Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/364/587/case.html
Timestamp: 2017-05-24 09:48:42
Document Index: 171347409

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1951', '§ 2255', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 1951', '§ 2', '§ 2', '§ 2113']

Callanan v. United States (full text) :: 364 U.S. 587 (1961) :: Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center Log In
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Callanan v. United States 364 U.S. 587 (1961)
U.S. Supreme CourtCallanan v. United States, 364 U.S. 587 (1961)Callanan v. United StatesNo. 47Argued November 15-16, 1960Decided January 9, 1961364 U.S. 587CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
Petitioner was convicted by a jury in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on two counts. Count I charged a conspiracy to obstruct commerce by extorting money, and Count II charged the substantive offense of obstructing commerce by extortion, both crimes made punishable by the Hobbs Anti-Racketeering Page 364 U. S. 588 Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1951. [Footnote 1] Petitioner was sentenced to consecutive terms of twelve years on each count, but the sentence on Count II was suspended and replaced with a five-year probation to commence at the expiration of his sentence under Count I. [Footnote 2] On appeal, the conviction was affirmed, 223 F.2d 171.
Petitioner thereafter sought a correction of his sentence, invoking Rule 35 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Page 364 U. S. 589 Procedure, as well as 28 U.S.C. § 2255. [Footnote 3] He claimed that the maximum penalty for obstructing interstate commerce under the Act by any means is twenty years, and that Congress did not intend to subject individuals to two penalties. The District Court denied relief, holding that the Hobbs Act gave no indication of a departure from the usual rule that a conspiracy and the substantive crime which was its object may be cumulatively punished. 173 F.Supp. 98. The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed this judgment, 274 F.2d 601. Deeming the question raised by petitioner of sufficient importance, we brought the case here. 362 U.S. 939.
Under the early common law, a conspiracy -- which constituted a misdemeanor -- was said to merge with the completed felony which was its object. See Commonwealth v. Kingsbury, 5 Mass. 106. This rule, however, was based upon significant procedural distinctions between misdemeanors and felonies. The defendant in a misdemeanor trial was entitled to counsel and a copy of the indictment; these advantages were unavailable on trial for a felony. King v. Westbeer, 1 Leach 12, 15, 168 Eng.Rep. 108, 110 (1739); see Clark and Marshall, Crimes, § 2.03, n. 96 (6th ed). Therefore, no conviction was permitted of a constituent misdemeanor upon an indictment for the felony. When the substantive crime was also a misdemeanor, People v. Mather, 4 Wend., N.Y., 229, 265, or when the conspiracy was defined by statute as a felony, State v. Mayberry, 48 Me. 218, 238, merger did not obtain. As these common law procedural niceties disappeared, the Page 364 U. S. 590 merger concept lost significance, and today it has been abandoned. Queen v. Button, 11 Q.B. 929, 116 Eng.Rep. 720; Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U. S. 640.
The present Hobbs Act had as its antecedent the Anti-Racketeering Act of 1934. [Footnote 4] In view of this Court's restrictive Page 364 U. S. 591 decision in United States v. Local 807, 315 U. S. 521 (1942), Congress, under the leadership of Representative Hobbs, sought to stiffen the 1934 legislation. After several unsuccessful attempts over a period of four years, a bill was passed in 1946 which deleted any reference to wages paid by an employer to an employee, on which the decision in Local 807 had relied. [Footnote 5] The 1934 Act was further invigorated by increasing the maximum penalty from ten to twenty years.
Petitioner relies on numerous statements by members of Congress concerning the severity of the twenty-year penalty to illustrate that cumulative sentences were not Page 364 U. S. 592 contemplated. [Footnote 6] But the legislative history sheds no light whatever on whether the Congressmen were discussing the question of potential sentences under the whole bill, or merely defending the maximum punishment under its Page 364 U. S. 593 specific sections. All the legislative talk only reiterates what the statute itself says -- that the maximum penalty is twenty years.
This settled principle derives from the reason of things in dealing with socially reprehensible conduct: collective criminal agreement -- partnership in crime -- presents a greater potential threat to the public than individual delicts. Concerted action both increases the likelihood that the criminal object will be successfully attained and decreases the probability that the individuals involved will depart from their path of criminality. Group association for criminal purposes often, if not normally, makes possible the attainment of ends more complex than those which one criminal could accomplish. Nor is the danger of a conspiratorial group limited to the particular end toward which it has embarked. Combination in crime Page 364 U. S. 594 makes more likely the commission of crimes unrelated to the original purpose for which the group was formed. In sum, the danger which a conspiracy generates is not confined to the substantive offense which is the immediate aim of the enterprise. [Footnote 7]
These considerations are reinforced by a prior interpretation of the Sherman Act whose minor penalties influenced the enactment of the 1934 anti-racketeering legislation. [Footnote 8] In American Tobacco Co. v. United States, 328 Page 364 U. S. 595 U.S. 781, individual and corporate defendants were convicted, inter alia, of conspiracy to monopolize and monopolization, both made criminal by § 2. They were sentenced to a fine of $5,000, the maximum statutory penalty, on each of the counts. We affirmed these convictions on the basis of our past decisions in this field of law. 328 U.S. at 328 U. S. 788-789. To dislodge such conventional consequences in the outlawing of two disparate offenses, conspiracy and substantive conduct, and effectuate a reversal of the settled interpretation we pronounced in American Tobacco would require specific language to the contrary. See also Albrecht v. United States, 273 U. S. 1, 273 U. S. 11; Burton v. United States, 202 U. S. 344, 202 U. S. 377.
