Court Opinion

ID: 9493778
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:19:23.401927+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:02.226944
License: Public Domain

CLAY, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the majority’s opinion affirming Defendant’s conviction and sentence. I write separately to expressly state that United States v. Dalton, 960 F.2d 121 (10th Cir.1992) should be rejected even if it is distinguishable with respect to the matter at hand.
Several circuit courts have rejected Dalton in favor of the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning in United States v. Jones, 976 F.2d 176 (4th Cir.1992). For example, in United States v. Ardoin, 19 F.3d 177, 180 & n. 4 (5th Cir.1994), the Fifth Circuit elected to follow Jones over Dalton when it reasoned that the defendant in Ardoin could have avoided prosecution for failing to register and pay taxes on illegal machine guns by refusing to accept these weapons in the first place. Later, in United States v. Gresham, 118 F.3d 258, 263 (5th Cir.1997), the court once again rejected Dalton and held that “if it was legally impossible for Gresham to register the pipe bomb and thereby comply with the NFA, he could avoid prosecution by not engaging in the illegal activity.” The Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Eleventh circuits have similarly rejected Dalton. See United States v. Elliott, 128 F.3d 671, 672 (8th Cir.1997) (per curiam ); Hunter v. United States, 73 F.3d 260, 261-62 (9th Cir.1996) (per curiam ); United States v. Rivera, 58 F.3d 600, 601-02 (11th Cir.1995); United States v. Ross, 9 F.3d 1182, 1192-94 (7th Cir.1993), vacated on other grounds, 511 U.S. 1124, 114 S.Ct. 2129, 128 L.Ed.2d 860 (1994).
In addition, the Eastern District of Michigan has recently rejected Dalton on several occasions. In United States v. Djelaj, the district court criticized Dalton as follows:
The court finds the analysis in [United States v. Jones, 976 F.2d 176 (4th Cir.1992)] and [United States v. Ross, 9 F.3d 1182 (7th Cir.1993)] clearly superior to that of Dalton. Just as the defendant in Jones could have complied with both the NFA and § 922(o) by not dealing in newly-made machine guns, so, too, Defendants in this case could have complied with NFA § 5861(d) and Michigan’s ban on Molotov cocktails by not possessing those destructive devices in the first place. Dalton’s impossibility analysis is therefore flawed, and this Court believes that there is nothing fundamentally unfair with holding Defendants to answer for their breach of federal law regardless of what state law may say. If this were not the case, fed*534eral criminal statutes could be enforced only in states which agreed with and accepted them. This is a preposterous contention.
Defendants’ arguments to dismiss the indictment, then, when boiled down to their essence, collapse under simple common sense.
842 F.Supp. 278, 281 (E.D.Mich.1994) (footnote omitted).
A few years later, in United States v. Wolfe, 32 F.Supp.2d 945, 954-55 (E.D.Mich.1999), the Eastern District of Michigan rejected Dalton for the reasons set forth in Djelaj. Finally, in United States v. Bournes, once again the Eastern District of Michigan took the opportunity to reject Dalton and its reasoning:
[T]his Court has previously rejected the reasoning in Dalton, and sees no reason to reach a -different conclusion here. Simply stated, the dilemma confronted by Defendant was of his own making, and could have been avoided if he had refrained from possessing outlawed machine guns in the first instance. Thus, the Court finds that the Government’s refusal to permit Defendant to register machine guns does not operate to bar Defendant’s prosecution for possessing unregistered machine guns.
105 F.Supp.2d 736, 744-45 (E.D.Mich.2000) (footnote omitted). The Bournes court also noted that Dalton’s viability is questionable in that the case upon which Dalton was premised, United States v. Rock Island Armory, Inc., 773 F.Supp. 117 (C.D.Ill.1991), has been since rejected by the Court of Appeals for the circuit in which Rock Island was decided. See Bournes, 105 F.Supp.2d at 745 n. 3 (citing United States v. Ross, 9 F.3d 1182, 1192-94 (7th Cir.1993)).
Based upon the above cited authority, I believe that this circuit should reject Dalton’s reasoning in favor the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning in Jones. Applying Jones to the case at hand, Defendant’s claim fails where he could have avoided prosecution simply by refusing to manufacture and possess the pipe bomb.