Opinion ID: 259846
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the 'in time of war' ground.

Text: 15 The indictment charged that 'On or about June 6, 1944, up to and including June 16, 1950,    the defendants herein, did, the United States of America then and there being at war, conspire' to communicate national defense information to the Soviet Union in violation of 50 U.S.C. 32(a). The overt acts cited, none of which in terms referred to Sobell, were laid between June 6, 1944 and January 14, 1945. Elitcher's testimony would have placed Sobell's entrance into the conspiracy no later than June, 1944. But whereas the evidence as to the disclosure of atomic secrets by the Rosenbergs, in which Sobell was not proved to have participated, related principally to the period prior to the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, the greater portion of the evidence against Sobell concerned 1946, 1947 and 1948. 16 At the trial the defendants did not dispute that if the Government's evidence was believed, they were subject to the punishment of death or thirty years imprisonment which the proviso to 32(a) made a applicable to a violation 'in time of war.' It was hardly conceivable that any such claim would be made by the Rosenbergs, so far as this statute was concerned, since the portion of the conspiracy relating to disclosure of atomic secrets, which dwarfed the other charges against them, was largely consummated before the fighting stopped. For Sobell the situation was different; it was possible in theory, however unlikely in fact, that the jury could divide Elitcher's testimony against him and credit only the part relating to later years. But in his case also there was no dispute that if he had committed any offense he had done so 'in time of war'; his counsel, in summation, emphasized that Sobell's life was at stake and that 'the statute says for this crime that Mr. Elitcher is trying to prove Mr. Sobell guilty of, he can get up to thirty years or death.' Under these circumstances it was altogether natural that the judge, who had received no request on the subject, did not include in his charge any reference to the term 'in time of war' and told the jury, without objection from anyone, that the case was one in which the penalties of the proviso were applicable. He did, however, submit the indictment to the jury, and they found the defendants 'guilty as charged.' 17 Sobell would now find in this a defect entitling him to have his conviction vacated under 2255 or, in the alternative, to have his sentence reduced under F.R.Crim.Proc. 35. The basis of the argument is that whether 32(a) was violated 'in time of war' was a matter for determination by the jury as a part of its verdict. We accept this as a premise to the extent of holding that a defendant being tried under 32(a) was entitled, on proper request, to have the jury determine whether any violation of the statute on his part occurred 'in time of war' as that term would be defined for the jury by the judge. The next steps in the argument are that the 'time of war' ended with the cessation of fighting on August 14, 1945, or with the unconditional surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, or in any event when the President proclaimed the termination of hostilities on December 31, 1946, 61 Stat. 1048-and that the jury should have been so instructed. Since it was not, and since it might have convicted Sobell on the basis of believing only the portion of Elitcher's testimony relating to acts subsequent to those dates, the thirty-year sentence is said to be one 'not authorized by law or otherwise open to collateral attack' under 2255 or, in the alternative, 'an illegal sentence' under F.R.Crim.Proc. 35. 'Exceptional circumstances' are alleged to excuse the failure to raise the point at trial or on appeal, since, it is said, until the decision in Lee v. Madigan, 358 U.S. 228, 79 S.Ct. 276, 3 L.Ed.2d 260 (1959), it was universally assumed that 'time of war' continued until a treaty of peace had been ratified or a peace proclamation issued. At least this seems the most effective statement of the argument. For it would require stronger language than anything in Stilson v. United States, 250 U.S. 583, 587-588, 40 S.Ct. 28, 63 L.Ed. 1154 (1919), or Schaefer v. United States, 251 U.S. 466, 40 S.Ct. 259, 64 L.Ed. 360 (1920), relied on by appellant, to convince us that the jury ought to have been allowed to make its own determination of when the war ended, a question of law which, as we shall see, is not readily answered even by judges. 