Noto v. United States

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Noto v. United States
Seal of the United States Supreme Court.svg
Argued October 10, 1960
Decided June 5, 1961
Full case nameNoto v. United States
Citations 367 U.S. 290 ( more )
81 S. Ct. 1517; 6 L. Ed. 2d 836
Holding
The trial evidence was insufficient to prove that the Communist Party advocated violent overthrow of the government not as an abstract doctrine, but by the use of language reasonably and ordinarily calculated to incite persons to action, immediately or in the future.
Court membership
Chief Justice
Earl Warren
Associate Justices
Hugo Black  · Felix Frankfurter
William O. Douglas  · Tom C. Clark
John M. Harlan II  · William J. Brennan Jr.
Charles E. Whittaker  · Potter Stewart
Case opinions
Majority Harlan, joined by unanimous
Laws applied
Smith Act, McCarran Act

Noto v. United States, 367 U.S. 290 (1961), was a 1961 United States Supreme Court case that reversed the felony conviction of a lower-echelon official of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

Supreme Court of the United States Highest court in the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. Established pursuant to Article III of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, it has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, including suits between two or more states and those involving ambassadors. It also has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all federal court and state court cases that involve a point of federal constitutional or statutory law. The Court has the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution or an executive act for being unlawful. However, it may act only within the context of a case in an area of law over which it has jurisdiction. The court may decide cases having political overtones, but it has ruled that it does not have power to decide nonjusticiable political questions.

Communist Party USA American political party

The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revolution.

Contents

Background

John Francis Noto of Buffalo, New York, was the chairman of the CPUSA for upstate New York. According to officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Noto "went underground" in 1951. A grand jury issued a secret indictment for his arrest in November 1954 and he was taken into custody on August 31, 1955 [1] He was convicted of a felony in federal District Court in Rochester in 1956 under the membership clause of the Smith Act, which made membership in an organization that advocates the violent overthrow of the United States government a felony. He was sentenced to five years in prison. He challenged the constitutionality of that clause on appeal. The Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction on December 31, 1958, and with respect to the membership clause said: "Clearly this is not a prosecution of membership per se but of membership with knowledge and criminal intent." [2]

Smith Act

The Alien Registration Act, popularly known as the Smith Act, 76th United States Congress, 3d session, ch. 439, 54 Stat. 670, 18 U.S.C. § 2385 is a United States federal statute that was enacted on June 29, 1940. It set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence and required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the federal government.

Decision

The Supreme Court case reversed Noto's conviction on June 5, 1961, in a unanimous decision, finding that the evidence presented at trial was not sufficient to demonstrate that the Party was advocating action to cause the forcible overthrow of the government. [3]

Justice Harlan wrote: [4]

The evidence was insufficient to prove that the Communist Party presently advocated forcible overthrow of the Government not as an abstract doctrine, but by the use of language reasonably and ordinarily calculated to incite persons to action, immediately or in the future.... In order to support a conviction under the membership clause of the Smith Act, there must be some substantial direct or circumstantial evidence of a call to violence now or in the future which is both sufficiently strong and sufficiently pervasive to lend color to the otherwise ambiguous theoretical material regarding Communist Party teaching and to justify the inference that such a call to violence may fairly be imputed to the Party as a whole, and not merely to some narrow segment of it.

Justices Black and Douglas wrote concurring opinions that argued that the Court should have gone further and ruled that the membership clause of the Smith Act was unconstitutional. Douglas wrote that "the utterances, attitudes, and associations in this case ... are, in my view, wholly protected by the First Amendment, and not subject to inquiry, examination, or prosecution by the Federal Government." Black characterized Harlan's review of the inadequacy of the trial testimony sarcastically: [4]

Hugo Black U.S. Supreme Court justice

Hugo Lafayette Black was an American politician and jurist who served in the United States Senate from 1927 to 1937, and as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971. A member of the Democratic Party and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections. Having gained a reputation in the Senate as a reformer, Black was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 63 to 16. He was the first of nine Roosevelt nominees to the Court, and he outlasted all except for William O. Douglas.

William O. Douglas Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

William Orville Douglas was an American jurist and politician who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Douglas was confirmed at the age of 40, one of the youngest justices appointed to the court. His term, lasting 36 years and 211 days (1939–75), is the longest in the history of the Supreme Court. In 1975 Time magazine called Douglas "the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court".

I cannot join an opinion which implies that the existence of liberty is dependent upon the efficiency of the Government's informers. I prefer to rest my concurrence in the judgment reversing petitioner's conviction on what I regard as the more solid ground that the First Amendment forbids the Government to abridge the rights of freedom of speech, press and assembly.

On the same day, the Court upheld a provision of the Internal Security Act of 1950 that required "Communist action" organizations to register with the government, which subjected their members to a variety of restrictions. Observers assessed the Court's sustaining the membership clause of the Smith Act in that light. Anthony Lewis wrote in the New York Times: "The court's opinions were carefully limited and did not give the government a blank check in applying the two statutes. Nevertheless, the decisions were substantial victories for the government—the most important legal victories it has had in the internal security field in many years." [5]

McCarran Internal Security Act

The Internal Security Act of 1950, 64 Stat. 987, also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 or the McCarran Act, after its principal sponsor Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), is a United States federal law. Congress enacted it over President Harry Truman's veto.

Anthony Lewis was an American public intellectual and journalist. He was twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and was a columnist for The New York Times. He is credited with creating the field of legal journalism in the United States.

See also

Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951), was a United States Supreme Court case relating to Eugene Dennis, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. The Court ruled that Dennis did not have the right under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution to exercise free speech, publication and assembly, if the exercise involved the creation of a plot to overthrow the government.

<i>United States Reports</i> official record of the rulings, orders, case tables, and other proceedings of the Supreme Court of the United States

The United States Reports are the official record of the rulings, orders, case tables, in alphabetical order both by the name of the petitioner and by the name of the respondent, and other proceedings of the Supreme Court of the United States. United States Reports, once printed and bound, are the final version of court opinions and cannot be changed. Opinions of the court in each case are prepended with a headnote prepared by the Reporter of Decisions, and any concurring or dissenting opinions are published sequentially. The Court's Publication Office oversees the binding and publication of the volumes of United States Reports, although the actual printing, binding, and publication are performed by private firms under contract with the United States Government Publishing Office.

Scales v. United States, 367 U.S. 203 (1961), was a 1960 decision of the United States Supreme Court that upheld the conviction of Junius Scales for violating of the Smith Act on the basis on his membership in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).

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References

  1. ↑ New York Times: "Red Leader Seized Upstate," September 1, 1955, accessed June 19, 2012; New York Times: "Smith Act Case First in State," September 18, 1955, accessed June 19, 2012. Noto was 37 years old at the time of his trial. He was a native of Ridgeway, Pennsylvania. The government claimed that he had been active in the Party since 1934, was the CPUSA's chairman for Erie County (Buffalo), a leader of the Young Communist League in the 1940s, and on the Party's payroll from 1946 to 1950.
  2. ↑ New York Times: "Red's Conviction Upheld by Court," January 1, 1959, accessed June 19, 2012
  3. ↑ Milton Konvitz, "Noto v. United States", in The Oxford companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Oxford University Press, 2005), 697
  4. 1 2 Justia: Noto v. United States (1961), accessed June 19, 2012
  5. ↑ New York Times: Anthony Lewis, ""High Court Puts Curb on U.S. Reds in 2 Major Cases," June 6, 1961, accessed June 19, 2012. The others cases decided the same day were Communist Party of the United States v. Subversive Activities Control Board and Scales v. United States .
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