Trop v. Dulles
| Trop v. Dulles | |
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| Argued May 2, 1957 Decided March 31, 1958 | |
| Full case name | Albert L. Trop v. John Foster Dulles |
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Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958) was a federal court case in the United States that was filed in 1955, and finally decided by the Supreme Court in 1958. The Supreme Court decided, 5-4, that it was unconstitutional for the government to cancel the citizenship of a U.S. citizen as a punishment. The ruling's reference to "evolving standards of decency" has become frequently cited precedent in the court's interpretation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment."
Case details
Albert Trop, a native-born U.S. citizen serving as a private in the United States Army, escaped from an Army stockade in Casablanca, Morocco in 1944. The next day, he willingly surrendered to an Army officer and was taken back to the base. For this desertion, Trop was court-martialed and sentenced to three years at hard labor, forfeiture of pay, and a dishonorable discharge.
In 1952, Trop applied for a passport, which was denied because the Nationality Act of 1940 provided that members of the military forces of the United States who deserted would lose their citizenship. (A 1944 amendment modified the Act such that a deserter would only lose his citizenship if on these grounds he had been dishonorably discharged or dismissed from the military.) Trop went to a federal court to seek a declaratory judgment that he was a citizen; the court sided with the government, as did the Second Circuit.
The Supreme Court noted in its holding, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, that in the previous case Perez v. Brownell, the Court had held that citizenship could be divested in the exercise of the foreign affairs power. However, "denationalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment," as this is "the total destruction of the individual's status in organized society".
It should also be noted that the Nationality Act of 1940 was, at the moment of those events (1958), in violation of article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In the dissent, Justice Felix Frankfurter noted that desertion from the military can be punished by the death penalty, leading him to ask, "Is constitutional dialectic so empty of reason that it can be seriously urged that loss of citizenship is a fate worse than death?"