Petitioner argues that some of the other provisions of § 1951 seem to overlap, and would not justify cumulative punishment for separate crimes. From this he deduces a congressional intent that the statute allows punishment for only one crime, no matter how many separately outlawed offenses have been committed. These contentions raise problems of statutory interpretation not now here. That some of the substantive sections may be repetitive as being variants in phrasing of the same delict, or that petitioner could not be cumulatively punished for both an attempt to extort and a completed act of extortion, has no relevance to the legal consequences of two incontestably distinctive offenses, conspiracy and the completed crime Page 364 U. S. 596 that is its object. In the American Tobacco litigation, it was decided that the attempt to monopolize, described in § 2 of the Sherman Act, merged with the completed monopolization, but this result did not qualify the holding that cumulative sentences for the conspiracy and the substantive crime, also contained within § 2, were demanded by the governing precepts of our law.
Petitioner invokes the rule of lenity for decision in this case. But that "rule," as is true of any guide to statutory construction, only serves as an aid for resolving an ambiguity; it is not to be used to beget one. [Footnote 9] "To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death." Mr. Justice Holmes, in Collected Legal Papers, p. 306. The rule comes into operation at the end of the process of construing what Congress has expressed, not at the beginning as an overriding consideration of being lenient to wrongdoers. That is not the function of the judiciary. In United States v. Universal C.I.T. Credit Corp., 344 U. S. 218; Bell v. United States, 349 U. S. 81, and Ladner v. United States, 358 U. S. 169, the applicable statutory provisions were found to be unclear as to the appropriate unit of prosecution; accordingly, the rule of lenity was utilized, in favorem libertatis, to resolve the ambiguity. In Price v. United States, 352 U. S. 322, and Heflin v. United States, 358 U. S. 415, the Court had to meet the problem whether various subsidiary provisions of the Federal Bank Robbery Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2113, which punished entering with intent to commit robbery and possessing stolen property merged when applied to a defendant who was also being prosecuted for the robbery itself. Again, the rule of lenity served to resolve the doubt with which Congress faced the Court. Page 364 U. S. 597
To be sure, it is now a commonplace of our law that the commission of a substantive crime and a conspiracy to commit it may be treated by Congress as separate offenses, cumulatively punishable. Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U. S. 640, 328 U. S. 643. It is also true that Congress has often chosen to exercise its power to make separate offenses of the two. [Footnote 2/1] But neither of these generalities provides an answer to the question now before us. The question here is the meaning of this law, the Hobbs Anti-Racketeering Act. I do not agree that, under this statute, a man can be separately convicted and cumulatively punished Page 364 U. S. 598 for obstructing commerce by extorting money, and for conspiring to obstruct commerce by the same extortion. My view is based both upon the language of the statute and upon its history, considered in the light of principles that have consistently guided this Court's decisions in related areas of federal criminal law.
The Act, then, must mean something else. I think its language can fairly be read as imposing a maximum twenty-year sentence for each actual or threatened interference with interstate commerce accomplished by any one or more of the proscribed means. Such a reading of Page 364 U. S. 599 the Act does violence neither to semantics nor to common sense. It is fully justified by the legislative history, and it is consistent with settled principles governing the construction of ambiguous criminal statutes. If this is what the Act means, then the indictment in the present case charged but a single offense, and it was wrong to impose two separate sentences upon the petitioner.
After the bill had passed the Senate, fear was expressed that some of the provisions of the proposed legislation might endanger legitimate activities of organized labor. In response to these fears, the bill was revised by the House Judiciary Committee along lines suggested by the Attorney General, and it was then that the statutory reference to conspiracy was added, without explanation. H.R.Rep. No. 1833, 73d Cong., 2d Sess. The bill was passed by the House after adoption of an amendment Page 364 U. S. 600 reducing the maximum punishment provision to "10 years or by a fine of $10,000 or both." 78 Cong.Rec. 11403. Thereafter, the Senate approved the House bill without debate. 78 Cong.Rec. 11482.
With that aspect of the 1946 amendment we are not here concerned. But the amendment made one other significant change in the Act: it increased the maximum penalty from ten to twenty years' imprisonment. The congressional debates over that provision throw considerable light upon the problem now before us. For two conclusions can be drawn from a review of the discussions in Congress of the proposed increase in the penalty provision. First, it is clear that many Members of Congress were seriously concerned by the severity of a penalty of twenty years in prison for violation of this statute. Expressions such as "too drastic," "too severe," and "excessive" were used in describing what was referred to by one Member as "even a possible penalty of 20 years." 89 Cong.Rec. 3162, 3194, 3201, 3229. Secondly, it is clear that there was general agreement among both the proponents and the opponents of the legislation that twenty years was to be the maximum penalty that could be imposed upon a defendant convicted of violating the Page 364 U. S. 601 statute. 89 Cong.Rec. 3226. No one ever suggested that cumulative penalties could be inflicted.
It is said, however, that despite all this, we must attribute to Congress a "tacit purpose" to provide cumulative punishments for conspiracy and substantive conduct under this statute. We are told that this presumption of a tacit purpose must prevail because there is no "specific language to the contrary" in the Act. [Footnote 2/3] But to indulge in such a presumption seems to me wholly at odds with principles firmly established by our previous decisions. Page 364 U. S. 602