Conditional Silence

Reds and party-liners have a perfect right to refuse to answer questions about their Communist activities--so long as they take advantage of their constitutional privilege not to incriminate themselves. Then the law cannot touch them for contempt. So the Supreme Court ruled last week in an 8-0 decision written by Justice Hugo Black.

The decision involved a minor Communist Party official in Colorado named Mrs. Patricia Blau. Called as a witness in a federal grand-jury investigation in 1949, Mrs. Blau stood on her right to avoid selfincrimination, refused to say whether she knew anything about the party. She was tried for contempt, sentenced to a year in jail.

The Smith Act of 1940 (under which the eleven leaders of the C.P were convicted) makes Communist activities a possible basis for criminal charges, reasoned the court. Therefore, a witness asked to testify about such activities may justifiably enfold himself in the Fifth Amendment, which provides that no one in a criminal case is required to be a witness against himself. As precedent, Justice Black recalled Chief Justice John Marshall's famed ruling in 1807 reaffirming this guarantee of the Fifth Amendment in the Aaron Burr treason trial. From Mr. Burr to Mrs. Blau the constitutional line was clear.

The ruling might be applied to the grubby crew of witnesses who have defied congressional committees on the same grounds. Some 50 witnesses are currently embroiled with the law and facing jail terms for refusing to answer questions like those put to Mrs. Blau. Among them: Earl Browder, Frederick Vanderbilt Field. The famed Hollywood Ten, however, relied primarily on the First Amendment (freedom of speech) in their refusal to answer the question: Are you a Communist?

The court's latest decision also brought into sharp question the constitutionality of the McCarran anti-subversive act, which Communists are currently defying. Forcing a person to register as a Communist might also conceivably be held as an infringement of his rights under the Fifth Amendment.

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