinson are equally applicable to statutes that punish conduct "symptomatic" of a disease, any attempt to explain Robinson as based solely on the lack of voluntariness encounters a number of logical difficulties. [n3] Other problems raised by status crimes are in no way involved when the State attempts to punish for conduct, and these other problems were, in my view, the controlling aspects of our decision. [p543]
Punishment for a status is particularly obnoxious, and in many instances can reasonably be called cruel and unusual, because it involves punishment for a mere propensity, a desire to commit an offense; the mental element is not simply one part of the crime, but may constitute all of it. This is a situation universally sought to be avoided in our criminal law; the fundamental requirement that some action be proved is solidly established even for offenses most heavily based on propensity, such as attempt, conspiracy, and recidivist crimes. [n4] In fact, one eminent authority has found only one isolated instance, in all of Anglo-American jurisprudence, in which criminal responsibility was imposed in the absence of any act at all. [n5]
The reasons for this refusal to permit conviction without proof of an act are difficult to spell out, but they are nonetheless perceived and universally expressed in our criminal law. Evidence of propensity can be considered relatively unreliable and more difficult for a defendant to rebut; the requirement of a specific act thus provides some protection against false charges. See 4 Blackstone, Commentaries 21. Perhaps more fundamental is the difficulty of distinguishing, in the absence of any conduct, between desires of the day-dream variety and fixed intentions that may pose a real threat to society; extending the criminal law to cover both types of desire would be unthinkable, since
[t]here can hardly be anyone who has never thought evil. When a desire is inhibited, [p544] it may find expression in fantasy; but it would be absurd to condemn this natural psychological mechanism as illegal. [n6]
In contrast, crimes that require the State to prove that the defendant actually committed some proscribed act involve none of these special problems. In addition, the question whether an act is "involuntary" is, as I have already indicated, an inherently elusive question, and one which the State may, for good reasons, wish to regard as irrelevant. In light of all these considerations, our limitation of our Robinson holding to pure status crimes seems to me entirely proper.
IV
The rule of constitutional law urged upon us by appellant would have a revolutionary impact on the criminal law, and any possible limits proposed for the rule would be wholly illusory. If the original boundaries of Robinson are to be discarded, any new limits too would soon fall by the wayside, and the Court would be forced to hold the States powerless to punish any conduct that could be shown to result from a "compulsion," in the complex, psychological meaning of that term. The result, to choose just one illustration, would be to require recognition of "irresistible impulse" as a complete defense to any crime; this is probably contrary to present law in most American jurisdictions. [n7]
The real reach of any such decision, however, would be broader still, for the basic premise underlying the argument is that it is cruel and unusual to punish a person who is not morally blameworthy. I state the proposition in this sympathetic way because I feel there is much to be said for avoiding the use of criminal sanctions in many [p545] such situations. See Morissette v. United States, supra. But the question here is one of constitutional law. The legislatures have always been allowed wide freedom to determine the extent to which moral culpability should be a prerequisite to conviction of a crime. E.g., United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U.S. 277 (1943). The criminal law is a social tool that is employed in seeking a wide variety of goals, and I cannot say the Eighth Amendment's limits on the use of criminal sanctions extend as far as this viewpoint would inevitably carry them.
But even if we were to limit any holding in this field to "compulsions" that are "symptomatic" of a "disease," in the words of the findings of the trial court, the sweep of that holding would still be startling. Such a ruling would make it clear beyond any doubt that a narcotics addict could not be punished for "being" in possession of drugs or, for that matter, for "being" guilty of using them. A wide variety of sex offenders would be immune from punishment if they could show that their conduct was not voluntary, but part of the pattern of a disease. More generally speaking, a form of the insanity defense would be made a constitutional requirement throughout the Nation, should the Court now hold it cruel and unusual to punish a person afflicted with any mental disease whenever his conduct was part of the pattern of his disease and occasioned by a compulsion symptomatic of the disease. Such a holding would appear to overrule Leland v. Oregon, 343 U.S. 790 (1952), where the majority opinion and the dissenting opinion in which I joined both stressed the indefensibility of imposing on the States any particular test of criminal responsibility. Id. at 800-801; id. at 803 (Frankfurter, J., dissenting).