18 Before proceeding further we must consider a threshold point, even though it has not been raised by the Government, as to the applicability of 2255 to the 'in time of war' ground. In Heflin v. United States, 358 U.S. 415, 79 S.Ct. 451, 3 L.Ed.2d 407 (1959), a majority of the Justices joined in a concurring opinion, by Mr. Justice Stewart, taking the position that 2255 is available only to a prisoner claiming the 'right to be released.' Here it could be said that if we should sustain Sobell's contention, the Government, rather than undergo a new trial, might consent to a reduction of the sentence to the twenty years that would have been permissible even if Sobell's violation of 32(a) had been in time of peace, and, if it did, Sobell would have no 'right to be released' and 2255 would not be available. We do not read the statute, even in the light of the concurring opinion in Heflin, as calling for that result. Mr. Justice Stewart and his colleagues were addressing themselves to a situation where a prisoner in custody under a concededly valid sentence sought to attack a consecutive sentence which had not begun to run. Here Sobell is claiming the 'right to be released' from a single sentence which he alleges to be illegal; if his claim were made out and the Government continued to insist on the higher penalty, there would have to be a new trial. The jurisdictional test of the first sentence of the first paragraph of 2255 is thus satisfied, and the final clause of the third paragraph makes clear that the court is not limited to discharging the prisoner but may 'resentence him or grant a new trial or correct the sentence.' We therefore pass to the merits. 19 In denying the alternative motion for reduction of sentence under Rule 35, Judge McGohey relied in part upon a theory which, if sound, would cover the motion under 2255 as well. His reasoning was that even if we should assume the earliest possible date for the end of the war, the jury must have found that the over-all conspiracy had begun before then, and Sobell took the conspiracy as he found it, United States v. Sansone, 231 F.2d 887, 893 (2 Cir.), cert. denied 351 U.S. 987, 76 S.Ct. 1055, 100 L.Ed. 1500 (1956), and would thus be subject to the higher penalty even if he did not join until after the 'time of war' had ended. On appeal the Government has not sought to support the decision on this ground. A person joining a conspiracy does, indeed, take it as he finds it in many respects, including the important one, to which the Sansone opinion had reference, that acts or declarations of conspirators prior to his entry are admissible against him. But here the question is what Congress meant when it said, 50 U.S.C. (1946 ed.) 34, that 'If two or more persons conspire to violate the provisions of sections 32 or 33 of this title, and one or more of such persons does any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be punished as in said sections provided in the case of the doing of the act the accomplishment of which is the object of such conspiracy.' This language can indeed be read to say that when 'the act the accomplishment of which is the object of such conspiracy' was a disclosure of defense information beginning in time of war and continuing into time of peace, the heavier penalty may be visited even on a 'party to such conspiracy' who did not join it in wartime. Yet it is difficult to discern what purpose Congress would have thought such a rule would accomplish, and it seems more reasonable to read the section as making the penalty for a substantive offense 'in time of war' applicable to conspiring at such a time. Moreover, established principles favor the more lenient construction where ambiguity exists. See, e.g., Bell v. United States, 349 U.S. 81, 83-84, 75 S.Ct. 620, 99 L.Ed. 905 (1955). 20 We likewise cannot accept the Government's attempt to dispose of the contention on the basis that 'time of war' under 32(a) continued until the Presidential proclamation of the termination of the state of war with Japan on April 28, 1952, 66 Stat. c. 31, Proclamation No. 2974, which succeeded the joint resolution of Congress and the Presidential proclamation terminating the war with Germany on October 19, 1951, 65 Stat. 451, 66 Stat. c. 3. We do follow the Government insofar as we reject Sobell's contention that the 'time of war' ended on September 2, 1945, or even earlier. Lee v. Madigan, supra, did not decide that; it held that June 10, 1949, was within a proviso of Article of War 92, 10 U.S.C. (1946 ed. Supp. IV) 1564, prohibiting a military trial of a soldier for murder or rape committed within the United States 'in time of peace.' The Court said that terms such as war and peace 'must be construed in light of the precise facts of each case and the impact of the particular statute involved.' 