Court Opinion

ID: 9447202
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:28:46.043507+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:56.492419
License: Public Domain

*908HAND, Circuit Judge
(dissenting in part and concurring in part).
Regardless of whether the doctrine of Dunn v. United States, 284 U.S. 390, 52 S.Ct. 189, 76 L.Ed. 356, applies to cases tried to a judge, I do not see why the conviction on Count 2 should be reversed, however erroneous was the acquittal on Count 1, unless there was some inconsistency in the findings upon one of the facts constituting the crime charged in Count 1 and upon the same fact constituting the crime charged in Count 2. The reason for reversing the conviction in that event would be that we could not know what the judge found as to the fact common to the two crimes. I do not see why otherwise a person should escape punishment for a crime of which he is found guilty, because he was acquitted of another crime of which he was also guilty. Consistency in the application of the law is not an interest which the accused may invoke, unless it operates to his disadvantage, which by hypothesis would not then be true. We should not exculpate him in order to prevent errors in judicial dialectic.
In the case at bar even if the judge found that Maybury had not endorsed the check when he entered the judgment of acquittal, and that he had, endorsed it when he entered judgment of conviction, I should not agree that the conviction could not stand, unless it appeared that he had relied upon Maybury’s endorsement as a necessary fact in determining to convict. It is impossible to know what he did find as to the endorsement. In his colloquy with counsel at the close of the evidence he said several times that Maybury had endorsed the cheek, yet on the motion to set aside the “verdict” he said that there “wasn’t any evidence he signed the name Abraham Kohl * * * Somebody endorsed Abraham Kohl’s name on the back of the check”; and he concluded by saying that the “inference to be drawn” (was that) “he knew the check was a forged check or he had reason to understand it was a forged check,” and “he should have had knowledge it was a check not properly endorsed by the payee.” It appears to me that there was enough evidence to support a finding of fraudulent “uttering.” The trumped up explanation of a supposititious “Barney who I believed was the rightful payee,” and who asked him to sign Kohl’s name, was surely a sufficient basis for imputing to Maybury the fact that it was not the payee who got the money.
Since Judge LUMBARD wishes to reverse the judgment on both Counts and to dismiss them, and Judge FRIENDLY wishes to reverse the judgment on both Counts but to order a new trial on both, we are at an impasse. Although for the reasons I have tried to give I think that the judgment on Count 2 was right, I am willing to go along with Judge FRIENDLY in reversing that judgment and order a new trial. Green v. United States, 355 U.S. 184, 78 S.Ct. 221, 2 L. Ed.2d 199, seems to me to forbid a reversal of the judgment on Count 1, and, as I understand it, Judge FRIENDLY does not insist upon reversing that judgment. Therefore, the result is that the judgment of conviction on Count 2 will be reversed and a new trial ordered, and the judgment on Count 1, from which no appeal was, or could have been taken, will remain unaffected.