U.S. v. Booker, s. 80-5164

• Decision Date: 30 July 1981
• Docket Number: Nos. 80-5164,80-5165,s. 80-5164
• Citation: 655 F.2d 562
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Tony BOOKER, Appellant. UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. J. D. ROLLINS, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 562

655 F.2d 562

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Tony BOOKER, Appellant.

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. J. D. ROLLINS, Appellant.

Nos. 80-5164, 80-5165.

United States Court of Appeals,

Fourth Circuit.

Argued March 6, 1981.

Decided July 30, 1981.

Joseph T. Nall, Smithfield, N. C., John H. Boddie, Raleigh, N. C., for appellants.

Louise A. Lerner, Dept. of Justice (Walter W. Barnett, Dept. of Justice, James P. Turner, Acting Asst. Atty. Gen., Washington, D. C., on brief), for appellee.

Before WINTER and WIDENER, Circuit Judges, and MICHAEL, ^* District Judge.

WINTER, Circuit Judge:

Tony Booker, J. D. Rollins and Tony Gibson were convicted by a jury of kidnapping and carrying away two persons with the intent to hold them as slaves in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1583 and 2 (1976). Booker and Rollins appeal, questioning the legal sufficiency of the evidence to convict them under the statute and the legal correctness of the district court's instruction to the jury of what it means to be "held as a slave" under § 1583. We see no merit in the appeals and affirm.

I.

Booker operated a migrant agricultural labor camp in Johnston County, North Carolina. Two of his lieutenants, Rollins and Gibson, brought Gary Walters, his half-brother and Joseph Romeo to the camp from Florida, having promised them free transportation and steady work. The men discovered instead that employment was intermittent, that they would be charged both for their meals while idle and for their transportation from Florida, that Booker withheld their wages and required all retail purchases to be executed at the camp, and that they were forbidden to leave the camp until they had satisfied any debts allegedly owed Booker. Booker repeatedly threatened workers at the camp with serious injury or death if they attempted to leave without paying their debts, and he backed up his threats with severe beatings and assaults with firearms, administered personally or by his lieutenants.

The indictment was returned as the result of an incident at the camp involving Walters and Romeo. Walters asked Booker for permission to leave the camp to buy some personal items and for a small advance on his wages. Booker refused, and left the camp, leaving instructions to his lieutenants to "keep an eye on things" and not to permit any workers to depart in his absence. Walters and Romeo set out nonetheless for a nearby store, whereupon Rollins, Gibson and a third unidentified individual threatened them, beat them severely, forced them into the van and returned them to the camp. Walters was knocked down by a blow to the jaw, choked until he entered the van, and then struck again to his knees upon his return to camp, breaking his nose and bloodying his face. Romeo was beaten severely with an ax handle. Booker, who had returned to camp by the time Walters and Romeo had been brought back, warned them that they could expect more physical abuse or death if they ever tried to leave camp again while owing him money, punctuating this discussion with foul and abusive language. Walters and Romeo both testified that they thought that Booker meant to carry out his threats. They left the camp shortly thereafter when representatives of Farm Workers' Legal Services arrived, and they refused medical attention because of their anxiety to leave North Carolina and get away from Booker and his men.

II.

We hold that this evidence provided a substantial basis on which the jury could conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Rollins and Gibson, at the instigation of Booker, kidnapped and carried away Walters and Romeo from the road, returning them to the camp with the intent to hold them as slaves in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1583 and 2. ¹ We reach this conclusion from our understanding of the intent and scope of § 1583. Section 1583, along with sections 1581 and 1584 of Title 18, was enacted to enforce the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, which provides in part that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." The amendment and the legislation were intended to eradicate not merely the formal system of slavery that had existed in the southern states prior to the Civil War, but all forms of compulsory, involuntary service. See Clyatt v. United States, 197 U.S. 207, 215-19, 25 S.Ct. 429, 430-431, 49 L.Ed. 726 (1905); The Peonage Cases, 123 F. 671, 675-83 (M.D.Ala.1903); see also The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 20-23, 3 S.Ct. 18, 27-30, 27 L.Ed. 835 (1883); The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 89-90, 21 L.Ed. 394 (1873) (Field, J., dissenting).

