Court Opinion

ID: 9636623
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:35:47.460881+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:47.477754
License: Public Domain

WOODROUGH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
It seems to me that the -defendant was properly indicted, fairly tried and justly convicted under the accessory statute. Section 551, Title 18 U.S.C.A., Criminal Code, Section 333.
It was clearly proved that defendant’s brother John had been stealifig small sums of cash from the Minneapolis bank day by day over a course of years and putting it in his pocket. Most of it he spent, but when he was caught he still had $5,903 hidden under his bed in a tin box. The defendant being cognizant of his brother’s felony took the money from under the bed and secreted it in a golf bag in order to conceal that clue to his brother’s crime. That made the defendant an accessory after the fact, as I see it.1 True, the federal statute does not define “accessory,” but the meaning is long settled in common law. Any act knowingly done to aid a felon to cheat the law either of his person or the fruits of his crime constitutes the actor an accessory. The gist of the offense is the intent to cheat the law, the acts may'vary infinitely. Where the felony of the principal is larceny of money I see no reason to restrict the accessory *651statute to the receiving of identified stolen money knowing it to have been stolen. Any act to cheat the law may suffice where the gist — the intent — is proven.
The indictment in this case was very carefully drawn to accord exactly with the established facts. The pleader knew that the identity of every dollar John stole was lost as soon as John stole it, because John immediately put his stealings in his pockets that were already well filled and none of it was marked. That being so, and the fact considered that John always spent many times what he earned, I can think of no better way to describe the fund or any part of it that remained in John’s possession than to call it the “fruits or proceeds” of his stealing. That is what it was in ordinary acceptation and those are the appropriate descriptive words applied in the indictment to the ill-gotten gains that John hid under the bed and the defendant feloniously concealed from the law.
It is argued that the $5,903 cash under John’s bed was not “important evidence” against him as alleged in the indictment, but it seems to me that it was. True, John confessed his stealings but the criminal law requires more than confession. The money hidden under the bed considered with the records and the confessions tended to establish the corpus delicti of John’s offense. It would in the mind of a layman, and I think it would on a criminal trial. Not because it was suddenly acquired or unaccounted for wealth in John’s possession, but because the presence of the money there under the bed corroborated and tended to bear out the amazing story of his stealings and what he had done with the loot. Nearly all of the great sum of $110,000 which John had stolen was gone without trace. There was nothing to show for it but some figures on paper-. But the cash under the bed was tangible to the touch and visible to the eye. It was of the corpus delicti whether the state prosecuted for the stealings before the amendment to the federal bank robbery act or the federal government for those committed thereafter. In either case the relevant proof would be that over and above what John had earned and spent there was a remnant hidden under the bed not honestly earned but “fruits and proceeds” of his crime. His restoration of it after he was caught was merely by written document. But the money itself in a pile of coins and bills was “important evidence” for the jury.
I dissent because I think the conclusion unduly restricts the broad salutary accessory statute against helping thieves cheat the law. In the particular case I think there are extenuating circumstances but that guilt was proven. '

 Blackstone Com. Vol. 2 IV, 37: “Any assistance whatever given to a felon to hinder his being apprehended, tried or suffering punishment makes the assistor an accessory.”