Court Opinion

ID: 9449520
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:14:22.351049+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:52.140615
License: Public Domain

BAZELON, Chief Judge
(concurring).
Although appellant purports to be attacking the propriety of charging the jury on lesser included offenses, I agree with my brethren that he is in effect attempting an untimely attack against the indictment for duplicity. Whether made against the indictment or the charge, the attack is levelled against the possibility that the conviction was based on facts not found by the grand jury.* But since appellant failed to make a timely challenge to the indictment, I concur in the court’s disposition of the case.
But I reject any suggestion that evidence at the trial may be considered in determining whether the grand jury *800found facts sufficient to constitute an assault. As Mr. Justice Stewart said, writing for the Court in Russell v. United States, 369 U.S. 749, 770, 82 S.Ct. 1038, 8 L.Ed.2d 240 (1962):
“To allow the prosecutor, or the court, to make a subsequent guess as to what was in the minds of the grand jury at the time they returned the indictment would deprive the defendant of a basic protection which the guaranty of the intervention of a grand jury was designed to secure. For a defendant could then be convicted on the basis of facts not found by, and perhaps not even presented to, the grand jury which indicted .him.”

 In Spencer v. United States, 73 App.D.C. 98, 116 F.2d 801 (1940), a conviction of robbery was affirmed on facts which did not show an assault. The indictment in the Spencer case charged robbery “against resistance, and by putting in fear, and by sudden and stealthy seizure and snatching * * The practice of the United States Attorney, followed in the present case, still seems to be to charge all methods of robbery in robbery indictments regardless of the nature of the evidence presented to the grand jury.