540
Opinion of the Court
Cummings v. Missouri addressed an ex post facto challenge to certain amendments to the Missouri State Constitution made in 1865. When read together, those amendments listed a series of acts deemed criminal (all dealing with the giving of aid or comfort to anyone engaged in armed hostility against the United States), and then declared that unless a person engaged in certain professions (e. g., lawyers and clergymen) swore an oath of loyalty, he "shall, on conviction [for failing to swear the oath], be punished" by a fine, imprisonment, or both. Id., at 279-281. We held that these provisions violated the Ex Post Facto Clause.
Writing for the Court, Justice Field first observed that "[b]y an ex post facto law is meant one which imposes a punishment for an act which was not punishable at the time it was committed; or imposes additional punishment to that then prescribed; or changes the rules of evidence by which less or different testimony is sufficient to convict than was then required." Id., at 325-326. The Court then held the amendments violated the Ex Post Facto Clause in all these respects: some of the offenses deemed criminal by the amendments were not criminal acts before then, id., at 327-328; other acts were previously criminal, but now they carried a greater criminal sanction, id., at 328; and, most importantly for present purposes, the amendments permitted conviction on less testimony than was previously sufficient, because they "subvert the presumptions of innocence, and alter the rules of evidence, which heretofore, under the universally recognized principles of the common law, have been supposed to be fundamental and unchangeable," ibid. The Court continued: "They assume that the parties are guilty; they call upon the parties to establish their innocence; and they declare that such innocence can be shown only in one way—by an inquisition, in the form of an expurgatory oath, into the consciences of the parties." Ibid.
It is correct that Cummings held Missouri's constitutional amendments invalid under the fourth category because
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