Court Opinion

ID: 9651397
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:18:28.497685+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:33.504669
License: Public Domain

HUTCHESON, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
The opinion of the majority is an extremely simple and, as I think, correct statement of the principle that two substantial things must concur before a defendant may be convicted of a felony in a court of the United States; (1) He must be charged by indictment with the commission of a federal offense;. (2) the offense must be proven against him.
I have always supposed that as an indictment without proof cannot support a conviction, so proof without indictment cannot.
That Congress by the Act of February 26, 1919, 28 USCA § 391, either intended or has effected the result that in federal courts proof of a federal offense is now the only matter of substance, that indictment is mere technicality, and may, when proof is ample, be entirely dispensed with, I do not believe.
No ease has yet been found by me which declares that failure to charge the essential element of an offense is a mere technicality; on the contrary, there is general concurrence in the statement that if “the indictment fails *512to state facts sufficient to constitute the crime charged, the judgment of conviction cannot, of course, be sustained” Sonnenberg v. U. S. (C. C. A.) 264 F. 327, 328; Wong Tai v. U. S., 273 U. S. 80, 47 S. Ct. 300, 71 L. Ed. 545; Wishart v. U. S. (C. C. A.) 29 F.(2d) 103, 106; Shilter v. U. S. (C. C. A.) 257 F. 724, and this even in the absence of an attack of any kind upon the indictment in the court below. Sonnenberg v. U. S. (C. C. A.) 264 F. 327, 328.
Where the indictment has been challenged by demurrer, raising not technicality, but matters of substance, and the demurrer has been erroneously overruled, by that much more is it clear that a conviction upon such indictment must be reversed. Moore v. United States, 160 U. S. 268, 16 S. Ct. 294, 40 L. Ed. 422.
Technicality and substance are not so confused in my mind as that I can bring myself to believe that failure to charge the substantive elements of a federal offense constitutes “technical error, defect, or exception which does not, affect the substantial rights” of the defendant.
I concur in the majority opinion.