Hoffa vs The United States
“I cannot agree that what happened in this case is in keeping with the standards of justice in our federal system and I must, therefore, dissent.“
– Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa vs The United States
Only around 50 to 80 court cases out of dozens of thousands a year reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren was the only one of nine Supreme Court justices to vote against using my grandfather’s testimony to convict Hoffa and send him to prison. Six justices voted to allow his testimony; two abstained.
Hoffa lost his final appeal and immediately began serving his prison sentence. Hoffa versus The United States became archived and, because of America’s predicate-based system, forever changed our interpretation of the U.S. constitution’s 4th Amendment. That case is, to this day, still taught in every law school in America, though most students impersonally refer to the people involved as “the defendant” and “the witness.”
Big Daddy – and using his testimony – was so controversial that in the written record on file in America’s archives and the supreme court’s web site, the name Edward Partin or Partin is cited 144 times across 22 pages, more than even Hoffa himself. To see why, it’s useful to start at th 1964 case where Big Daddy stood up as the prosecution’s surprise witness.
The most obvious challenge to Big Daddy’s testimony against Hoffa came from Chief Justice Earl Warren’s three-page rant about Big Daddy and using his testimony in Hoffa versus The United States. Warren cited the words of Sydney Simpson, the 22 year old Baton Rouge Teamster in jail with Big Daddy on kidnapping charges, and quoted Simpson as saying:
One Sydney Simpson, who was Partin’s cellmate at the time the latter first contacted federal agents to discuss Hoffa, has testified by affidavit as follows:
“Sometime in September, 1962, I was transferred from the Donaldsonville Parish Jail to the Baton Rouge Parish Jail. I was placed in a cell with Partin. For the first few days, Partin acted sort of brave. Then when it was clear that he was not going to get out in a hurry, he became more excited and nervous. After I had been in the same cell with Partin for about three days, Partin said, ‘I know a way to get out of here. They want Hoffa more than they want me.’ Partin told me that he was going to get one of the deputies to get Bill Daniels. Bill Daniels is an officer in the State of Louisiana. Partin said he wanted to talk to Daniels about Hoffa. Partin said that he was going to talk to Captain Edwards and ask him to get Daniels. A deputy, whose name is not known to me, came and took Partin from the cell. Partin remained away for several hours.
“A few days later Partin was released from the jail. From the day when I first saw the deputy, until the date when Partin was released, Partin was out of the cell most of the day and sometimes part of the night. On one occasion Partin returned to the cell and said, ‘It will take a few more days and we will have things straightened out, but don’t worry.’ Partin was taken in and out of the cell frequently each day. Partin told me during this time that he was working with Daniels and the FBI to frame Hoffa. On one occasion I asked Partin if he knew enough about Hoffa to be of any help to Daniels and the FBI, and Partin said, ‘It doesn’t make any difference. If I don’t know it, I can fix it up.’
“While we were in the cell, I asked Partin why he was doing this to Hoffa. Partin replied: ‘What difference does it make? I’m thinking about myself. Aren’t you thinking about yourself? I don’t give a damn about Hoffa. . . .”
That alone should have slain Big Daddy’s testimony against Hoffa. But the supreme court sees cases challenging the constitution, not personalities, and Warren went on to agree with Hoffa’s defense using the 4th Amendment. As Warren said, the violation was so blatant that the case should have been squelched in a lower court and not risen to the supreme court at all.
I copied the 4th Amendment earlier in this story and emphasized that it was penned by our founding fathers using quill and ink in the 1700’s and ratified in 1784, but envoking a 1600’s case to support the adamancy that a person should feel safe from government intrusion in his home. It’s worth repeating how succinct our founding fathers emphasized a person’s rights over the urges of a government. They wrote:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That one sentence was Jimmy Hoffa’s shield. It was his best defense against going to prison.
The justices were in agreement that the 4th amendment applied to a person’s car, hotel room, or office; the right to be free from unlawful search and seizure should be universal; several predicate court decisions were shown as historical trends in the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Stewart summarized the predicate court cases that supported this when he wrote:
A hotel room can clearly be the object of Fourth Amendment protection as much as a home or an office. United States v. Jeffers, 342 U. S. 48. The Fourth Amendment can certainly be violated by guileful as well as by forcible intrusions into a constitutionally protected area. Gouled v. United States, 255 U. S. 298. And the protections of the Fourth Amendment are surely not limited to tangibles, but can extend as well to oral statements. Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505.
Stewart then said that using Big Daddy’s word didn’t violate the 4th Amendment because:
When Hoffa made incriminating statements to or in the presence of Partin, his invitee, he relied, not on the security of the hotel room, but on his misplaced confidence that Partin would not reveal his wrongdoing.
Three other justices made similar statements; two abstained from voting.
In Warren’s statements of why he dissented, he chose specific words to show that Big Daddy’s testimony had, in unassailable fact, violated the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights; he said that when Big Daddy was in the room and listening to Hoffa and his defense team as the room’s Sergeant at Arms, he was, in effect, “a walking bugging device,” a predecessor of today’s common technologies, but just a risk to our 4th Amendment in Warren’s mind in 1966,
He expounded by saying:
Pursuant to the general instructions he received from federal authorities to report “any attempts at witness intimidation or tampering with the jury,” “anything illegal,” or even “anything of interest,” Partin became the equivalent of a bugging device which moved with Hoffa wherever he went. Everything Partin saw or heard was reported to federal authorities and much of it was ultimately the subject matter of his testimony in this case.
After using my grandfather’s name more than 45 times and will blatant ill contempt to both his character and the government’s affront on the 4th Amendment, Warren even mentioned Mamma Jean. By then Hoffa’s attorney’s had uncovered that she was paid by the government to remain silent as long as Hoffa was in prison.
