Word: contemptibly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Traditionally outside this command is the power of federal judges to enforce their orders by trying errants for criminal contempt without a jury. Last week the Supreme Court again followed the tradition by denying jury trials to Mississippi's ex-Governor Ross R. Barnett and his successor, Paul B. Johnson Jr., both charged with what Justice Arthur Goldberg called the "extraordinarily serious" crime of obstructing federal orders to desegregate the riot-torn University of Mississippi...
...jury. The Mississippians had hoped for the former, counting on sympathetic Southern jurors. But how they fare now is almost unimportant compared with the ramifications of last week's decision. For only by the narrowest margin of 5 to 4 did the Supreme Court uphold summary criminal-contempt power. And in so doing, it seemed to grant a key concession that dissenting Justice Hugo Black hailed as "the beginning of the end" for nonjury contempt trials...
However, there are curbs on this power. If Barnett and Johnson were charged with contempt of a federal district court, they could well argue for a jury trial under certain provisions of the 1914 Clayton Act. Such a court did in fact order Negro Student James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss. But Justice Tom Clark, speaking for the majority, put Barnett and Johnson squarely in the hands of the Court of Appeals, which had also enjoined them from interfering. Said Clark: "It would be anomalous for a Court of Appeals to have the power to punish contempt...
Pointed Dictum. The argument then entered virgin territory: the constitutional guarantee of jury trial has long been construed to exclude "petty offenses"-meaning those carrying top penalties of six months in jail and a $500 fine. Criminal contempt is no petty offense. Until recently, however, it was almost never punished by more than petty-level penalties. Now the penalties have grown ever stiffer. For example, the Supreme Court in 1958 upheld three-year sentences for Communists Gilbert Green and Harry Winston, who had jumped bail. In the light of such penalties, has criminal contempt now become triable by jury...
...Durwood Pye, a scholarly white-supremacist. Graduating at the top of his class at Atlanta Law School, he became a formidable lawyer before becoming a judge in 1956. A stickler for detail, he has ground out opinions of more than 600 pages, once fined Atlanta newspapers $20,000 for contempt for describing a defendant's past, banned news cameras and tape recorders not only in his courtroom, but also on "adjacent sidewalks and public streets." At 54, Pye is tetchy as a loaded derringer; he is wont to hector witnesses and explode at any moment over what he calls...