358 U.S. at 230-231, 79 S.Ct. at 278. Nothing suggests it would have reached the same result if the conspiracy to commit murder there at issue had occurred in, say, late September, 1945. We have been cited to and have found nothing to indicate that any authority on international law, either in 1917, when 32(a) was enacted, 40 Stat. 218, or since, would have considered a war to end, for governmental purposes, 7 as soon as the last shot was even when the surrender was unconditional. See Ludecke v. Watkins, 335 U.S. 160, 166-170, 68 S.Ct. 1429, 92 L.Ed. 1881 (1948). Although a leading treatise has long recognized that 'Belligerents may    abstain from further acts of war and glide into peaceful relations without expressly making peace through a special treaty,' 2 Oppenheim, International Law (2d ed. 1906), 261, at p. 275, 'glide ' connotes a gradual rather than a sudden stop. A war may end also by subjugation of the enemy, but an unconditional surrender is not that when the successful belligerent has manifested no intention to hold the realm of the defeated one permanently under its dominion, id. 264, 265, pp. 277-278; see also Phillipson, Termination of War and Treaties of Peace (1916), chs. I and II. A Congress containing many of the same members who had passed the Espionage Act of 1917 enacted a Joint Resolution terminating World War I on March 3, 1921, and declaring that 'any Act of Congress, or any provision of any such Act, that by its terms is in force only during the existence of a state of war    shall be construed and administered as if such war   terminated on the date when this resolution becomes effective   .' 41 Stat. 1359. On September 1, 1945, President Truman was assured by the Attorney General that the end of actual fighting had terminated no war legislation, 30 Ops.Atty.Gen. 421, 422 (1945); a week later he asked the Congress to refrain from taking action that would end the war until a full study of the problem could be made. Message of September 8, 1945, 91 Cong.Rec. 8380. Congress Complied with his request; not until 1947 did it enact a joint resolution repealing certain wartime statutes, 61 Stat. 449 (1947). We cite the 1945-1947 experience not as bearing directly on the intent of the Congress of 1917, but rather to illustrate how practicalities work against a construction that would strip government of 'wartime' powers instantaneously and without opportunity even to consider how far they might be needed in a transitional period partaking of some elements of both war and peace. Cf. Woods v. Cloyd W. Miller Co., 333 U.S. 138, 141-143, 68 S.Ct. 421, 92 L.Ed. 596 (1948). The considerations that motivated the 1917 Congress to authorize the more severe penalties for espionage 'intime of war' would not be dissipated the very moment when shooting stopped, even after unconditional surrender-- with vast citizen armies, navies and air forces still in the field, allied military missions having access to American defense installations in the United States and abroad, and the danger of flare-ups in the defeated countries that might require military action for their suppression. 21 On the other hand, we cannot believe the Congress of 1917 would have thought the statute it was enacting would have the result that the death penalty for disclosing defense information to a foreign power 'in time of war' should apply not only to disclosures during the less than four years of actual shooting between December 7, 1941 and August 14, 1945, but for six and a half years more, during which our wartime enemies had become our friends. In determining what a statute means when it speaks of war or peace, the purpose of the particular provision must be analyzed; such is the teaching of Lee v. Madigan. Here the purpose was to place the ultimate discouragement on communicating defense information when the nation was fighting for its own life, and to exact the ultimate penalty from those who did. Although this purpose would not end on the firing of the last shot or even on the signing of the surrender, it also would not continue indefinitely thereafter. The prospect of a prolonged interval after the end of the fighting, which bore all the indicia of peace with the former enemy save for a formal treaty, the signing of which was postponed by disagreement among the victorious allies, was not likely to have occurred to the Congress of 1917. That Congress lived in a tidier age, when wars had been generally followed by peace treaties signed with reasonable promptness after the end of fighting. 8 True, allies had been known to fall out over the division of the spoils, so that the friend of one day became the foe of the next and vice versa-- the second Balkan War, following two months after the treaty ending the first, was a then recent example-- but in such cases either the first 'war' continued, or there was a brief 'peace' followed by a new 'war', with changed partners. Still the 1917 Congress must be taken to have been familiar with the notion that a 'time of war' could end through simple cessation of hostilities even though no formal peace treaty had been concluded-- in Oppenheim's phrase, that the former belligerents could 'glide into peaceful relations.' A half century earlier Secretary Seward had written: 22 'It is certain    the situation of peace may be restored by the long suspension of hostilities without a treaty of peace being made. History is full of such occurrences. What period of suspension of war is necessary to justify the presumption of the restoration of peace has never yet been settled, and must in every case be determined with reference to collateral facts and circumstances.' 