Court Opinion

ID: 9637963
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:27:54.873425+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:02.252891
License: Public Domain

MARTIN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I think the evidence in this criminal case abundantly supports the verdict of the jury that the defendants are guilty of the offense charged. To.my thinking, moreover, the verdict was responsive to a clear and correct charge that, to justify conviction, the jury must find from the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants designedly and with the purpose of wrongdoing wilfully attempted to evade payment of lawful taxes by purposely failing to report in the return all income which they knew the corporation had received during the calendar year involved. The necessity that the Government prove a wilful attempt to evade was stressed over and over again in the charge.
While it might have been more euphonious had the district judge said that the defendants had admitted that the original return was “incorrect,” rather than “false and untrue,” he was nonetheless, as I view it, correct in his statement. These words in some settings carry sinister significance; wherein consider, “as false as Cressid,” “false as dicers’ oaths.” In other contexts the words carry no such evil connotation ; as, for instance, “a false premise” in logic. The word “false” may mean merely “erroneous, incorrect,” as well as “deceptive.” See Fowler’s American Oxford Dictionary, p. 294. Cf. The New Century Dictionary, Vol. I, p. 547; The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1939 Reprint, Vol. I, p. 672. Some current periodicals have even made popular the indoor game of underscoring answers to assertions of this sort: “Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of American Independence. True? False?” ‘‘After eating Welsh rarebits, a giraffe talks in his sleep. True? False?”
It seems to me unreasonable to infer from the entire context of the charge that the jury could- possibly have misunderstood the sense in which the District Judge used the words “false and untrue” in the paragraph of the charge upon which reversal is based.
Nor do I think that reversible error inheres in the rejection of the proffered evidence of prompt payment of the additional tax shown by the amended return. In my judgment, the failure to admit this evidence was, at most, mere harmless error; but inasmuch as the case must be retried, I join my colleagues in the thought that it would be fairer to the defendants to receive it upon the second trial of the case. Yet, prompt payment of the correct tax, after the amended return was filed as a result of the Government’s investigation, would not exculpate the defendants from the charge laid in the indictment