Dennis v. United States
| Dennis v. United States | |
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| Argued December 4, 1950 Decided June 4, 1951 |
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| Full case name | Eugene Dennis, et al. v. United States |
| Citations | 341 U.S. 494 (more)
71 S. Ct. 857; 95 L. Ed. 1137; 1951 U.S. LEXIS 2407
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| Prior history | Motion by co-defendant to dismiss attorney denied, 9 F.R.D. 367 (S.D.N.Y. 1949); defendants convicted, S.D.N.Y., October 29, 1949; affirmed, 183 F.2d 201 (2d Cir. 1950) |
| Subsequent history | Rehearing denied, 342 U.S. 842 (1951); rehearing denied, 355 U.S. 936 (1958) |
| Holding | |
| Defendants' convictions for conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government by force through their participation in the Communist Party were not in violation of the First Amendment. Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. | |
| Court membership | |
| Case opinions | |
| Plurality | Vinson, joined by Reed, Burton, Minton |
| Concurrence | Frankfurter |
| Concurrence | Jackson |
| Dissent | Black |
| Dissent | Douglas |
| Clark took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. | |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amend. I; 18 U.S.C. §§ 10, 11 (1946) | |
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Overruled by
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Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951), was a United States Supreme Court case relating to Eugene Dennis, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. The Court ruled that Dennis did not have the right under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution to exercise free speech, publication and assembly, if the exercise involved the creation of a plot to overthrow the government.
In 1948, eleven Communist Party leaders were convicted of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government and for the violation of several points of the Smith Act. The party members who had been petitioning for socialist reforms claimed that the act violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and that they served no clear and present danger to the nation. The eleven petitioners were:
The 1949 trial was presided over by Judge Harold Medina, a former Columbia University professor who had been a judge for only 18 months when the trial began. The trial was held in the Foley Square federal courthouse in New York City, and opened on November 1, 1948; preliminary proceedings and jury selection lasted until January 17, 1949; the defendants first appeared in court on March 7; and the trial concluded on October 14, 1949. Although later trials surpassed it, in 1949 it was the longest federal trial in US history.
Prosecutor John McGohey did not assert that the defendants had a specific plan to violently overthrow the US government, but rather alleged that the CPUSA's philosophy generally advocated the violent overthrow of governments. To prove this, the prosecution proffered articles, pamphlets and books (such as The Communist Manifesto) written by authors such as Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin. The prosecution argued that the texts advocated violent revolution, and that by adopting the texts as their political foundation, the defendants were also personally guilty of advocating violent overthrow of the government.
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