Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber/Opinion of the Court

This writ of certiorari brings before this Court a unique situation. The petitioner, Willie Francis, is a colored citizen of Louisiana. He was duly convicted of murder and in September, 1945, sentenced to be electrocuted for the crime. Upon a proper death warrant, Francis was prepared for execution and on May 3, 1946, pursuant to the warrant, was placed in the official electric chair of the State of Louisiana in the presence of the authorized witnesses. The executioner threw the switch but, presumably because of some mechanical difficulty, death did not result. He was thereupon removed from the chair and returned to prison where he now is. A new death warrant was issued by the Governor of Louisiana, fixing the execution for May 9, 1946.

Applications to the Supreme Court of he state were filed for writs of certiorari, mandamus, prohibition and habeas corpus, directed to the appropriate officials in the state. Execution of the sentence was stayed. By the applications petitioner claimed the protection of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment on the ground that an execution under the circumstances detailed would deny due process to him because of the double jeopardy provision of the Fifth Amendment and the cruel and unusual punishment provision of the Eighth Amendment. These federal constitutional protections, petitioner claimed, would be denied because he had once gone through the difficult preparation for execution and had once received through his body a current of electricity intended to cause death. The Supreme Court of Louisiana denied the applications on the ground of a lack of any basis for judicial relief. That is, the state court concluded there was no violation of state or national law alleged in the various applications. It spoke of the fact that no 'current of sufficient intensity to cause death' passed through petitioner's body. It referred specifically to the fact that the applications of petitioner invoked the provisions of the Louisiana Constitution against cruel and inhuman punishments and putting one in jeopardy of life or liberty twice for the same offense. We granted certiorari on a petition, setting forth the aforementioned contentions, to consider the alleged violations of rights under the Federal Constitution in the unusual circumstances of this case. State of Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 328 U.S. 833, 66 S.Ct. 1382. For matters of state law, the opinion and order of the Supreme Court of Louisiana are binding on this Court. Hebert v. State of Louisiana, 272 U.S. 312, 317, 47 S.Ct. 103, 104, 71 L.Ed. 270, 48 A.L.R. 1102. So far as we are aware, this case is without precedent in any court.

To determine whether or not the execution of the petitioner may fairly take place after the experience through which he passed, we shall examine the circumstances under the assumption, but without so deciding, that violation of the principles of the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, as to double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment, would be violative of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As nothing has been brought to our attention to suggest the contrary, we must and do assume that the state officials carried out their duties under the death warrant in a careful and humane manner. Accidents happen for which no man is to blame. We turn to the question as to whether the proposed enforcement of the criminal law of the state is offensive to any constitutional requirements to which reference has been made.

First. Our minds rebel against permitting the same sovereignty to punish an accused twice for the same offense. Ex parte Lange, 18 Wall. 163, 168, 175, 21 L.Ed. 872; In re Bradley, 318 U.S. 50, 63 S.Ct. 470, 87 L.Ed. 500. Compare United States v. Lanza, 260 U.S. 377, 382, 43 S.Ct. 141, 142, 67 L.Ed. 314. But where the accused successfully seeks review of a conviction, there is no double jeopardy upon a new trial. United States v. Ball, 163 U.S. 662, 672, 16 S.Ct. 1192, 1195, 41 L.Ed. 300. See People v. Trezza, 128 N.Y. 529, 535, 28 N.E. 533, 534. Even where a state obtains a new trial after conviction because of errors, while an accused may be placed on trial a second time, it is not the sort of hardship to the ac used that is forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment. Palko v. State of Connecticut, supra, 302 U.S. at page 328, 58 S.Ct. at page 153, 82 L.Ed. 288. As this is a prosecution under state law, so far as double jeopardy is concerned, the Palko case is decisive. For we see no difference from a constitutional point of view between a new trial for error of law at the instance of the state that results in a death sentence instead of imprisonment for life and an execution that follows a failure of equipment. When an accident, with no suggestion of malevolence, prevents the consummation of a sentence, the state's subsequent course in the administration of its criminal law is not affected on that account by any requirement of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. We find no double jeopardy here which can be said to amount to a denial of federal due process in the proposed execution.

Second. We find nothing in what took place here which amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in the constitutional sense. The case before us does not call for an examination into any punishments except that of death. See Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, 30 S.Ct. 544, 54 L.Ed. 793, 19 Ann.Cas. 705. The traditional humanity of modern Anglo-American law forbids the infliction of unnecessary pain in the execution of the death sentence. Prohibition against the wanton infliction of pain has come into our law from the Bill of Rights of 1688. The identical words appear in our Eighth Amendment. The Fourteenth would prohibit by its due process clause execution by a state in a cruel manner.

