U.S. v. Stokes, 74-1315

• Decision Date: 20 January 1975
• Docket Number: No. 74-1315,74-1315
• Citation: 506 F.2d 771
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Charles Cary STOKES, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 771

506 F.2d 771

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Charles Cary STOKES, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 74-1315.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

Jan. 20, 1975.

Manley F. Brown, H. T. O'Neal, Jr., James D. Hudson, Macon, Ga., for defendant-appellant.

William J. Schloth, U.S. Atty., Macon, Ga., John F. Conroy, Washington, D.C., Ronald T. Knight, Asst. U.S. Atty., Macon, Ga., for plaintiff-appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia.

Before GODBOLD and MORGAN, Circuit Judges, and JOHNSON, District judge.

LEWIS R. MORGAN, Circuit Judge:

Charles Cary Stokes brings this appeal from his conviction by a jury for violation of Title 18 U.S.C. 242, ¹ which makes criminal the willful deprivation of constitutional rights by any person, acting under color of law. We affirm.

I.

At the time of the acts giving rise to his conviction, Stokes was employed as a police officer by the City of Macon, Georgia. On the night of July 10, 1973, Stokes and another Macon police officer were summoned to the lounge of a local inn where they arrested John Velpo Tucker on a charge of 'plain drunk.' Tucker, a field representative for a major oil company, was a resident of Florida who had traveled to Macon on a business trip. Both before his arrest at the lounge and afterwards in the custody of the police, Tucker was obstreperous and verbally abusive to the point of threats. However, he never made any overt attempts to carry out his threats to resist arrest and to inflict injury on his custodians. After Tucker was taken to the police station for booking, Stokes shoved Tucker down a flight of stairs, struck him with his hands and a nightstick, and threw him against a wall head first. After booking, Tucker was locked in the drunk tank. Early the next morning, Tucker was taken to a Macon hospital in a coma, where he was operated on for a fractured skull. He was still in a coma at the time of Stokes' trial six months later.

A one-count indictment charged Stokes with willfully striking and assaulting Tucker, an inhabitant of the state of Florida, and thereby willfully depriving him of the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on January 16, 1974. Stokes was sentenced to six months imprisonment and five years probation.

II.

Stokes has argued numerous grounds for the reversal of his conviction. Most of these involve alleged errors in the trial court's failure to instruct the jury in accordance with requests submitted by Stokes' counsel. The trial court, of course, has no obligation to adopt the language proposed by counsel, as long as its charge, taken as a whole, correctly states the law. Locke v. United States, 166 F.2d 449, 451 (5th Cir. 1948), cert. denied,334 U.S. 837, 68 S.Ct. 1495, 92 L.Ed. 1763 (1948).

Stokes' primary objection is that the trial court erroneously stated the law in instructing the jury as to what constitutes a deprivation of liberty without due process. Stockes contends that the only constitutional right of which Tucker could have been deprived in this situation is his right to a courtroom trial; for a deprivation of due process to have occurred, he argues, Stokes' actions must be found to have constituted summary punishment of Tucker. Thus he contends there was fatal error in the trial court's instruction that a police officer's unlawful assault of a prisoner in his custody is a deprivation of liberty without due process of law, within the purview of 18 U.S.C. 242. ²

Stokes' interpretation of 242 and the cases construing it is an oversimplification and an understatement of the constitutional rights of which one may not willfully deprive another without incurring criminal liability. The seminal case interpreting 18 U.S.C. 242, and upon which Stokes relies, is Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 65 S.Ct. 1031, 89 L.Ed. 1495 (1945). In Screws, the sheriff of Baker County, Georgia, with the assistance of two other law enforcement officers, arrested a Negro citizen of that state. They beat their prisoner to death with fists and a blackjack. The Court was faced with a strong challenge to the constitutionality of applying 242 (then 20 of the Criminal Code, 18 U.S.C. 52) to the deprivation of due process rights, on the grounds that the due process clause lacked the specificity which is constitutionally mandated for criminal statutes. To preserve the statute's constitutionality, the Court held that 242 requires as one element of the offense the specific intent 'to deprive a person of a right which has been made specific either by the express terms of the Constitution or laws of the United States or by decisions interpreting them.' 325 U.S. at 104, 65 S.Ct. at 1037.

