Court Opinion

ID: 9444165
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:44:05.473411+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:44.812576
License: Public Domain

DENMAN, Chief Judge,
concurring-in the dismissal of the action but dissenting from the grounding of the court’s opinion on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure instead of 48 U.S. C.A. § 1424(a) creating the jurisdiction of the District Court of Guam, which the Rules do no more than implement.
A. The right to indictment is conferred by the statute creating the jurisdiction of the court and not by its rules which merely implement its jurisdiction.
All the court’s discussion of the Constitution following the flag in Guam is way by the mark, that contention not being seriously pressed at the hearing. Such discussion is no more than brutum fulmen about the obvious fact that the Constitution does not follow the flag, thus obscuring the single issue in the case and at the same time ignoring the principal contention made#at the hearing.
*765That single issue is, has Congress created in the Guam district court by the express language of 48 U.S.C.A. § 1424 (a) the jurisdiction to try persons accused of felonies only by indictment unless waived, as in the district courts of the United States and as it has created such limited jurisdiction in the district courts of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
The pertinent portions of 48 U.S.C.A. § 1424(a) and 28 U.S.C.A. § 451, to which the former refers, expressly confer on the Guam district court the same jurisdiction as that of a continental district court of the United States in such a case as this of a federal felony. They are:
“The District Court of Guam shall have, in all causes arising under the laws of the United States, the jurisdiction of a district court of the United States as such court is defined in section 451 of Title 28 * * (Emphasis supplied.)
and
“§ 451. Definitions
“As used in this title:
“The term ‘court of the United States’ includes the Supreme Court of the United States, courts of appeals, district courts constituted by chapter 5 of this title, including the district courts of the United States for the districts of Hawaii and Puerto Rico * * (Emphasis supplied.)
As early as Ex parte Wilson, 114 U.S. 417 at page 429, 5 S.Ct. 935 at page 941, 29 L.Ed. 89, it was held that to proceed to try an accused for felony without an indictment was without the “jurisdiction” of district courts of the United States, stating:
“Deciding nothing beyond what is required by the facts of the case before us, our judgment is that a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term of years at hard labor is an infamous crime, within the meaning of the fifth amendment of the constitution; and that the district court, in holding the petitioner to answer for such a crime, and sentencing him to such imprisonment, without indictment or presentment by a grand jury, exceeded its jurisdiction, and he is therefore entitled! to be discharged.” (Emphasis supplied.)
Two years later in Ex parte Bain, 121 U.S. 1, 7 S.Ct. 781, 788, 30 L.Ed. 849, where Bain was convicted on an indictment found invalid because amended by the court, it was held that “jurisdiction of the offense [a felony] is gone” because the case was not “properly presented by indictment”. Cf. Roche v. Evaporated Milk Ass’n, 319 U.S. 21, 26, 63 S.Ct. 938, 87 L.Ed. 1185.
Congress further indicates that it conferred on the Guam district court the same jurisdictional requirements of indictment as in the continental courts by applying to Guam the Federal Code of Crimes and Criminal Procedure, 18 U. S.C., of which Section 3321 provides for the number of grand jurors and the method of summoning them; § 3432 providing for a service of the indictment in capital cases; § 5032 providing for indicting juvenile offenders for the crimes punishable by death or life imprisonment; and §§ 3288 and 3289 which provide for re-indictment where a defective indictment was found before and after the expiration of the period of limitation.
The court’s opinion quotes the pertinent sentence of § 1424(a): “The District Court of Guam shall have, in all causes arising under the laws of the United States, the jurisdiction of a district court of the United States as such court is defined in section 451 of Title 28,” and states “we think the use of the-word ‘jurisdiction’ in the language just quoted has no such connotation here [as it does for the district courts of the United States]. Plainly this refers to the jurisdiction of the subject matter. It states what cases the court may try” (Emphasis supplied.)
That is to say, the court would amend this sentence of § 1424(a) by deleting *766the significant comma after the word “have” and inserting the word “jurisdiction” before the words “in all causes arising under the laws of the United States” and, after deleting the second comma, by striking out all the succeeding words “the jurisdiction of a district court of the United States as such court is defined in section 451 of Title 28”.
After such legerdemain so mauling the statute, the sentence would read:
“The District Court of Guam shall have [jurisdiction] in all cases arising under the laws of the United States, the jarisdietion ef a district ee-u-r-fe ef the United StatC3 as saeb eeart is defined.”
