Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/215/50/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 15:58:24+00:00

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Justia › US Law › US Case Law › US Supreme Court › Volume 215 › United States v. Union Supply Co.
Where corporations are as much within the mischief aimed at by a penal statute and as capable of willful breaches of the law as individuals, the statute will not, if it can be reasonably interpreted as including corporations, be interpreted as excluding them.
impossible, the guilty defendant is not to escape the other which is possible.
Section 6 of the Act of May 9, 1902, c. 784, 32 Stat. 193, imposing certain duties on wholesale dealers in oleomargarine and imposing penalties of fine and imprisonment for violations applies to corporations, notwithstanding the penalty of imprisonment cannot be inflicted on a corporation.
"And any person who willfully violates any of the provisions of this section shall, for each such offense, be fined not less than fifty dollars and not exceeding five hundred dollars, and imprisoned not less than thirty days nor more than six months."
The corporation moved to quash the indictment, and the district court quashed it on the ground that the section is not applicable to corporations. Thereupon the United States brought this writ of error.
excluded. They are as much within the mischief aimed at as private persons, and as capable of a "willful" breach of the law. New York Central & Hudson River R. Co. v. United States, 212 U. S. 481. If the defendant escapes, it does so on the single ground that, as it cannot suffer both parts of the punishment, it need not suffer one.
It seems to us that a reasonable interpretation of the words used does not lead to such a result. If we compare § 5, the application of one of the penalties, rather than of both, is made to depend not on the character of the defendant, but on the discretion of the judge, yet there, corporations are mentioned in terms. See Hawke v. E. Hulton & Co., (1909) 2 K.B. 93, 98. And if we free our minds from the notion that criminal statutes must be construed by some artificial and conventional rule, the natural inference, when a statute prescribes two independent penalties, is that it means to inflict them so far as it can, and that, if one of them is impossible, it does not mean, on that account, to let the defendant escape. See Commonwealth v. Pulaski County Agricultural & Mechanical Association, 92 Ky.197, 201. In Hawke v. E. Hulton & Co., (1909) 2 K.B. 93, it was held that the words "any person" in one section of a penal act did not embrace a corporation, notwithstanding a statute like our Rev.Stat. § 1. But that was not so much on the ground that imprisonment was contemplated as a punishment as because the person convicted was to be "deemed a rogue and a vagabond." Moreover, it was thought that corporations could be reached under another section of the act.

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