Incredibly, it meant that henceforth federal prosecutors in such cases had to prove that the defendants were thinking about constitutional violations while they committed heinous, primordial crimes. This was the Screws precedent, from a decision written by liberal Justice William O. Douglas in 1944. Within the tiny fraternity of civil rights prosecutors, the decision was an unpleasant echo of Dred Scott. And no matter how badly they wished to discard the case as a wartime aberration, like the Japanese internment cases, it was controlling law still.
