United States v. Dixon, 509 U.S. 688, 12 (1993)

Page:   Index   Previous  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  Next

Cite as: 509 U. S. 688 (1993)

Opinion of Scalia, J.

To oppose this analysis, the Government can point only to dictum in In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564, 594, 599-600 (1895), which, to the extent it attempted to exclude certain nonsum-mary contempt prosecutions from various constitutional protections for criminal defendants, has been squarely rejected by cases such as Bloom, 391 U. S., at 208. The Government also relies upon In re Chapman, 166 U. S. 661 (1897), and Jurney v. MacCracken, 294 U. S. 125 (1935), which recognize Congress' power to punish as contempt the refusal of a witness to testify before it. But to say that Congress can punish such a refusal is not to say that a criminal court can punish the same refusal yet again. Neither case dealt with that issue, and Chapman specifically declined to address it, noting that successive prosecutions (before Congress for contemptuous refusal to testify and before a court for violation of a federal statute making such refusal a crime) were "improbable." 166 U. S., at 672.

Both the Government, Brief for United States 15-17, and Justice Blackmun, post, at 743, contend that the legal obligation in Dixon's case may serve "interests . . . fundamentally different" from the substantive criminal law, because it derives in part from the determination of a court rather than a determination of the legislature. That distinction seems questionable, since the court's power to establish conditions of release, and to punish their violation, was conferred by statute; the legislature was the ultimate source of both the criminal and the contempt prohibition. More importantly, however, the distinction is of no moment for purposes of the Double Jeopardy Clause, the text of which looks to whether the offenses are the same, not the interests that the offenses violate. And this Court stated long ago that criminal conas assault (the only conceivable lesser included offense of an order not to "shoot")—unless one assumes that constables often order the noncommission of serious crimes (for example, "Don't murder that man!") and that serious felons such as murderers are first prosecuted for disobeying police orders.

699

Page:   Index   Previous  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  Next

Last modified: October 4, 2007