Such an absurdity of statutory construction obviously violates the elementary principle that the words of a statute shall be construed to give them effect and not to make them nugatory. As stated by the Supreme Court in Market Co. v. Hoffman, 101 U.S. 112, 115, 116, 25 L.Ed. 782, “We are not at liberty to construe any statute so as to deny effect to any part of its language. It is a cardinal rule of statutory construction that significance and effect shall, if possible, be accorded to every word. As early as in Bacon’s Abridgment, sect. 2, it was said that ‘a statute ought, upon the whole, to be so construed that, if it can be prevented, no clause, sentence, or word shall be superfluous, void, or insignificant.’ ” The same statement is repeated in Ex parte Public Bank, 278 U.S. 101, 104, 49 S.Ct. 43, 73 L.Ed. 202.
The only construction of the sentence which gives effect to the jurisdictional provision of 48 U.S.C.A. § 1424(a) is that the District Court of Guam has the same jurisdiction as the district courts of the United States in all causes arising under the laws of the United States. Indeed, this is so clear from the text that we have no reason to consider the Committee reports, for, as stated in Helver-ing v. City Bank, 296 U.S. 85, 89, 56 S.Ct. 70, 72, 80 L.Ed. 62:
“We are not at liberty to construe language so plain as to need no construction, or to refer to committee reports where there can be no doubt of the meaning of the words used.”
Also, in Browder v. United States, 312 U.S. 335, 338, 61 S.Ct. 599, 601, 85 L.Ed. 862, the Court said:
“The plain meaning of the words' of the act covers this use. No single argument has more weight in statutory interpretation than this.”
However, when we examine the Senate report on the bill creating the District Court of Guam, we find its purpose was to give the litigants in that court the same “rights of American law and legal procedure” as they have in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. That is to say, that court could obtain its jurisdiction to prosecute one accused of a felony only by indictment, unless waived.
In the original draft of the Organic Act (see H.R. 7273, 81st Cong., 2d Sess., as introduced on Feb. 13, 1950), no provision was made for a District Court. Instead, Section 22 vested the judicial authority of Guam in one Supreme Court and in such inferior Courts as may be established under the laws of Guam. The problem of enforcement of the laws of the United States, as opposed to the laws of Guam, was taken care of in Sec. 24 of the proposed bill by extending the jurisdiction of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California to include Guam, and providing for special terms of that Court to be held in Guam.
Later the bill was amended to establish a District Court in Guam. The reason for this change is given on page 4 of Senate Report No. 2109, U.S.Code Congressional Service 1950, p. 2840, cited supra:
“Given a period of peace, the growth of Guam as a transportation and commercial center for American interests in the Far East seems almost a foregone conclusion. American business enterprise in the area will want, and need, a center in which it can have the full protection *767of American laws and legal procedure. Formerly this need was supplied by the United States Court for China, which had its headquarters in Shanghai, but that court was abolished by the treaty with China ending extraterritoriality. The nearest American court to far eastern economic centers is that in Hawaii, which is 12 or more hours away from Guam by air. If Guam is to afford American business enterprise the protection and stability needed, a court in Guam which will have on-the-spot jurisdiction in matters involving admiralty and business reorganization is clearly indicated.” (Emphasis supplied.)
We thus see that the considered alternative for Guam of the United States Court for the Northern District of California was the United States District Court of Hawaii where, again, jurisdiction of a felony could be obtained only by indictment, unless waived.
In addition to these continental businessmen needing these “rights of American law and legal procedure” are some 15,000 continentally-reared soldiers and sailors of the Armed Forces on Guam. A sailor accused of second degree murder of a Guamanian, committed off a military reservation, as much is entitled to indictment as is the businessman.
We should take judicial notice of the following facts before Congress in enacting Sec. 1424(a). Apart from the businessmen and the 15,000 military, the original inhabitants, the Guamanians, are capable of producing trial jurors as well as grand jurors.
Beginning in 1900 and continuing for the succeeding fifty-four years, save in the Japanese occupancy, they have been compelled by the military authorities to send their children to English-speaking schools from the age of 7 to 12. They are people, excepting the few aged, speaking in English and literate in English and taught in the schools the elements of American ideals. Since 1935 they have been governed by the common law as developed in the California Civil and Criminal Codes, then made the law of Guam. It is clear that if they are not now able to supply jurors for the jury system, they never will be.
Contrast this with the conferring of the grand and petit juries on the Puerto Ricans in 1900 where, according to the 1929 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, page 263, “In 1899, out of a reported total but 15% could read or write. The total number in all schools at that time was 22,265, or about 2% of the population.” Nevertheless, the Commission, appointed by the President under 48 U.S.C.A. § 1421c(b) to determine the federal statutes applicable to Guam in 1950 which should remain applicable, stated that Guam’s status is comparable to that of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands,” and “If the Congress has extended a statute to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, the Commission considered that act to be presumptively appropriate for application to Guam.”