Word: contemptibly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...burden of proof would be on the Government. The defendant would have the usual rights to cross-examine, present witnesses and appeal. If the injunction were issued and the white man ignored it by, say, continuing to threaten the Negro, he could be held in civil contempt. At his contempt hearing he would not have the right to a jury trial-a key point in the program. If found guilty, he could be jailed until he purged himself of the contempt by agreeing to obey the injunction...
...state's Supreme Court, that the Southerners have built their first line of defense. As a member of a Judiciary subcommittee conducting hearings on the civil rights bill, Ervin began asking questions about "the abolition of trial by jury." This, he argued, would result from the civil contempt citations against persons disobeying the courts' injunctions under the new bill. It would, cried Ervin, be a "tragic error to attempt the protection of civil rights for any one group through a process which denies a liberty equally precious-that of trial by jury. The Administration's civil rights...
...Ervin's trial-by-jury slogan was taken up by Southern newspapers. Indeed, the issue worried many who were otherwise friendly to civil rights. Yet the contempt citation is the judiciary's historic enforcement tool. Jury trials in contempt cases have absolutely no basis in equity or constitutional law and precious little legislative sanction.* As early as 1894, the Supreme Court wrote: "Surely it cannot be supposed that the question of contempt of the authority of a court of the U.S., committed by-a disobedience of its orders, is triable, of right, by a jury." North Carolina Supreme...
...explanation. It has so strengthened the Southern position that civil rights backers may find it impossible to obtain the 64 votes necessary to cut off a Senate filibuster. The Southerners are within shooting distance of a Senate majority for an amendment that would require jury trials in civil rights contempt cases; Wyoming's Democratic Senator Joseph O'Mahoney has announced his support of such an amendment, while apparently wavering are such influential Senators as Minority Leader William Knowland of California and Assistant Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana. Such an amendment, said Assistant Attorney General Warren Olney...
...With a single exception, trial by jury has never been required in contempt cases to which the U.S. Government was a party. The exception: the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932 required jury trials in contempt proceedings arising from labor disputes. The provision was in effect repealed (with the enthusiastic approval of most Southern Congressmen) by the Taft-Hartley...