Court Opinion

ID: 9462099
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:31:59.65979+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:24.223315
License: Public Domain

TONE, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
While I concur in the court’s opinion, I feel constrained to say a few words about the question decided by Part III of that opinion.
The majority in United States v. Feola, 420 U.S. 671, 95 S.Ct. 1255, 43 L.Ed.2d 541 (1975), held that “the ‘federal officer’ requirement” in 18 U.S.O. § 111 is “jurisdictional only” (95 S.Ct. at 1260 n. 9), i. e., that by enacting that statute, in the words of Mr. Justice Stewart’s dissent, “Congress intended merely to federalize every assault which *464happens to have a federal officer as its victim.” (Id. at 1270.) It seems to follow inexorably from this that, as the court holds today, the criminality of the use of force against one who turns out to be a federal officer depends upon whether the act is legally justified under the law of the state in which the act occurred. Thus the mens rea referred to in the passage from the Feola opinion quoted by Judge Pell is the mens rea necessary for the state offense, as is illustrated by the example given by the Court, in which the use of force against the person would be legally justified under state law.
I am uncomfortable in holding a defendant criminally accountable for conduct which, we hypothesize for present purposes, he thought was not only lawful but socially desirable, and I am made more so because the penalties provided by the statute are so harsh as to suggest that Congress did not contemplate their imposition on persons who did not believe they were committing a wrong. The defendants here were each sentenced to nine years imprisonment. The severity of the sentences indicates that the judge did not believe they were merely trying to apprehend a felon, but the jury might have found otherwise. This case demonstrates the harsh results that can be produced by transplanting the state laws of criminal assault and citizen’s arrest into a federal criminal statute which does not distinguish between unknowing assaults and knowing assaults and punishes one as harshly as the other.* See Mr. Justice Stewart’s dissent in Feola, 95 S.Ct. at 1276. I concur in Part III of the court’s opinion in the case at bar only because I believe Feola requires that result. If I were free to do so, I would hold otherwise.

 As Mr. Justice Stewart states in his Feola dissent, the typical state assault statute makes an assault on a private citizen a misdemeanor and an assault on a law enforcement officer a felony, but “the accused’s knowledge that his victim had an official status or function is invariably recognized by the States as an essential element of the aggravated offense.” 95 S.Ct. at 1270-1271. Indiana appears to be no exception. The offense of the defendants in the case at bar, if committed against a state officer, would have been a misdemeanor under Ind.Code 35-13 — 5-7 unless they knew the victim to be a law enforcement officer, in which case it would have been a felony under Ind. Code 35-21-4-2.