9 23 See also Phillipson, supra, ch. I. 24 We find it unnecessary to make such a determination here more precisely than to say that, for the purposes of 32(a), the 'war' had ended before the summer and fall of 1948, to which some of Elitcher's testimony against Sobell related. 10 True, American troops were still on foreign soil, but they were there for the same reasons that kept them there after April 28, 1952, when, as the Government concedes, the war with Germany and Japan had terminated. We add for clarity, as must be obvious, that nothing in the Constitution forbade Congress' making the heavier penalties applicable even to espionage carried on in peacetime, as it now has done, see fn. 1, supra, or taking other action, appropriate under the war power, that stretches into times of peace. The only question we have sought to answer is what the 1917 Congress meant by the phrase 'in time of war'. 11 25 It follows that Sobell could properly have asked that the jury determine whether, if he had joined a conspiracy, he had done this in 1944-45 or only at some later date when, in our view, the United States was no longer at war for the purposes of 32(a). 12 But nothing of the sort was suggested; everything said by Sobell's trial counsel assumed that the proviso applied to Sobell if the jury found him guilty as it unquestionably did to the Rosenbergs. Whether this was because counsel was not sensitive to the point, or because he thought it unlikely that the jury would draw a line through Elitcher's testimony and considered it a preferable trial tactic to emphasize the grave penalties a conviction might entail, while being confident that Sobell's offense would not attract a death sentence, we do not know. 26 Applying 2255 as interpreted in our discussion of the Grunewald ground, Sobell again fails to make out a case for relief thereunder. The lack of any instruction to the jury to make a special finding relative to the penalty, which had not been requested, deprived Sobell of no constitutional right. It is true that the jury trial guaranteed in the Sixth Amendment, like that in the Seventh, is a trial not simply by a jury but by a jury acting under the instructions of a judge. United States v. Philadelphia & Reading R.R.,123 U.S. 113, 114, 8 S.Ct. 77, 31 L.Ed. 138 (1887). But the guarantee is also of instructions to the jury by a judge who is assisted by appropriate requests on the part of the defendant; that is one of the reasons why the Sixth Amendment assures him 'the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.' Rules 30 and 51 negate appellant's assumption that it is unnecessary for a defendant to make 'known to the court the action which he desires the court to take or his objection to the action of the court and the grounds therefor.' see Williams v. United States, 238 F.2d 215 (5 Cir., 1956), cert. denied 352 U.S. 1024, 77 S.Ct. 589, 1 L.Ed.2d 596 (1957); Herzog v. United States, 235 F.2d 664 (9 Cir.), cert. denied 352 U.S. 844, 77 S.Ct. 54, 1 L.Ed.2d 59 (1956). It is true that under F.R.Crim.Proc. 52(b) an appellate court has power to notice 'Plain errors or defects affecting substantial rights    although they were not brought to the attention of the court', but this provision does not transmute ordinary errors or defects into constitutional ones, or obliterate the distinction between direct appeal and collateral attack. Perhaps a case might arise where a charge tells a jury so little as to deprive a defendant, even though no request was made or objection taken, of rights guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, and by the due process clause of the Fifth as well. But there is no denial of constitutional right because a judge has not submitted as an issue what everyone plausibly assumed not to be one. See Kenion v. Gill, 81 U.S.App.D.C. 96, 155 F.2d 176 (1946); United States v. Jonikas, 197 F.2d 675 (7 Cir.), cert. denied 344 U.S. 877, 73 S.Ct. 171, 97 L.Ed. 679 (1952). Neither is this a case where there was no evidence that would warrant imposition of the higher penalty under the statute as we now construe it, a situation that might give rise to a due process claim of a different sort. See Thompson v. City of Louisville, 362 U.S. 199, 80 S.Ct. 624, 4 L.Ed.2d 654 (1960). 27 There is likewise no basis for concluding that although the failure under these circumstances to obtain from the jury a special finding of the date when Sobell joined the conspiracy was not of constitutional magnitude, he may nevertheless have relief under 2255 because this seriously affected his trial and 'exceptional circumstances' excuse his failure to raise the point either at trial or on appeal. We gravely doubt that the first branch of the argument is made out; it seems quite unlikely that the jury would have accepted only the part of Elitcher's testimony relating to later years. In any event the second is not. The contention is that until the 1959 decision in Lee v. Madigan, supra, it was settled law that 'war' continued for all purposes until the ratification of a treaty of peace or official action by the President (or by Congress