Court Opinion

ID: 9641255
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:26:36.625624+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:36.064621
License: Public Domain

NEBEKER, Associate Judge
(dissenting) :
One cannot but be left to ask: How and by what good reason can the extant statutory command — “Notwithstanding any other provisions of law” — be rendered meaningless? The dissent by Judge Robb in United States v. Howard, 146 U.S.App.D.C. 10, 20, 449 F.2d 1086, 1096 (1971), is, in my view, not merely persuasive but compelling. I subscribe to it and, accordingly, dissent here. In so doing, I add that the affected “conflict” between the two statutes (D.C.Code 1973, § 22-2404, and 18 U.S.C. § 5010(b)) is in reality a device to catch hold of the tail of the rule of lenity and drag it into first-degree murder cases. Such crimes are recognized as among the most heinous in civilized society. If there is ever a need for punishment to serve all of its recognized purposes that need is in first-degree murder cases, and I believe that the Congress has so spoken.
Sometimes I fear that judges may be prone to view all criminal acts recited in testimony or records as mere statistics on the altar of social conflict. Here, a human being died at the hands of a premeditating and deliberating killer. Yet we tell the community there is a sophisticated way of interpreting two statutes so as to permit a mere slap on the wrist for this offense. Before this happens, Congress — not the courts — should do some pretty specific legislating.
None of the cases cited by the majority here or in Howard for application of the rule of lenity are authority for its application to a question on the effect, if any, of one statute on another. Those cases are all consecutive punishment-separate offense cases.
But there is more. By way of astounding legerdemain, the majority brushes aside the government’s reliance on United States v. Lane, 284 F.2d 935 (9th Cir. 1960), and in so doing turns the law respecting repeal by implication on its head. Since the rule of lenity has no place in this case, I submit the majority has really hidden behind that label in applying the unfavored notion of repeal by implication to § 22-2404 — and in a most curious way. Lane, the majority says, noted “ ‘solid support’ in the legislative history of the statute in question for the conclusion that its enactment effected an implicit repeal of 18 U.S.C. § 5010(a)”. It is then concluded that there is “no such direct evidence of Congressional intent to exclude young offenders convicted of first-degree murder from coverage under the Youth [Corrections] Act.” (Emphasis supplied.) How the result follows from this reasoning, I cannot say, but without any basis whatsoever, section 22-2404 by judicial fiat has had excised from it the clear language — “Notwithstanding any other provision of law” — and it was done on a basis that there is no congressional intent, one way or another, on the question whether young first-degree murderers should be excluded from the Youth Corrections Act. That intent, I submit, is found in the excised phrase of § 22-2404. A lack of expression as to intent in the Youth Corrections Act can hardly bring about implicit repeal of part of our first-degree murder punishment statute. With all respect, the reasoning of the majority here and in Howard is sophistry.