Dash v. Mitchell

356 F. Supp. 1292, 1972 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15200
CourtDistrict Court, District of Columbia
DecidedFebruary 7, 1972
DocketCiv. A. 3713-70
StatusPublished
Cited by13 cases

This text of 356 F. Supp. 1292 (Dash v. Mitchell) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, District of Columbia primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Dash v. Mitchell, 356 F. Supp. 1292, 1972 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15200 (D.D.C. 1972).

Opinion

OPINION

MacKINNON, Circuit Judge.

The present case is an action seeking a declaratory judgment that the so-called preventive detention provisions of the District of Columbia Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act of 1970 1 are unconstitutional, and a permanent injunction against their enforcement. The preventive detention provisions, specifically D.C.Code §§ 23-1322 and 23-1323 (Supp. IV, 1971), are asserted to be unconstitutional on their face and void as violative of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments and Articles I and III of the United States Constitution. Because a permanent injunction was sought, a three-judge district court was convened pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2282 (1970).

The plaintiffs have filed a motion for summary judgment in their favor, and. the defendants have filed motions to dismiss the amended complaint. Since we have concluded that' for various reasons relating to standing to sue, ripeness and mootness—reasons which are jurisdictional in nature—the amended complaint must be dismissed, we do not reach the actual merits of the controversy.

I.

For purposes of resolving certain of the questions of standing to sue which must be decided, a number of the plaintiffs may conveniently be treated as a group. First, there are the individual trustees of the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia, set forth in paragraph 3 of the amended complaint, 2 suing on behalf of the Defender Service. Second, there are the Washington Urban League, Inc. and the American Civil Liberties Union Fund of the National Capital Area, Inc., set forth in paragraphs 7 and 8 of the amended complaint. All of these plaintiffs will hereafter be referred to together as the “organizational plaintiffs.”

The allegations of the amended complaint state that the plaintiffs in general sue as representatives of a class under Fed.R.Civ.P. 23 which “consists of all persons subject to pretrial detention pursuant to the pretrial detention provisions of the District of Columbia Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act of *1295 1970 . . . .” 3 There are no allegations anywhere in the amended complaint which seek to confer on the organizational plaintiffs any status other than the class representational one just referred to. For reasons to be explained presently, we have concluded that under the mantel of this particular status, the precise allegations of this amended complaint fail to set out any “injury in fact” to the organizational plaintiffs. They therefore have no standing to maintain the present suit.

All of the allegations of the amended complaint which relate to the harm purportedly occasioned by the preventive detention provisions speak directly in terms of harm to those persons —members of the class sought to be represented—who are actually or potentially subject to preventive detention. 4 There simply are no allegations that the organizational plaintiffs as organizations are harmed in any way, shape or fashion. Compare Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State v. Watson, 132 U.S.App.D.C. 329, 407 F.2d 1264 (1968). However many uncertainties there may be as to certain aspects of the federal law of standing, there is no uncertainty as to the requirement that a plaintiff, in order to have standing, must allege that he himself suffers some “injury in fact” by reason of the action sought to be challenged. Davis, Standing: Taxpayers and Others, 35 U.Chi.L.Rev. 601, 607 (1968). Injury in fact is what the Supreme Court has thought imparts that “adversary context” 5 to litigation required by the “case or controversy” clause of Article III of the Constitution. See Association of Data Process Service Organizations v. Camp, 397 U.S. 150, 152-154, 90 S.Ct. 827, 25 L.Ed.2d 184 (1970); Barlow v. Collins, 397 U.S. 159, 164, 90 S.Ct. 832, 25 L.Ed.2d 192 (1970); Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 204, 82 S.Ct. 691, 7 L.Ed.2d 663 (1962). Where, as in the present case, the allegations of a complaint establish a plaintiff in a strictly representational status, and allege injury only to members of the class sought to be represented—an injury not shared in by the representational plaintiff—the representational plaintiff plainly has no standing under Article III.

In support of their standing, the organizational plaintiffs rely principally on Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965), Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925) and Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33, 36 S.Ct. 7, 60 L.Ed. 131 (1915). From these cases they would have us conclude that they enjoy a “derivative” standing as a consequence of their “professional relationship” 6 to persons actually or potentially subject to the provisions of the preventive detention statute. Those cases, however, are easily distinguishable from the present case.

In Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965), it was held that a physician could assert the constitutional rights of his patients as a defense in a criminal prosecution as an accessory to a viola *1296 tion of a Connecticut birth control law. But the imposition of criminal liability upon the physician under an unconstitutional statute certainly constitutes injury in fact to the physician. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925), a private school was permitted to sue to enjoin the operation of a statute requiring parents to send their children to public schools. The injury to the private school is obvious. Finally, in Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33, 36 S.Ct. 7, 60 L.Ed. 131 (1915), an alien employee was held to have standing to attack a statute requiring his employer to fire all but a certain proportion of his alien employees. Again the harm is obvious.

The above three cases were all consistent with the rule “that a person cannot challenge the constitutionality of a statute unless he shows that he himself is injured by its operation.” Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249, 255, 73 S.Ct. 1031, 1034, 97 L.Ed. 1586 (1953); cf., e. g., Kauffman v. Dreyfus Fund, Inc., 434 F.2d 727 (3d Cir. 1970).

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
356 F. Supp. 1292, 1972 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15200, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/dash-v-mitchell-dcd-1972.