h a man whom they had just
arrested, these officers had deprived him of life without due process of
law. The defendant claimed that the statute was unconstitutional insofar
as it made criminal acts in violation of the due process clause, because
that concept was too vague to supply an ascertainable standard of
guilt.[51] Four opinions were written in the Supreme Court, no one of
which obtained the concurrence of a majority of the Justices. To "avoid
grave constitutional questions" four members construed the word
"willfully" as "connoting a purpose to deprive a person of a specific
constitutional right,"[52] and held that such "requirement of a specific
intent to deprive a person of a federal right made definite by decision
or other rule of law saves the Act from any charge of
unconstitutionality on the grounds of vagueness."[53] Justices Murphy
and Rutledge considered the statute to be sufficiently definite with
respect to the offense charged and thought it unnecessary to anticipate
doubts that might arise in other cases.[54] However, to prevent a
stalemate, Justice Rutledge voted with the four members who believed the
case should be reversed to be tried again on their narrower
interpretation of the statute. Justices Roberts, Frankfurter and Jackson
found the act too indefinite to be rescued by a restrictive
interpretation. With respect to the effect of the requirement of
willfulness, they said: "If a statute does not satisfy the due-process
requirement of giving decent advance notice of what it is which, if
happening, will be visited with punishment, so that men may presumably
have an opportunity to avoid the happening * * *, then 'willfully'
bringing to pass such an undefined and too uncertain event cannot make
it sufficiently definite and ascertainable. 'Willfully' doing something
that is forbidden, when that something is not sufficiently defined
according to the general conceptions of requisite certainty in our
criminal law, is not rendered sufficiently definite by that unknowable
having been done 'willfully.' It is true also of a statute that it
cannot lift itself up by its bootstraps."[55] In Williams _v._ United
States,[56] however, it was held by a sharply divided Court that Sec. 20
did not err for vagueness where the indictment made it clear that the
constitutional right violated by the defendant was immunity from the use
of force and violence to obtain a confession, and this meaning was also
made clear by the t