Since 1951, federal law has required gamblers to register with the Internal Revenue Service, buy a $50 gambling-tax stamp, and pay a 10% excise tax on their annual gross bets. Another law, passed in 1934, called for the taxation and registration of the manufacture, transfer or possession of such underworld weapons as sawed-off shotguns and machine guns. Last week, in the latest of several decisions extending the protection of the Fifth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the two laws on grounds that they require persons to give information to the Government that could eventually be self-incriminating.
Obviously, neither law was ever particularly well obeyed. In the year following the gambling law's enactment, something over 19,000 stamps were sold, but the number dwindled to 5,917 last year. Mainly, the laws were used as charges of convenience against persons caught gambling or carrying weapons. Some 2000 gambling-tax and unregistered-weapons charges were headed for, or were moving through, state and federal courts last week when the Supreme Court acted.
In both decisions the vote was 7 to 1, Chief Justice Earl Warren dissenting. For the majority, Justice John M. Harlan noted that most states and the Federal Government outlaw gambling. Thus anyone complying with the law would automatically provide evidence—freely made available to state authorities—that he was planning something illegal. Said one St. Louis bookie, asked if he had bought a stamp: "No. It's worth it to keep the feds off your back. But the minute you buy one, the state knows what's going on."
Chief Justice Warren worried that the ruling would place gamblers in a "privileged class." In his opinion, no self-incrimination occurred until registered information was used to aid prosecution. Rather than declare the law unconstitutional, he urged, why not restrict the use of such data?
Warren warned that the court's action might then trigger a fusillade of parallel attacks by persons required to register dealings in such items as narcotics and distillery equipment.