and the President) declaring its complete termination; hence, it is urged, appellant could not reasonably have been expected to raise the point before then, and thereby brings himself within what are asserted to be the implications of Sunal v. Large, supra, 332 U.S. at 181, 67 S.Ct. at 1592, see fn. 6 supra. It would seem a sufficient answer that neither the petitioner in Lee v. Madigan nor the six Justices who joined in that decision thought the law had been thus firmly settled. But there is more. We have already cited expressions, antedating Sobell's trial by many years, to the effect that 'war' might terminate by a long cessation of hostilities. See also Note, Judicial Determination of the End of the War, 47 Colum.L.Rev. 255, 256 and fns. 4 and 5 (1947). In the very year of Sobell's trial an eminent authority on international law, nothing that no treaty of peace with Germany or Japan had yet been signed, wrote that 'For some purposes, therefore, it may be said that the state of war with Germany and Japan continued; yet in view of the political developments, this view smacks of such unreality that no dogmatic statement can be made as to some of its possible consequences.' Hudson, Cases on International Law (3d ed. 1951), page 618. The Supreme Court itself had indicated in 1948 that it might some day be required to determine whether it could 'find that a war though merely formally kept alive had in fact ended,' although characterizing this as 'a question too fraught with gravity even to be adequately formulated when not compelled.' Ludecke v. Watkins, supra, 335 U.S. at 169, 68 S.Ct. at 1433. A new counsel for Sobell seems to have been aware of the point when he argued for a reduction of sentence in 1953, although Lee v. Madigan was still six years away. As with the Grunewald ground, the situation was that 'at the time of the conviction the definitive ruling on the question of law had not crystallized,' Sunal v. Large, 332 U.S. at 181, 67 S.Ct. at 1592-- not that an alleged rule whereby only formal action could bring 'war' to an end for any purpose had become so hardened that it would have seemed hopeless to question it. 28 The foregoing is largely determinative of Sobell's alternative motion for reduction of sentence under F.R.Crim. Proc. 35. The interpretation of that rule and its interrelation with the laterenacted 2255, particularly the portions of that section speaking of a 'sentence    in excess of the maximum authorized by law' and a sentence 'not authorized by law or otherwise open to collateral attack', have recently concerned the Supreme Court. Heflin v. United States, 358 U.S. 415, 418, 79 S.Ct. 451, 3 L.Ed.2d 407 (1959); Hill v. United States, 368 U.S. 424, 82 S.Ct. 468, 7 L.Ed.2d 417 (1962). The Hill decision stated that 'the narrow function of Rule 35 is to permit correction at any time of an illegal sentence, not to re-examine errors occurring at the trial or other proceedings prior to the imposition of sentence', 368 U.S. at 430, 82 S.Ct. at 472; Heflin said that 'relief under Rule 35 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure is available (at least where matters dehors the record are not involved)' when 'the sentence imposed was illegal on its face', 358 U.S. at 418, 79 S.Ct. at 453. 29 The indictment charged, as we have said, that 'On or about June 6, 1944, up to and including June 16, 1950    the United States of America then and there being at war', Sobell and others conspired to violate 32(a), and the jury found him 'guilty as charged.' The indictment and the evidence were such that, on proper proceedings, sentence under the proviso might lawfully have been imposed. Sobell's complaints are that the indictment included too long a period in its definition of 'war', and that, for want of an instruction never sought, we cannot tell whether the jury believed he had conspired during or only after the 'war'. But the former complaint could have been the subject of a motion addressed to the indictment under Rule 12(b), and the latter was an appropriate subject for a request for an instruction under Rule 30. The sentence is thus not 'illegal on its face'; the asserted defect consists of alleged 'errors occurring at the trial or other proceedings prior to the imposition of sentence.' These lie beyond the ambit of Rule 35, Cook v. United States, 171 F.2d 567, 570 (1 Cir., 1948), cert. denied 336 U.S. 926, 69 S.Ct. 647, 93 L.Ed. 1088 (1949); Stegall v. United States, 279 F.2d 872 (6 Cir.), cert. denied 364 U.S. 915, 81 S.Ct. 279, 5 L.Ed.2d 229 (1960). That Rule is confined to cases where the court can properly correct the sentence without any need for a new trial, yet the very nub of Sobell's argument is that the issue of the date of his entrance into the conspiracy was one on which a jury was required to but did not pass. It would be quite improper for this Court, by utilizing Rule 35 to reduce Sobell's sentence, to place the Government in the same position as if the issue had been submitted to the jury and decided in his favor. 30 Affirmed.