Source: https://openjurist.org/365/us/551
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 05:43:53+00:00

Document:
The petitioners ars husband and wife. They were both convicted in a Federal District Court for stealing several thousand dollars in currency from a commissary store at a United States Naval Base. The wife was convicted also on a separate count for receiving and concealing the stolen currency.1 Both petitioners were sentenced to prison on the larceny conviction, the husband for a term of five years, and the wife for a ten-year term. In addition, the wife received a five-year concurrent sentence on the receiving count.
Throughout the trial counsel for the petitioners consistently maintained the position that a thief could not be convicted of receiving from himself.2 Although directing an acquittal on the receiving count in the husband's case, the trial judge overruled a similar motion on behalf of the wife. Counsel then clearly indicated his intention to request that the jury be instructed that it could not find the wife guilty of both stealing and receiving.3 The trial judge responded by pointing out that the Fourth Circuit had decided, in Aaronson v. United States, 175 F.2d 41, that it is possible that as long as the person did not actually participate in the actual taking of the goods, that same person may be found guilty of receiving and concealing and may also be found guilty as an accessory before the fact or as an aider and an abetter of the actual charge of theft. Faced with this controlling Fourth Circuit authority, counsel did not engage in the futile exercise of submitting a more formal request for such instructions.
It is now contended that setting aside the sentence on the receiving count was not enough—that the conviction on the larceny count must also be reversed, and the case remanded for a new trial. The argument is that although the evidence was sufficient to support a conviction for either larceny or reciving,5 the judge should have instructed the jury that a guilty verdict could be returned upon either count but not both. It is urged that since it is now impossible to say what verdict would have been returned by a jury so instructed, and thus impossible to know what sentence would have been imposed, a new trial is in order. This was the view of Chief Judge Sobeloff, dissenting in the Court of Appeals. 275 F.2d at page 721.
This is a prosecution brought under 18 U.S.C. § 641, 18 U.S.C.A. § 641,1 upon an indictment containing several counts. One charged the defendant Virginia Milanovich, petitioner herein, with the theft of government property; another charged her with receiving the stolen property with an intent to convert it to her own use. Both counts were allowed to go to the jury which explicitly found the defendant guilty on each of the two counts.
This was the evidence on which the jury must have based their verdict against the defendant. She and her husband, as owners of an automobile, transported three others under an arrangement whereby the three were to break into a United States naval commissary building with a view to stealing government funds. Defendant and her husband were to remain outside for the return of their accomplices after the accomplishment of the theft. In fact, for one reason or another, husband and wife drove off without awaiting the return of their friends. Not finding the automobile where they had left it, the thieves buried the booty. No share of the stolen money ever touched the hand of petitioner or was in any sense received by her until seventeen days later when, after she had removed some of the booty from the base, it was soon after discovered by FBI agents during a legal search of the premises. Since she herself was not an active participant in the breaking in and thieving, she was amenable to § 641 because she, as an accessory, was legally deemed a principal under 18 U.S.C. § 2, 18 U.S.C.A. § 2.2 On this basis the trial judge submitted the case to the jury and the jury was enabled to find her guilty of the substantive offense of stealing government property, as well as to return a verdict of guilty on the receiving charge. The trial judge then sentenced the defendant on each of the counts. Because of the extensive criminal record of the defendant he imposed a sentence of ten years on the thieving count and five years on the receiving count, the sentences to run concurrently.
Both of these conclusions rest, I believe, on a wholly unwarranted reliance on Heflin. They disregard the only issue that was before the Court in that case, and thereby misconceive its holding. Today's decision reflects the common-law doctrine of merger and the consequences of such merger on the requirements of criminal procedure—specifically, what separate counts may be laid in an indictment and the duty of a trial judge in charging the jury the kind of a verdict they may return to an indictment of multiple counts.
The case before us presents a totally different situation—not a coincidental or even a contemporaneous transaction, in the loosest conception of contemporaneity. Here we have two clearly severed transactions. The case against the defendant—and the only case—presented two behaviors or transactions by defendant clearly and decisively separated in time and in will. The intervening seventeen days between defendant's accessorial share in the theft and her conduct as a recipient left the amplest opportunities for events outside her control to frustrate her hope of sharing in the booty, or ample time for her to change her criminal purpose and avail herself of a locus poenitentiae. Two larcenies, separated in time, would not be merged; what legal difference between the two situations here?
