Court Opinion

ID: 9421382
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:58:02.662491+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:29.898197
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Black and Mr. Justice Douglas join,
dissenting.
If Congress desires to make cheating, in all its myriad varieties, a federal offense when employed to obtain an automobile that is then taken across a state line, it should express itself with less ambiguity than by language that leads three Courts of Appeals to decide that it has not said so and three that it has. If “stealing” (describing a thing as “stolen”) be not a term of art, it must be deemed a colloquial, everyday term. As such, it would hardly be used, even loosely, by the man in the street to cover “cheating.” Legislative drafting is dependent on treacherous words to convey, as often as not, complicated ideas, and courts should not be pedantically exacting in con*418struing legislation. But to sweep into the jurisdiction of the federal courts the transportation of cars obtained not only by theft but also by trickery does not present a problem so complicated that the Court should search for hints to find a command. When Congress has wanted to deal with many different ways of despoiling another of his property and not merely with larceny, it has found it easy enough to do so, as a number of federal enactments attest. See, e. g., 18 U. S. C. §§ 641, 655, 659, 1707. No doubt, penal legislation should not be artificially restricted so as to allow escape for those for whom it was with fair intendment designed. But the principle of lenity which should guide construction of criminal statutes, Bell v. United States, 349 U. S. 81, 83-84, precludes extending the term “stolen” to include every form of dishonest acquisition. This conclusion is encouraged not only by the general consideration governing the construction of penal laws; it also has regard for not bringing to the federal courts a mass of minor offenses that are local in origin until Congress expresses, if not an explicit, at least an unequivocal, desire to do so.
I would affirm the judgment.