Petitioner's suggestion is that because he once underwent the psychological strain of preparation for electrocution, now to require him to undergo this preparation again subjects him to a lingering or cruel and unusual punishment. Even the fact that petitioner has already been subjected to a current of electricity does not make his subsequent execution any more cruel in the constitutional sense than any other execution. The cruelty against which the Constitution protects a convicted man is cruelty inherent in the method of punishment, not the necessary suffering involved in any method employed to extinguish life humanely. The fact that an unforeseeable accident prevented the prompt consummation of the sentence cannot, it seems to us, add an element of cruelty to a subsequent execution. There is no purpose to inflict unnecessary pain nor any unnecessary pain involved in the proposed execution. The situation of the unfortunate victim of this accident is just as though h had suffered the identical amount of mental anguish and physical pain in any other occurrence, such as, for example, a fire in the cell block. We cannot agree that the hardship imposed upon the petitioner rises to that level of hardship denounced as denial of due process because of cruelty.

Third. The Supreme Court of Louisiana also rejected petitioner's contention that death inflicted after his prior sufferings would deny him the equal protection of the laws, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This suggestion in so far as it differs from the due process argument is based on the idea that execution, after an attempt at execution has failed, would be a more severe punishment than is imposed upon others guilty of a like offense. That is, since others do not go through the strain of preparation for execution a second time or have not experienced a nonlethal current in a prior attempt at execution, as petitioner did, to compel petitioner to submit to execution after these prior experiences denies to him equal protection. Equal protection does not protect a prisoner against even illegal acts of officers in charge of him, much less against accidents during his detention for execution. See Lisenba v. People of State of California, 314 U.S. 219, 226, 62 S.Ct. 280, 285, 86 L.Ed. 166. Laws cannot prevent accidents nor can a law equally protect all against them. So long as the law applies to all alike, the requirements of equal protection are met. We have no right to assume that Louisiana singled out Francis for a treatment other than that which has been or would generally be applied.

Fourth. There is a suggestion in the brief that the original trial itself was so unfair to the petitioner as to justify a reversal of the judgment of conviction and a new trial. Petitioner's claim in his brief is that he was inadequately represented by counsel. The record of the original trial presented to us shows the warrant for arrest, the indictment, the appointment of counsel and the minute entries of trial, selection of jury, verdict and sentence. There is nothing in any of these papers to show any violation of petitioner's constitutional rights. See Carter v. People of State of Illinois, 329 U.S. 173, 67 S.Ct. 216. Review is sought here because of a denial of due process of law that would be brought about by execution of petitioner after failure of the first effort to electrocute him. Nothing is before us upon which a ruling can be predicated as to alleged denial of federal constitutional rights during petitioner's trial. On this record, we see nothing upon which we could conclude that the constitutional rights of petitioner were infringed.

Affirmed.

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, concurring.

When four members of the Court find that a State has denied to a person the due process which the Fourteenth Amendment safeguards, it seems to me important to be explicit regarding the criteria by which the State's duty of obedience to the Constitution must be judged. Particularly is this so when life is at stake.

Until July 28, 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the Constitution of the United States left the States free to carry out their own notions of criminal justice, except insofar as they were limited by Article I, § 10 of the Constitution which declares: 'No State shall * *  * pass any Bill of Attainder, (or) ex post facto Law *  *  * '. The Fourteenth Amendment placed no specific restraints upon the States in the formulation or the administration of their criminal law. It restricted the freedom of the States generally, so that States thereafter could not 'abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,' or 'deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law', or 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws'.

These are broad, inexplicit clauses of the Constitution, unlike specific provisions of the first eight amendments formulated by the Founders to guard against re urrence of well-defined historic grievances. But broad as these clauses are, they are not generalities of empty vagueness. They are circumscribed partly by history and partly by the problems of government, large and dynamic though they be, with which they are concerned. The 'privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States' concern the dual citizenship under our federal system. The safeguards of 'due process of law' and 'the equal protection of the laws' summarize the meaning of the struggle for freedom of English-speaking peoples. They run back to Magna Carta but contemplate no less advances in the conceptions of justice and freedom by a progressive society. See the classic language of Mr. Justice Matthews in Hurtado v. People of State of California, 110 U.S. 516, 530, 531, 4 S.Ct. 111, 118, 28 L.Ed. 232.

