Judge Aldrich Frees Kamin On All Contempt Charges

Leon J. Kamin '48 was acquitted of all charges of contempt of Congress in Federal Court yesterday morning and became, barring highly unlikely future complications, a free man.

Judge Bailey Aldrich '28, who has been trying Kamin without a jury, announced the decision briefly to a full courtroom and released copies of a 25-page opinion supporting the judgment. The entire proceeding took less than five minutes.

His opinion held that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's Investigating Subcommittee had exceeded the powers Congress had granted its parent committee, the Government Operations Committee. The Committee, he said, had no authority to investigate subversion in privately operated defense plants.

This was the investigation for which Kamin was summoned before McCarthy in Boston two years ago. In a televised hearing Kamin refused to answer, on grounds of conscience, six questions McCarthy asked him about his former associates in the Communist party.

Aldrich noted that the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act, which defined the Committee's functions, had assigned it the task of "studying the operation of Government activities at all levels with a view to determining its economy and efficiency."

"It seems to me," the Judge's opinion said, "that, as a pure matter of language, private operation of private industry is not 'activity performed by the government' on an 'operational level,' and that the general economy and efficiency of such private corporation was outside the scope of the Committee."

No Congressional Authority

He added that the Committee was also given no authority by Congress to investigate "the general area of Communism." He said the "presence of Communists in defense plants could be a matter of legitimate Congressional concern," but not of this particular committee.

Immediately after the judgment was announced, U.S. Attorney Anthony Julian said an appeal from it was impossible. He said the law prevents the government from appealing an acquittal in criminal cases.

In making his announcement, Judge Aldrich reversed his decision of Nov. 2 to dismiss two counts of the original six-count indictment against Kamin for contempt of Congress. He reinstated them and then acquitted Kamin on all counts.

Reversal of Decision

The government could theoretically have appealed the dismissals.

Aldrich's acquittal of Kamin is nearly unique in Federal jurisprudence. Only a handful of men who have refused to testify before Congressional committees have been found innocent, and usually their cases have gone to the Supreme Court before they were successful.

His decision also represents a rare instance when the courts have found that a Congressional committee exceeded its jurisdiction. Besides Judge Aldrich's own decision to acquit Kamin on two counts last November, the most recent occurred in 1953 when the Supreme court said in the Rumely case that an investigation of lobbying did not allow Congress a general mandate to investigate pamphlet-publishing.

Lacked Clear Authority

The government briefs had argued that the Courts normally give Congressional committees the benefit of the doubt in presuming the "legitimacy of their motives." Aldrich said this could be done when the Committee had clear authority, but not when the Committee clearly lacked it.

Judge Aldrich struck down many of the arguments the defense had built up during the trial. He declared Kamin's grounds of conscience legally insufficient. He said he had no grounds to disbelieve Senator McCarthy's testimony at the trial that Kamin had been informed sufficiently of the reason he had been asked to appear. He did not feel that Kamin's constitutional rights had been infringed.