Significantly, the thirteenth amendment applied not only to state-sanctioned slavery but to slavery practiced by individuals. As the Supreme Court stated in the Civil Rights Cases :

By its own unaided force and effect it abolished slavery, and established universal freedom. Still, legislation may be necessary and proper to meet all the various cases and circumstances to be affected by it, and to prescribe proper modes of redress for its violation in letter or spirit. And such legislation may be primary and direct in its character; for the amendment is not a mere prohibition of State laws establishing or upholding slavery, but an absolute declaration that slavery or involuntary servitude shall not exist in any part of the United States.

109 U.S. at 20, 3 S.Ct. at 28.

Congress in fact moved swiftly to provide such legislation after the amendment was ratified in December 1865. The South was far from wholly reconciled to the abandonment of the system of forced labor that contributed significantly to the economic success of its agriculture. See R. Fogel and S. Engerman, Time on the Cross (1974). Many planters felt strongly that they simply could not work their fields without compulsory service. A Georgia Leader on Reconstruction and Conversation of Alabama Planters in R.N. Current, ed., Reconstruction (1865-1877), at 39, 46 (1969). Moreover, the war-torn South had large numbers of homeless uprooted people who today would probably be characterized as refugees but were then commonly seen as roaming, "dangerous" vagrants. Some local authorities responded by permitting employers to engage laborers on a basis that essentially bound the worker for life. C. V. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 23 (3d Rev.Ed.1974). Many states enacted so-called "Black Codes" that severely restricted the freedom of the former slaves and provided tough criminal sanctions for those who violated their "labor contracts" with employers. J. H. Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War 48-50 (1961); J. L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves 139-40 (1977). The Freedmen's Bureau and the federal military authorities acted quickly to eliminate the more obnoxious features of these schemes, but the dominant Radical faction in Congress became convinced that the openly-expressed Southern attitudes confirmed by the quick enactment of the Black Codes presaged the recrudescence of slavery. J. H. Franklin, supra, at 55-57. In 1866, Congress sought to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau, enacted the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, and on May 28, acted to proscribe kidnapping for the purpose of selling persons into involuntary servitude or holding them as slaves. 14 Stat. 50, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. (1866).

The legislative history for this provision, now codified as 18 U.S.C. § 1583, is very limited. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, one of the leaders of the Radicals, introduced the bill as a measure to prevent the kidnapping and sale of former slaves to countries which still permitted slavery, such as Cuba and Brazil. Cong.Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 852 (1866); see J. L. Roark, supra. Notwithstanding this limited purpose, the statute should be read as expressing the broad and sweeping intention of Congress during the Reconstruction period to stamp out the vestiges of the old regime of slavery and to prevent the reappearance of forced labor in whatever new form it might take. ²

The few reported cases that discuss this statute and the related provisions of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1581 and 1584 have confirmed this view. In Bailey v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219, 31 S.Ct. 145, 55 L.Ed. 191 (1911), the Supreme Court held invalid an Alabama statute that prescribed criminal penalties for laborers who breached their employment contracts without satisfying debts owed their employer. The statute established a presumption of criminal intent to defraud the employer by the fact of the mere breach of the contract. The Court ruled that the statute effectively required compulsory service impermissible under the thirteenth amendment because the compulsion inherent in the threat of criminal sanctions was as strong as that inherent in the use of physical force. 219 U.S. at 240-45, 31 S.Ct. at 151-153. In United States v. McClellan, 127 F. 971 (S.D.Ga.1904), the district court refused to quash an indictment that charged several defendants with the sale of a man into forced labor, holding that the statutes (now §§ 1581, 1583 and 1584) broadly regulated behavior of this type and were neither unconstitutional nor were to be confined to the narrow circumstances of the particular evils which they were intended to redress. ³ See also The Peonage Cases, 123 F. 671.

We accordingly think that the sort of migrant labor camp operated by Booker with the assistance of the other defendants in this case clearly comes within the purview of these statutes. The thirteenth amendment and the laws that enforce it were directed not only at involuntary servitude supported by state action but that exacted by purely private conduct as well. They established the fundamental principle that no person could secure the labor of another by compulsion. The statutes protected persons similarly situated to the migrant workers of our own time. They were persons without property and without skills save those in tending the fields....