Robinson Vs California

Traci White-Jones
Criminal Law Asst #1

MEMORANDUM

QUESTION PRESENTED

In Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962), the Supreme Court ruled that a law may not punished a status; i.e., one may not be punished to being an alcoholic or for being addicted to drugs. However, of course, one may be punished for actions such as abusing drugs. If the defendants status "forces" the action because of his or her addiction to drugs, is "forced" by the addiction to purchase and abuse the illegal drug? Would punishing that person be unfairly punishing a status?

FACTUAL BACKGROUND

A California statute makes it a criminal offense for a person to "be addicted to the use of narcotics." Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660
Appeal
A State might impose criminal sanctions, for example, against the unauthorized manufacture, prescription, sale, purchase, or possession of narcotics within its borders. In the interest of discouraging the violation Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 of such laws, or in the interest of the general health or welfare of its inhabitants, a State might establish a program of compulsory treatment for those addicted to narcotics. Such a program of treatment might require periods of involuntary confinement. And penal sanctions might be imposed for failure to comply with established compulsory treatment procedures. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197,U.S.
Whatever the intent of the law, it is clear that most addicts simply continued to receive drugs from their physician, on prescription, instead of directly from their local pharmacist. If a physician construed the administration of morphine to a patient to be within the scope of legitimate medical practice, he had the right, within the law, to maintain that addict on morphine. On the face of it, then, the law did not change anything. It was the Supreme Court that drew a restrictive interpretation of the Harrison Act and that decided what was to constitute "legitimate" medical practice; in a series of decisions from 1919 to 1922 the court declared maintenance of an addict to be outside the scope of medical practice and therefore illegal. However, in 1925, in the famous Linder case, the Supreme Court overturned its earlier decisions, declaring addiction per se not to be a crime and paving the way for the legality of maintenance. The court affirmed the decision in 1962, in Robinson v. California. Thus the present punitive policies are a consequence of decisions made by the Supreme Court between 1919 and 1922, decisions that were superseded and reversed by later rulings A good case could therefore be made for the unconstitutionality of present legal