Joe B. Driver v. Arthur Hinnant, Superintendent Halifax County Prison Unit of the North Carolina State Prison Department

ALBERT V. BRYAN, Circuit Judge:

The question is whether a chronic alcoholic, as appellant Joe B. Driver has been proved and confesses to be, can Constitutionally be criminally convicted and sentenced, as he was, for public drunkenness.

Admitting the truth of the charge under the North Carolina statute, he grounded his defense on the Eighth Amendment, applied to the States under the due process clause of the Fourteenth, barring the infliction of “cruel and unusual” punishment. His argument may be condensed in this syllogism: Driver’s chronic alcoholism is a disease which has destroyed the power…