Ignoring the clear holding in Screws, Stokes apparently relies upon the Court's statement that in order to convict the defendants, 'it was necessary for (the jury) to find that petitioners had the purpose to deprive the prisoner of a constitutional right, e.g., the right to be tried by a court rather than by ordeal.' 325 U.S. at 107, 65 S.Ct. at 1038. ³ screws and other cases cited by Stokes, e.g., United States v. Delerme, 457 F.2d 156 (3d Cir. 1972); Koehler v. United States, 189 F.2d 711 (5th Cir. 1951); Pullen v. United States, 164 F.2d 756 (5th Cir. 1947); Crews v. United States, 160 F.2d 746 (5th Cir. 1947), did involve the right not to be subjected to summary punishment at the hands of law enforcement officers cloaked in the power of their official state position. However, there is no suggestion in any of these cases that in the factual context of police beatings and assaults the right to due process or the scope of 242 is limited to a right not to be summarily punished or deprived of a trial by law. The argument that it is thus limited suggests that state officials can remove any beating of a prisoner, however brutal, from the realm of a constitutional violation merely by bringing the prisoner to trial, at least when the assault occurs in a pre-trial time frame.

To the contrary, Screws makes it perfectly clear that once a due process right has been defined and made specific by court decisions, that right is encompassed by 242. Screws' own language then negates the rationale of Stokes' position. The real question for decision, therefore, is whether the trial court's instructions described 'a right which has been made specific . . . by decisions interpreting (the Constitution).' Screws, supra, 325 U.S. at 104, 65 S.Ct. at 1037.

We are mindful of the problem faced by the Supreme Court in Screws. We deal here with a criminal statute, and those who are prosecuted under it ought not to be forced to guess at the actions which it makes criminal. There are numerous cases, however, which support the proposition that one's right to be free from unlawful assault by state law enforcement officers when lawfully in their custody has been made a definite and specific part of the body of due process rights protected by the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution, so that a willful deprivation of that right comes within the purview of 242.

In Lynch v. United States, 189 F.2d 476 (5th Cir. 1951), cert. denied, 342 U.S. 831, 72 S.Ct. 50, 96 L.Ed. 629, this court held that rights protected by the fourteenth amendment include: 'the rights of persons under state arrest not to be deprived of their personal security (which is embraced within the word 'liberty') except in accord with due process of law,' and 'the right to protection of law,' and 'the right to protection from injury from the officers having a conviction under 18 U.S.C. 242 of a sheriff and a deputy sheriff who arrested and held several Negroes, and then turned them over to a group of Ku Klux Klansmen who beat them. We held that the fourteenth amendment not only extends protection from injury at the hands of the state officers themselves, but also shelters the prisoner from the denial of protection owed him by the arresting officers when third persons seek to inflict injury. 189 F.2d at 479.

Furthermore, in United States v. Walker, 216 F.2d 683 (5th Cir. 1954), cert. denied, 348 U.S. 959, 75 S.Ct. 450, 99 L.Ed. 748, we reversed the dismissal of an indictment under 242 which alleged that the defendant, a supervisor of a Florida prison camp, did 'willfully, unlawfully, and wrongfully beat, bruise, wound, lacerate, cut, and injure the person and body' of one of his prisoners, thereby depriving him of certain Constitutional rights, 'to-wit: the right to be secure in his person, and to be immune from illegal assault and battery by the defendant and by other persons under the defendant's direction and control, and the right not to be assaulted by the said defendant and by other persons under the defendant's control and direction, and the right and privilege not to be subjected to punishment without due process of law.' 216 F.2d 683, n. 1.

In a slightly different procedural posture, Stokes has made an argument very similar to that of the accused prison official in Walker, namely, that his purpose or motive for beating Tucker is critical to the question of whether a 242 offense was committed, and unless his manhandling of Tucker was done with the intent and for the purpose of inflicting punishment without benefit of a trial in a court of law, his actions do not amount to a deprivation of due process. However, as we said in Walker.

(Defendant's) reliance, therefore, on the fact that in (United States v. Jones, 207 F.2d 785 (5th Cir. 1953)) the information stated the reasons for the alleged assault and the indictment in this case did not, will not do, for in each case the offense consists, not in the reason given by, or charged against, the offender for the unlawful action, the wilful deprivation under the color of state law of rights secured to prisoners by the Federal Constitution, but in the fact of the deliberate and wilful deprivation of such rights by the officer...