It surely is fair to say that in the common understanding of men such disjointed and discontinuous behaviors by Mrs. Milanovich (1) bringing thieves to the scene of their projected crime and departing without further ado before the theft had been perpetrated, and (2) taking possession seventeen days later of part of the booty—cannot be regarded as a single, merged transaction in any intelligible use of English. And that which makes no sense to the common understanding surely is not required by any fictive notions of law or even by the most sentimental attitude toward criminals. I venture to believe that not a single case concerned with a situation comparable to that now before the Court can be found in the law reports of England, of any of the States of this country, or of the federal courts, in which it was held or suggested that two disjointed, decisively separated manifestations of conduct constitute as a matter of law a single, fused transaction. An ample canvass of the reports has certainly not revealed the existence of such a case, and one reads the opinion of the Court in vain to find a suggestion that any such precedent is available.
One can say with confidence that Heflin is no warrant for the conclusion pronounced by the Court. There was not the remotest suggestion in the petition that brought that case here, in the briefs that were submitted before argument, in the oral argument, or in the opinion which formulated the decision, that the case was concerned with the power of the court to submit the several counts to the jury and the right of the jury to convict on separate counts for conduct charging separate transactions clearly separated in fact. In Heflin, (358 U.S. 415, 79 S.Ct. 454) the jury convicted defendant on separate counts of bank robbery and receiving stolen money. We held that we could find 'no purpose of Congress to pyramid penalties for lesser offenses following the robbery,' and therefore ruled against the cumulation of punishments, but found no impropriety in submitting both counts to the jury. I find not a word, not a hint, not a subtle innuendo suggesting that the case dealt with criminal procedure—that is, with submission of different counts to a jury, with the appropriateness of the judge's charge to the jury, or with the right of a jury to bring in separate verdicts on separate counts on the basis of evidence justifying such submission and such verdicts.
Heflin is one of a recent series of cases having to do with what the Court in Prince v. United States, 352 U.S. 322, 325, 77 S.Ct. 403, 405, 1 L.Ed.2d 370, called 'fragmentation of crimes for purposes of punishment.' Beginning with Bell v. United States, 349 U.S. 81, 75 S.Ct. 620, 99 L.Ed. 905, these cases concerned the propriety of cumulative sentences within different statutory frameworks.3 'It may fairly be said to be a presupposition of our law to resolve doubts in the enforcement of a penal code against the imposition of a harsher punishment * * * (when) Congress does not fix the punishment for a federal offense clearly and without ambiguity * * *.' Bell v. United States, supra, 349 U.S. at pages 83—84, 75 S.Ct. at page 622. In not one of these cases will there be found a word having to do with how crimes should be charged, how submitted to the jury, or what verdicts the jury may return. Heflin, like the rest of these cases, was concerned with the duty of the trial judge in sentencing after the jury was through with its job. Indeed, in all these cases, there were several counts on which the jury found a verdict and the issue arose not as to the propriety of leaving all the counts to the jury, but what sentence should be imposed after the verdict had been returned.
It is acknowledged here that the evidence was sufficient to support a jury finding that both petitioners aided and abetted the larceny, and thus were guilty as principals under 18 U.S.C. § 2, 18 U.S.C.A. § 2. It is also conceded that the evidence was sufficient to support the wife's conviction for receiving and concealing the stolen property (a substantial amount of silver currency having been found in a suitcase in her home two weeks after the robbery).
In Bell, the defendant pleaded guilty to an indictment under the Mann Act, 18 U.S.C.A. § 2421, which charged him in two counts with transporting two women, respectively, for immoral purposes on one trip. This Court held that Congress did not intend to make 'simultaneous transportation of more than one woman in violation of the Mann Act liable to cumulative punishment for each woman so transported.' 349 U.S., at pages 82—83, 75 S.Ct. at page 622.

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