defenses rooted in the First Amendment: in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, he sided with a priest whose rhetorical attacks on Jews and the Roosevelt administration had provoked a riot; in United Public Workers v. Mitchell and Oklahoma v. United States Civil Service Commission, he dissented when the Court upheld the Hatch Act's restrictions on civil servants' political activity; in Marsh v. Alabama, he joined the majority in holding a company town's restrictions on the distribution of religious literature unconstitutional. In only a single case—Prince v. Massachusetts—did he vote to reject an attempt to invoke the First Amendment. Prince involved a Jehovah's Witness who had been convicted of violating a Massachusetts child labor law by bringing her nine-year-old niece to distribute religious literature with her. Writing for a 5–4 majority, Rutledge held that Massachusetts's interest in protecting children's welfare outweighed the child's First Amendment rights; he argued that "parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow [that] they are free... to make martyrs of their children." His usual ally Murphy disagreed, arguing in dissent that the state had not demonstrated "the existence of any grave or immediate danger to any interest which it may lawfully protect". Rutledge's decision to reject the First Amendment argument presented in Prince may have stemmed more from his longstanding opposition to child labor than from his views on religious freedom. Criminal procedure In 80 percent of the criminal cases heard by the Supreme Court during his tenure, Rutledge voted in favor of the defendant—substantially more often than the Court as a whole, which did so in only 52 percent of criminal cases. He supported an expansive definition of due process and construed ambiguous statutes in favor of defendants, particularly in cases involving capital punishment. In Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, Rutledge dissented from the Court's 5–4 holding that Louisiana could again endeavor to execute a prisoner after the electric chair malfunctioned during the previous attempt. He joined the opinion of Justice Harold H. Burton, who maintained that "death by installments" was a form of cruel and unusual punishment that violated the Due Process Clause. In the case of In re Oliver, Rutledge agreed with the majority that a conviction for contempt of court was unlawful because a single judge, sitting as a one-man grand jury, had held proceedings in secret and given the defendant no opportunity to defend himself.