When, shortly after its adoption, the Fourteenth Amendment came before this Court for construction, it was urged that the 'privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States' which were not to be abridged by any State were the privileges and immunities which citizens theretofore enjoyed under the Constitution. If that view had prevailed, the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would have placed upon the States the limitations which the specific articles of the first eight amendments had theretofore placed upon the agencies of the national government. After the fullest consideration that view was rejected. The rejection has the authority that comes from contemporaneous knowledge of the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 67, 68, 21 L.Ed. 394; Davidson v. City of New Orleans, 96 U.S. 97, 6 Otto 97, 24 L.Ed. 616. The notion that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment absorbed, as it is called, the provisions of the Bill of Rights that limit the Federal Government has never been given countenance by this Court.

Not until recently was it suggested that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was merely a compendious reference to the Bill of Rights whereby the States were now restricted in devising and enforcing their penal code precisely as is the Federal Government by the first eight amendments. On this view, the States would be confined in the enforcement of their criminal codes by those views for safeguarding the rights of the individual which were deemed necessary in the eighteenth century. Some of these safeguards have perduring validity. Some grew out of transient experience or formulated remedies which time might well improve. The Fourteenth Amendment did not mean to imprison the States into the limited experience of the eighteenth century. It did mean to withdraw from the States the right to act in ways that are offensive to a decent respect for the dignity of man, and heedless of his freedom.

These are very broad terms by which to accommodate freedom and authority. As has been suggested from time to time, they may be too large to serve as the basis for adjudication, in that they allow much room for individual notions of policy. That is not our concern. The fact is that the duty of such adjudication on a basis no less narrow has been committed to this Court.

In an impressive body of decisions this Court has decided that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment expresses a demand for civilized standards which are not defined by the specifically enumerated guarantees of the Bill of Rights. They neither contain the particularities of the first eight amendments nor are they confined to them. That due process of law has its own independent function has been illustrated in numerous decisions, and has been expounded in the opinions of the Court which have canvassed the matter most thoroughly. See Hurtado v. People of State of California, supra; Twining v. State of New Jersey, 211 U.S. 78, 29 S.Ct. 14, 53 L.Ed. 97; Snyder v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 291 U.S. 97, 54 S.Ct. 330, 78 L.Ed. 674, 90 A.L.R. 575; Palko. State of Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 58 S.Ct. 149, 82 L.Ed. 288. Insofar as due process under the Fourteenth Amendment requires the States to observe any of the immunities 'that are valid as against the federal government by force of the specific pledges of particular amendments' it does so because they 'have been found to be implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, and thus, through the Fourteenth Amendment, become valid as against the states.' Palko v. State of Connecticut, supra, 302 U.S. at pages 324, 325, 58 S.Ct. at page 151, 152, 82 L.Ed. 288.

The Federal Bill of Rights requires that prosecutions for federal crimes be initiated by a grand jury and tried by a petty jury; it protects an accused from being a witness against himself. The States are free to consult their own conceptions of policy in dispensing with the grand jury, in modifying or abolishing the petty jury, in withholding the privilege against self-crimination. See Maxwell v. Dow, 176 U.S. 581, 20 S.Ct. 448, 44 L.Ed. 597; Twining v. State of New Jersey, supra; Snyder v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, supra; Palko v. State of Connecticut, supra, 302 U.S. at pages 323, 324, 58 S.Ct. at page 151, 82 L.Ed. 288; cf. Feldman v. United States, 322 U.S. 487, 64 S.Ct. 1082, 88 L.Ed. 1408, 154 A.L.R. 982. In short, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not withdraw the freedom of a State to enforce its own notions of fairness in the administration of criminal justice unless as it was put for the Court by Mr. Justice Cardozo, 'in so doing it offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental'. Snyder v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, supra, 291 U.S. at page 105, 54 S.Ct. at page 332, 78 L.Ed. 674, 90 A.L.R. 575.

