Court Opinion

ID: 9458670
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 20:58:41.220592+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:51.252521
License: Public Domain

GODBOLD, Circuit Judge
(specially concurring):
I concur in the result and add one point.
The court charged on the familiar rule that if a defendant is in possession of recently stolen property and does not explain his possession the jury is entitled to infer that he has knowledge of its stolen character. As to the defendant Martinez this charge just barely escapes being error, considering the lapse of *689eleven months between the disappearance of the securities and Martinez’s transactions relating to them. But the court then charged that if the government had shown: (a) mailing and non-receipt of the securities; (b) possession of them by a defendant; and (c) knowledge by the defendant that they were stolen, then the jury could infer that the securities were stolen from the mails. Martinez correctly asserts that this charge was error.
There is no substantial rational relationship between possession of stolen goods with knowledge of their illegal character and the facts surrounding the manner in which they were stolen. The circumstances of dealing with stolen goods have a rational relationship to knowledge of their illegal character— surreptitious dealings, changed names, sales not in regular course of business, discount prices, absence of title documents, and many other circumstances will tend to put a possessor on notice that he is dealing with illegal goods. But there is no such likelihood that a course of dealings will reveal to him the time, place and manner of the theft. And inquiry into the subject is unlikely. The less the dealer knows the better he will like it. As Judge Learned Hand put it in United States v. Bollenbach, 147 F.2d 199, 202 (2d Cir.), rev’d on other grounds 326 U.S. 607, 66 S.Ct. 402, 90 L.Ed. 350 (1946) :
It is of course possible that a man, dealing in stolen securities, and knowing or suspecting that they have in fact been stolen, may inquire where the seller got them; but it is more likely that he will not wish to do so. Inquiry is apt to add to that information any evidence of which he will at all hazards wish to suppress; it will be safer to take the securities as they are presented than to meddle into their source.
The tenuous nature of the “stolen from the mails” inference is even more attenuated than usual in the present case because one of the underpinnings —knowledge that the securities were stolen — was itself an inference that the jury was allowed to draw at the very outer limits of its rationality. This case is one of those rare ones in which the plaint of “inference on an inference” is substance rather than shibboleth.
The erroneous instruction was, however, error without injury as to Martinez. As the majority point out, Martinez’s guilty knowledge was required to be only of “theft” and not, “theft from the mails.” The inference erroneously permitted was only of “from the mails,” a matter clearly established by other evidence.