For his services he was well paid by the Government, both through devious and secret support payments to his wife and, it may be inferred, by executed promises not to pursue the indictments under which he was charged at the time he became an informer.
Warren also explains why so much of Big Daddy’s past vanished as thoroughly as Jimmy Hoffa’s body. He wrote:
In the four years since he first volunteered to be an informer against Hoffa he has not been prosecuted on any of the serious federal charges for which he was at that time jailed, and the state charges have apparently vanished into thin air.
And, to bring attention to his fellow eight supreme court justices, Warren emphasized that while they debated using Big Daddy’s testimony to send a person to prison, he was on trial in another court for perjury. He concluded his missive by saying:
I cannot agree that what happened in this case is in keeping with the standards of justice in our federal system and I must, therefore, dissent.
Given Warren’s testimony, I do not understand how the supreme court voted to use Big Daddy’s testimony. Maybe because I knew him. Regardless if Hoffa placed, as Stewart said, “misguided confidence” in my grandfather, it was obvious, as Warren pointed out again and again, that my grandfather was incentivized to say whatever he needed to remain out of jail, and his background demonstrated he was willing to perjure; but none of the justices had met Big Daddy, or they may have realized that he was so charming it was possible he influenced Hoffa to say and do things without Hoffa realizing it.
That’s where the 6th Amendment should have come in; but, all of the justices missed that point, probably because they didn’t know Big Daddy. The 6th Amendment is long and convoluted, but essentially ensures a defendant can face his accuser with an attorney present. This helps ensure that someone like Big Daddy doesn’t influence what someone like Hoffa says without an attorney being present to add context and rephrase the defendants statements if necessary. If you knew Big Daddy, you’d believe he could get anyone to say anything.
The 6th amendment also ensures that a mole for the prosecutor can not eavesdrop on the defendant’s legal defense strategy. When Hoffa’s team petitioned that the 6th Amendment was violated, they emphasized that Big Daddy overheard everything they said. Justice Stewart offered conflicting statements about this. He wrote:
Petitioners’ own witnesses testified that Partin was in the suite “virtually every day” as well as the “nightly meetings,” had “ready access” to the files and offices and acted as “sergeant-at-arms” just outside the door of the suite.
And also:
[Partin] said he might have heard some of the lawyers’ conversations, but he didn’t know what they were talking about, “because I wasn’t interested in what they had to say about the case.” He testified that he did not report any of the lawyers’ conversations to Sheridan, because the latter “wasn’t interested in what the attorneys said.” Partin’s testimony was largely confirmed by Sheridan.
Sheridan did testify, however, to one occasion when Partin told him about a group of prospective character witnesses being interviewed in the suite by one of the petitioner’s lawyers, who “was going over” some written “questions and answers” with them. This information was evidently relayed by Sheridan to the chief government attorney at the Test Fleet trial.
Stewart voted to allow Big Daddy’s testimony, seemingly believing his word that he didn’t listen to what the lawyers said because he “wasn’t interested,” though I can’t imagine that was true, especially because he relayed information to Walter.
The arguments of each justice are documented for posterity to ponder. I’m not an attorney, much less a supreme court justice, but I believe using Big Daddy’s word violated both the 4th and the 6th amendments. But, I can understand the jury at Hoffa’s first trial believing everything Big Daddy said, because they saw and heard him in person.
Big Daddy He was so charming that they only deliberated three hours before finding Hoffa guilty of jury tampering. Though in their defense, the prosecuting attorneys under Bobby Kenndy’s guidance did their job well and built a strong case based on what Big Daddy leaked to them. When he took the stand, he spoke as an expert on what the jury had been told by prosecutors because he was the one who had been telling prosecutors that all along. The jury saw a handsome, charming, confident Edward Partin tell them what they already had been hearing, and it painted a picture of Hoffa tampering with justice. As Hoffa wrote in mixed metaphors, Edward Partin was the killing shot that nailed him to a cross.
But that doesn’t explain why the supreme court accepted his testimony despite its violations of the 4th and 6th amendments. The supreme court, to me, should rise above the lower courts and set the precedent for strict adherence to the civil liberties I swore to defend when I joined the army. Over time, I learned to accept – or at least not stand up and fight against – that modern interpretations of the succinct U.S. Constitution is transient. For example, in 2022, the Warren-led Roe versus Wade was repealed by a panel of judges stacked by President Trump and presidents with an agenda, which may be all of them, though no decision since 1972 has affected me as much as my presumed right to live. Supreme court justices are just human beings, prone to error and influence just like everyone else.
I have no evidence, but I suspect that Bobby Kennedy used his family’s influence to reach the judges, and it’s possible that the surveillance-and-blackmail driven J. Edgar Hoover had something on them that he leveraged, too. We’ll probably never know for sure. Bobby would run for president in 1968 and be shot and killed by the redundantly named Serhan Serhan, who is still alive and has been serving in prison for 60 years; no conspiracy was suspected, and the JFK Assassination Report and allusions to what Bobby knew during the trials against Jimmy Hoffa were still classified and no one dug deeper for almost 30 years. J. Edgar Hoover died of natural causes in 1972, and he took whatever he knew to his grave.
Hoffa would find a way out of prison in time for Christmas in December of 1971, coincidentally a week before I was conceived and Wendy was just a 16 year old girl who knew nothing of Ed Partin’s history. Though Wendy didn’t know it, Jimmy Hoffa had thought of nothing but Ed Partin and how to get out of prison for six years. He would use America’s most decorated war hero and famous movie star, Audie Murphy, to champion his release until Audie died in a plane crash in 1971, then Hoffa would find a way to get President Nixon to release him after he served almost six years, which was seven years early.
To understand how that happened, I’ll share what I know about Audie Murphy’s relationship with my grandfather and President Nixon next.
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