A State may offend such a principle of justice by brutal subjection of an individual to successive retrials on a charge on which he has been acquitted. Such conduct by a State might be a denial of due process, but not because the protection against double jeopardy in a federal prosecution against which the Fifth Amendment safeguards limits a State. For the disputations that are engendered by technical aspects of double jeopardy as enshrined in the Fifth Amendment, see the majority and dissenting opinions in Ex parte Lange, 18 Wall. 163, 21 L.Ed. 872, and In re Bradley, 318 U.S. 50, 63 S.Ct. 470, 87 L.Ed. 500. Again, a State may be found to deny a person due process by treating even one guilty of crime in a manner that violates standards of decency more or less universally accepted though not when it treats him by a mode about which opinion is fairly divided. But the penological policy of a State is not to be tested by the scope of the Eighth Amendment and is not involved in the controversy which is necessarily evoked by that Amendment as to the historic meaning of 'cruel and unusual punishment'. See Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, 30 S.Ct. 544, 546, 54 L.Ed. 793, 19 Ann.Cas. 705, and particularly the dissenting opinion of White and Holmes, JJ.

Once we are explicit in stating the problem before us in terms defined by an unbroken series of decisions, we cannot escape acknowledging that it involves the application of standards of fairness and justice very broadly conceived. They are not the application of merely personal standards but the impersonal standards of society which alone judges, as the organs of Law, are empowered to enforce. When the standards for judicial judgment are not narrower than 'immutable principles of justice, which inhere in the very idea of free government', Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366, 389, 18 S.Ct. 383, 387, 42 L.Ed. 780, 'fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions', Hebert v. State of Louisiana, 272 U.S. 312, 316, 47 S.Ct. 103, 104, 71 L.Ed. 270, 48 A.L.R. 1102, 'immunities * *  * implicit in the concept of ordered liberty', Palko v. State of Connecticut, supra, 302 U.S. at pages 324, 325, 58 S.Ct. at page 151, 82 L.Ed. 288, great tolerance toward a State's conduct is demanded of this Court. Such were recently stated to be 'the controlling principles'. See Mr. Chief Justice Stone in Malinski v. New York, 324 U.S. 401, 438, 65 S.Ct. 781, 799, 89 L.Ed. 1029, in connection with the concurring opinion in that case, ibid., 324 U.S. at pages 412, 416, 417, 65 S.Ct. at pages 788, 789, 89 L.Ed. 1029.

I cannot bring myself to believe that for Louisiana to leave to executive clemency, rather than to require, mitigation of a sentence of death duly pronounced upon conviction for murder because a first attempt to carry it out was an innocent misadventure, offends a principle of justice 'Rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people'. See Snyder v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, supra, 291 U.S. at page 105, 54 S.Ct. at page 332, 78 L.Ed. 674, 90 A.L.R. 575. Short of the compulsion of such a principle, this Court must abstain from interference with State action no matter how strong one's personal feeling of revulsion against a State's insistence on its pound of flesh. One must be on guard against finding in personal disapproval a reflection of more or less prevailing condemnation. Strongly drawn as I am to some of the sentiments expressed by my brother Burton, I cannot rid myself of the conviction that were I to hold that Louisiana would transgress the Due Process Clause if the State were allowed, in the precise circumstances before us, to carry out the death sentence, I would be enforcing my private view rather than that consensus of society's opinion which, for purposes of due process, is the standard enjoined by the Constitution.

The fact that I reach this conclusion does not mean that a hypothetical situation, which assumes a series of abortive attempts at electrocution or even a single, cruelly willful attempt, would not raise different questions. When the Fourteenth Amendment first came here for application the Court abstained from venturing even a tentative definition of due process. With wise forethought it indicated that what may be found within or without the Due Process Clause must inevitably be left to 'the gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion, as the cases presented for decision shall require, with the reasoning on which such decisions may be founded.' Davidson v. City of New Orleans, supra, 96 U.S. at page 104, 6 Otto at page 104, 24 L.Ed. 616. This is another way of saying that these are matters which depend on 'differences of degree. The whole law does so as soon as it is civilized.' Holmes, J., in LeRoy Fibre Co. v. Chicago, Milwaukee & St. P. Ry., 232 U.S. 340, 354, 34 S.Ct. 415, 418, 58 L.Ed. 631. Especially is this so as to questions arising under the Due Process Clause. A finding that in this case the State of Louisiana has not gone beyond its powers is for me not the starting point for abstractly logical extension. Since I cannot say that it would be 'repugnant to the conscience of mankind', Palko v. State of Connecticut, supra, 302 U.S. at page 323, 58 S.Ct. at page 151, 82 L.Ed. 288, for Louisiana to exercise the power on which she here stands, I cannot say that the Constitution withholds it.

Mr. Justice BURTON, with whom Mr. Justice DOUGLAS, Mr. Justice MURPHY and Mr. Justice RUTLEDGE concur, dissenting.