Kasinowitz v. United States. Steinberg v. United States. Dobbs v. United States

These are three appeals from judgments in criminal contempt sentencing each appellant to one year in jail for refusing to answer questions, later considered, in the same grand jury investigation as that in the appeals here in Alexander v. United States, 9 Cir., 1950, 181 F.2d 480 .

The three appellants are of a group of thirty persons chosen by the United States Attorney ¡because, he says, he thought he could obtain from them the whereabouts of the membership records of the Los Ange-les County Communist Party. The United States Attorney directed that the thirty subpoenas be served at seven o’clock in the morning of the same day because “unless served at that time it would be impossible to effect service thereafter on them.”

The Federal Register had disclosed only the month before that the Attorney General classified the “Communist Party U.S.A.” as one seeking to alter the form of the government of the United States by unconstitutional means, 13 F.R. 6138 . A person properly could infer that the Los Angeles branch of the United States Communist Party had the same subversive purpose, an inference sustained by the statement of the attorney General that the designation of the…