State v. Casselman

205 P.2d 1131, 69 Idaho 237, 1949 Ida. LEXIS 231, 24 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2056
CourtIdaho Supreme Court
DecidedMay 2, 1949
DocketNos. 7502-7505.
StatusPublished
Cited by16 cases

This text of 205 P.2d 1131 (State v. Casselman) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Idaho Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Casselman, 205 P.2d 1131, 69 Idaho 237, 1949 Ida. LEXIS 231, 24 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2056 (Idaho 1949).

Opinions

*240 GIVENS, Justice.

Appellants were convicted of violating Chapter 265, 1947 Session laws, page 788. 1 Separate appeals were consolidated for hearing and determination herein. Appellants waived a jury and were tried by the ■court on a stipulation of facts, epitomized' as follows:

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company is the head of and owns the controlling interest in 23 separate, individual, corporate subsidiaries of a federation giving nationwide telephone service, of which *241 the Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Company (hereinafter designated Telephone Co.), organized in Colorado; and the Western Electric Company (hereinafter designated Electric Co.), organized in New York, are members.

Each subsidiary, in addition to dividends, pays 1%% °f its gross operating revenue to the parent company, mostly used to operate the Bell Laboratories.

The Annual Reports of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1946, and Handbook for Installation Information of the Electric Company, and an advertisement in Life Magazine, January 2, 1947, pp. 108-9, entitled “Up from the Ranks,” were admitted as exhibits.

The Electric Co. engineers, fabricates and installs central office equipment in, and upon order from the various affiliates, its employees working mostly in their buildings and central offices, and at all times since November 1946 have been so doing for the Telephone Co. in its building. The Boise headquarters of the Electric Co. are under written contract with and in the central office building of the Telephone Co. at 609 Main Street, including lights, heat and toilet facilities. The foremen of the Electric Co. keep their records there and receive reports from their employees, who congregate and work there, such room being solely under the control of the Elec-trie Co., situated on the ground floor off the main hall.

Each subsidiary employs and pays its own employees, who are in separate unions: for the Telephone Co., the Mountain States Federation of Telephone Workers; and for the Electric Co., the Association of Communication Equipment Workers; both unions are affiliated with and part of the National Federation of Telephone Workers.

Employees of the operating companies and the Electric Co. may, but not as a matter of right, transfer from one to the other without loss of benefits, but as to the latter company, must take special training, and must in either event transfer his or her union membership.

April 7, 1947, both subordinate unions struck as against their respective employers, over separate labor contracts. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company refused to bargain with the National Federation of Telephone Workers as the bargaining agent for the subordinates, except as to long distance operators, for the reason it had no authority to represent the affiliated companies.

The separate labor disputes were settled individually; that between the Telephone Co. and its union employees at 12:01 A.M. May IS, 1947, and that of the Electric Co. May 21, 1947.

April 7 to May 14, pickets of the two unions peaceably patrolled the public street and thoroughfare in front of the Telephone *242 Co. building, bearing strike placards Exhibits E 2 and F. 3

After the settlement and ending of the strike against the Telephone Co., appellants, employees of the Electric Co., continued such picketing, carrying the same placards, and employees of the Telephone Co. therefore declined to work and its service was restricted. These prosecutions and convictions ensued.

Appellants’, assignments of error urge their demurrers should have been sustained and thereby and otherwise challenge the statute as unconstitutional, violating the Sixth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution and Article I, Sections 9, 10 and 13 of the Idaho Constitution, because it does not define “labor dispute” and “one not a party to a labor dispute” and neither has a technical, special or historical uniform or common-law meaning well enough known to the public to correctly apply it and that the statute is too vague and indefinite; that the evidence does not show appellants picketed the Telephone Co., nor that it was not a party to the labor dispute; and that there was, as to it, a primary, not a secondary boycott.

A criminal statute must be reasonably definite in defining the offense. State v. Groseclose, 67 Idaho 71, 171 P.2d 863. If a criminal statute is deficient in this respect, it violates due process and cannot stand. Lanzetta v. New Jersey, 306 U.S. 451, 59 S.Ct. 618, 83 L.Ed. 888; Connally v. General Construction Co., 269 U.S. 385, 46 S.Ct. 126, 70 L.Ed. 322.

Appellants thus present as a complete defense this proposed dilemma: First, that since there is no definition in Chapter 265, supra, of “labor dispute” or “party to the .labor dispute,” the statute is so deficient as to be unconstitutional under the above authorities; or second, a two-pronged horn in that, if the legislature intended the definition of a labor dispute in Chapter 266, '1947 Session Laws, p. 789, 4 to be the definition to be applied in Chapter 265 supra, *243 and it be applied^ literally, it is unconstitutional as violating the rule in various cases and thus announced in American Federation of Labor v. Swing, 312 U.S. 321, 61 S. Ct. 568, 570, 85 L.Ed. 855, at page 857:

“We are asked to sustain a decree which for purposes of this case asserts as the common law of a state that there can be no 'peaceful picketing or peaceful persuasion’ in relation to any dispute bet-ween an employer and a trade union unless the employer’s own employeés are in controversy with him.
“Such a ban of free communication is inconsistent with the guaranty of freedom of speech. That a state has ample power to regulate the local problems thrown up by modern industry and to preserve the p.eace is axiomatic. But not even these essential powers are unfettered by the requirements of the Bill of Rights. The scope of the Fourteenth Amendment is not confined by the notion of a particular state regarding the wise limits of an injunction in an industrial dispute, whether those limits be defined by statute or by the judicial organ of the state. A state cannot exclude workingmen from peacefully exercising the right of free communication by drawing the circle of economic competition between employers and workers so small as to contain only an employer and those directly employed by him. The interdependence of economic' interest of all engaged in the sanie industry has become a- commonplace. American [Steel] Foundries v.

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Bluebook (online)
205 P.2d 1131, 69 Idaho 237, 1949 Ida. LEXIS 231, 24 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2056, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-casselman-idaho-1949.