The impact of the holding urged upon us would, of course, be greatest in those States which have until now [p546] refused to accept any qualifications to the "right from wrong" test of insanity; apparently at least 30 States fall into this category. [n8] But even in States which have recognized insanity defenses similar to the proposed new constitutional rule, or where comparable defenses could be presented in terms of the requirement of a guilty mind (mens rea), the proposed new constitutional rule would be devastating, for constitutional questions would be raised by every state effort to regulate the admissibility of evidence relating to "disease" and "compulsion," and by every state attempt to explain these concepts in instructions to the jury. The test urged would make it necessary to determine not only what constitutes a "disease," but also what is the "pattern" of the disease, what "conditions" are "part" of the pattern, what parts of this pattern result from a "compulsion," and, finally, which of these compulsions are "symptomatic" of the disease. The resulting confusion and uncertainty could easily surpass that experienced by the District of Columbia Circuit in attempting to give content to its similar, though somewhat less complicated, test of insanity. [n9] The range of problems created would seem totally beyond our capacity to settle at all, much less to settle wisely, and even the attempt to define these terms, and thus to impose constitutional and doctrinal rigidity, seems absurd in an area where our understanding is even today so incomplete. [p547]
V
Perceptive students of history at an early date learned that one country controlling another could do a more successful job if it permitted the latter to keep in force the laws and rules of conduct which it had adopted for itself. When our Nation was created by the Constitution of 1789, many people feared that the 13 straggling, struggling States along the Atlantic composed too great an area ever to be controlled from one central point. As the years went on, however, the Nation crept cautiously westward until it reached the Pacific Ocean and finally the Nation planted its flag on the far-distant Islands of Hawaii and on the frozen peaks of Alaska. During all this period, the Nation remembered that it could be more tranquil and orderly if it functioned on the principle that the local communities should control their own peculiarly local affairs under their own local rules.
This Court is urged to forget that lesson today. We are asked to tell the most-distant Islands of Hawaii that they cannot apply their local rules so as to protect a drunken man on their beaches and the local communities of Alaska that they are without power to follow their own course in deciding what is the best way to take care of a drunken man on their frozen soil. This Court, instead of recognizing that the experience of human beings is the best way to make laws, is asked to set itself up as a board of Platonic Guardians to establish rigid, binding rules upon every small community in this large Nation for the control of the unfortunate people who fall victim to drunkenness. It is always time to say that this Nation is too large, too complex and composed of too great a diversity of peoples for any one of us to have the wisdom to establish the rules by which local Americans must govern their local affairs. The constitutional rule we are urged to adopt is not merely revolutionary -- [p548] it departs from the ancient faith based on the premise that experience in making local laws by local people themselves is by far the safest guide for a nation like ours to follow. I suspect this is a most propitious time to remember the words of the late Judge Learned Hand, who so wisely said:
For myself, it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.
L. Hand, The Bill of Rights 73 (1958).
I would confess the limits of my own ability to answer the age-old questions of the criminal law's ethical foundations and practical effectiveness. I would hold that Robinson v. California establishes a firm and impenetrable barrier to the punishment of persons who, whatever their bare desires and propensities, have committed no proscribed wrongful act. But I would refuse to plunge from the concrete and almost universally recognized premises of Robinson into the murky problems raised by the insistence that chronic alcoholics cannot be punished for public drunkenness, problems that no person, whether layman or expert, can claim to understand, and with consequences that no one can safely predict. I join in affirmance of this conviction.
1. If an intoxicated person is actually carried into the street by someone else, "he" does not do the act at all, and, of course, he is entitled to acquittal. E.g., Martin v. State, 31 Ala.App. 334, 17 So.2d 427 (1944).
2. The need for a cautious and tentative approach has been thoroughly recognized by one of the most active workers for reform in this area, Chief Judge Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In a recent decision limiting the scope of psychiatric testimony in insanity defense cases, Judge Bazelon states:
[I]t may be that psychiatry and the other social and behavioral sciences cannot provide sufficient data relevant to a determination of criminal responsibility no matter what our rules of evidence are. If so, we may be forced to eliminate the insanity defense altogether, or refashion it in a way which is not tied so tightly to the medical model. . . . But at least we will be able to make that decision on the basis of an informed experience. For now, the writer is content to join the court in this first step.
Washington v. United States, ___ U.S.App.D.C. ___, ___, n. 33, 390 F.2d 444, 457, n. 33 (1967) (expressing the views of Chief Judge Bazelon).
3. Although we noted in Robinson, 370 U.S. at 667, that narcotics addiction apparently is an illness that can be contracted innocently or involuntarily, we barred punishment for addiction even when it could be proved that the defendant had voluntarily become addicted. And we compared addiction to the status of having a common cold, a condition that most people can either avoid or quickly cure when it is important enough for them to do so.
4. As Glanville Williams puts it,
[t]hat crime requires an act is invariably true if the proposition be read as meaning that a private thought is not sufficient to found responsibility.
Williams, Criminal Law -- the General Part 1 (1961). (Emphasis added.) For the requirement of some act as an element of conspiracy and attempt, see id. at 631, 663, 668; R. Perkins, Criminal Law 482, 531-53 (1957).
5. Williams, supra, n. 4, at 11.
6. Id. at 2.
7. Perkins, supra, n. 4, at 762.
8. See Model Penal Code § 4.01, at 160 (Tent.Draft No. 4, 1955).
9. Durham v. United States, 94 U.S.App.D.C. 228, 214 F.2d 862 (1954). Some of the enormous difficulties encountered by the District of Columbia Circuit in attempting to apply its Durham rule are related in H.R.Rep. No. 563, 87th Cong., 1st Sess. (1961). The difficulties and shortcomings of the Durham rule have been fully acknowledged by the District of Columbia Circuit itself, and, in particular, by the author of the Durham opinion. See Washington v. United States, supra.
