Yates v. United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Yates v. United States | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Supreme Court of the United States |
||||||||||||
| Argued October 8 – 9, 1956 Decided June 17, 1957 |
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| Holding | ||||||||||||
| The Court held that for the Smith Act to be violated, people must be encouraged to do something, rather than merely to believe in something. The Court drew a distinction between a statement of an idea and the advocacy that a certain action be taken. | ||||||||||||
| Court membership | ||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Earl Warren Associate Justices: Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Harold Hitz Burton, Tom C. Clark, John Marshall Harlan II, William J. Brennan, Charles Evans Whittaker |
||||||||||||
| Case opinions | ||||||||||||
| Majority by: Harlan Joined by: Warren, Frankfurter, Clark Concurrence by: Burton Concurrence/dissent by: Black Joined by: Douglas Brennan, Whittaker took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. |
||||||||||||
| Laws applied | ||||||||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. I | ||||||||||||
Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving free speech and congressional power.
[edit] Background
In 1951, 14 persons were charged with violating the Smith Act for being members of the Communist Party USA in California. The Smith Act made it unlawful to advocate or organize the destruction or overthrow of any government in the United States by force. Yates claimed that his party was engaged in passive actions and that any violation of the Smith Act must involve active attempts to overthrow the government.
[edit] Issue
Whether Yates' First Amendment right to freedom of speech protected his advocating the forceful overthrow of the government.
[edit] Opinion
The Supreme Court of the United States said that for the Smith Act to be violated, people must be encouraged to do something, rather than merely to believe in something. The Court drew a distinction between a statement of an idea and the advocacy that a certain action be taken. The Court ruled that the Smith Act did not prohibit “advocacy of forcible overthrow of the government as an abstract doctrine.” In Justice Black's opinion, he wrote of the original Smith Act trials: "The testimony of witnesses is comparatively insignificant. Guilt or innocence may turn on what Marx or Engels or someone else wrote or advocated as much as a hundred years or more ago.[...] When the propriety of obnoxious or unfamiliar views about government is in reality made the crucial issue, [...] prejudice makes conviction inevitable except in the rarest circumstances." The convictions of the indicted members were reversed.
