MR. JUSTICE BLACK delivered the opinion of the Court.
The petitioners were convicted of a felony in an Arkansas state court and sentenced to serve one year in the state penitentiary. The State Supreme Court affirmed, one judge dissenting on the ground that the evidence was insufficient to sustain the convictions. 211 Ark. 836, 202 S.W.2d 770. A petition for certiorari here alleged deprivation of important rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. We granted certiorari because the record indicated that at least one of the questions presented was substantial. That question, in the present state of the record, is the only one we find it appropriate to consider. The question is: "Were the petitioners denied due process of law . . . in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment by the circumstance that their convictions were affirmed under a criminal statute for violation of which they had not been charged?"
The present convictions are under an information. The petitioners urge that the information charged them with a violation of § 2 of Act 193 of the 1943 Arkansas Legislature
The information charged:
The foregoing language describing the offense charged in the information is substantially identical with the following language of § 2 of the Arkansas Act. That section provides:
The trial court also instructed the jury that they could not convict petitioners unless "convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that they promoted, encouraged, and aided in an unlawful assemblage at the plant of the Southern Cotton Oil Company, for the purpose of preventing Otha Williams from engaging in a lawful vocation." This instruction, like the preceding one, told the jury that the trial of petitioners was for violation of § 2, since § 2 makes an unlawful assemblage an ingredient of the offense it defines and § 1
We therefore have this situation. The petitioners read the information as charging them with an offense under § 2 of the Act, the language of which the information had used. The trial judge construed the information as charging an offense under § 2. He instructed the jury to that effect. He charged the jury that petitioners were on trial for the offense of promoting an unlawful assemblage, not for the offense "of using force and violence." Without completely ignoring the judge's charge, the jury could not have convicted petitioners for having committed the separate, distinct, and substantially different offense defined in § 1.
No principle of procedural due process is more clearly established than that notice of the specific charge, and a chance to be heard in a trial of the issues raised by that charge, if desired, are among the constitutional rights of every accused in a criminal proceeding in all courts, state or federal. In re Oliver, 333 U.S. 257, 273, decided today, and cases there cited. If, as the State Supreme Court held, petitioners were charged with a violation of § 1, it is doubtful both that the information fairly informed them of that charge and that they sought to defend themselves against such a charge; it is certain that they were not tried for or found guilty of it. It is as much a violation of due process to send an accused to prison following conviction of a charge on which he was never tried as it would be to convict him upon a charge that was never made. De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 362.
Furthermore, since Arkansas provides for an appeal to the State Supreme Court and on that appeal considers questions raised under the Federal Constitution, the proceedings in that court are a part of the process of law under which the petitioners' convictions must stand or fall. Frank v. Mangum, 237 U.S. 309, 327. Cf. Mooney v. Holohan, 294 U.S. 103, 113. That court has not affirmed these convictions on the basis of the trial petitioners were afforded. The convictions were for a violation of § 2. Petitioners urged in the State Supreme Court that the evidence was insufficient to support their convictions of a violation of § 2. They also raised serious
We are constrained to hold that the petitioners have been denied safeguards guaranteed by due process of law — safeguards essential to liberty in a government dedicated to justice under law.
In the present state of the record we cannot pass upon those contentions which challenge the validity of § 2 of the Arkansas Act. The judgment is reversed and remanded to the State Supreme Court for proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
Reversed and remanded.
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