Court Opinion

ID: 9454586
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:50:46.779401+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:10.771033
License: Public Domain

ELY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
I respectfully dissent. This is a trifling case which should not have been prosecuted. After the government agent had gained admittance to the appellant’s *114dwelling, and after his discovery of the tiny particles of gold and his conversations with the appellant, he contacted the United States Attorney’s office by telephone and expressed his opinion that the appellant had committed no offense. Notwithstanding, an indictment and the conviction followed. While the district judge was lenient in the imposition of penalty, the appellant now bears the burdens of a felon. 18 U.S.C. § 1.
My analysis of the record convinces me that we should not permit the judgment of conviction to stand. As I see it, the appellant was, in truth, convicted, not for an offense which had been committed but for an offense which may have been contemplated and never accomplished. I interpret the majority’s reliance upon Lewis v. United States, 385 U.S. 206, 87 S.Ct. 424, 17 L.Ed.2d 312 (1966), as confirmative of this view. Lewis stands for the proposition that if one invites an undercover agent to his home for the specific purpose of feloni-ously selling narcotics therein, the introduction of incriminating evidence obtained by the undercover agent in the home is not barred by the Fourth Amendment. Here, the conviction rests upon the assumption that the offense was committed at the time the appellant crossed the border, not thereafter. Hence, the consent given by the appellant to the agent’s entry of his room could not, as in Lewis, have been given for the purpose of committing the felony in the room. It seems to me that the facts of the present case more nearly fit those presented in Gouled v. United States, 255 U.S. 298, 41 S.Ct. 261, 65 L. Ed. 647 (1921), which the Supreme Court in Lewis did not pretend to overrule. In Gouled, an undercover agent, an acquaintance of the accused, gained the challenged consent to entry on the pretense that his call was friendly. The Supreme Court held that the introduction of the incriminating evidence obtained as a result of the friendly “visit” infringed Gouled’s fourth amendment rights. Said the High Court:
“The prohibition of the Fourth Amendment is against all unreasonable searches and seizures and if for a government officer to obtain entrance to a man’s house or office by force or by an illegal threat or show of force, amounting to coercion, and then to search for and seize his private papers would be an unreasonable and therefore a prohibited search and seizure, as it certainly would be, it is impossible to successfully contend that a like search and seizure would be a reasonable one if only admission were obtained by stealth instead of by force or coercion. The security and privacy of the home or office and of the papers of the owner would be as much invaded and the search and seizure would be as much against his will in the one case as in the other, and it must therefore be regarded as equally in violation of his constitutional rights.”
255 U.S. at 305-306, 41 S.Ct. at 263.
The w'hole record convinces me that the evidence in this case was insufficient to support appellant’s conviction of the offense for which he was indicted and tried. The majority holds, as it must in order to sustain the conviction, that the minute quantity of gold shavings “should have been invoiced.” Relying upon Thomas v. United States, 314 F.2d 936 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 375 U. S. 849, 84 S.Ct. 105, 11 L.Ed.2d 76 (1963), the majority equates “invoiced” with “lawfully entered or declared.” I do not agree with the rationale of Thomas, believing that the Fifth Circuit’s interpretation of the statute in question was strained. I do not believe that the evidence justified the implied determination that the gold shavings in this case constituted “merchandise,” and I have more difficulty in accepting the additional determination that it was merchandise “which should have been invoiced.” Assuming that the gold shavings constituted “merchandise,” the appellant might have been more properly convicted had he been charged under the second paragraph *115of 18 U.S.C. § 545, which proscribes the importation of “any merchandise contrary to law” or under an allegation of unlawful conspiracy. See, 18 U.S.C. § 371.
Let us suppose that a Mexican dentist had inserted a gold filling into one of the appellant’s teeth while appellant was present in Mexico. Had he possessed no other gold upon his reentry into the United States, would the majority have upheld his conviction for the offense which was charged here, namely, the smuggling of “merchandise which should have been invoiced.”? I put this rhetorical question, assuming that there would have been evidence that at some future time the appellant might have undertaken to import, unlawfully, a bar of gold from which one-fifth ounce of the mineral had been taken for the dental treatment.
I would reverse.