Court Opinion

ID: 9651729
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:33:33.149782+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:38.477681
License: Public Domain

JOHNSEN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I am not convinced that an offense may not be charged, conviction had, and sentence imposed, under section 46 of the Criminal Code, 18 U.S.C.A. § 99, for a larceny of money belonging to the United States, but happening also to constitute postal revenue.
I am quite sure that, ever since Jolly v. United States, 1898, 170 U.S. 402, 18 S.Ct. 624, 42 L.Ed. 1085, it has been generally assumed that it could. The Supreme Court there affirmed a conviction under this section, for a larceny of postage stamps from a post office.
*434This .court, citing the Jolly case, thereafter declared, in Dockter v. White, 1928, 8 Cir., 25 F.2d 74, that one who had stolen some blank money orders from the possession of a postmaster, which Were alleged to be “the property of the United States for the use and benefit of the post office at Haskell, Oklahoma,” “might, for this crime, have been charged under section 99”, 18 U.S.C.A. § 99, Criminal Code § 46. The defendant had been given a ten year sentence under this section. After he had served three years—the maximum imprisonment which could be imposed under section 190 of the Criminal Code, 18 U.S.C.A. § 313—he sought his release on the ground that the balance of his sentence was illegal and void. He contended, as does appellant here, that since the blank money orders were property of the Post Office Department, the crime was and could Only be one under section 190, and that the court therefore was without power to impose a prison sentence in excess of three years, and that, having served all of his valid term, he was legally entitled to be released. This court denied his right to s release.
The crime charged in the present case is just as much a violation of section 46, and is as directly charged to be so, as were the offenses in the Jolly and Dockter cases. The indictment charges that appellant “did commit the offense of violating the provisions of Section 46 of the Federal Penal Code”, in that he did “feloniously, steal and carry away from a building used in part as a post office building of the United States at Voltaire, North Dakota; certain personal property of the United States, to-wit: $74.14, * * * said money being then and there a part of the postal revenues of the Post Office Department of the United States of America”. Appellant thus was' specifically charged with stealing “personal property of the United States”, in violation of “the provisions of Section 46 of the Federal Penal Code”. This seems to me . a plainly adequate basis for jurisdiction to deal with the offense as one under that section, and most certainly so where the situation is unattacked.
Appellant made no attack, but plead guilty to the offense as charged. The court’s journal entry recites that, on this plea, he was convicted of violating section 46. Sentence was imposed on him for a violation of that section. He took no appeal from the form, of the order of conviction or the sentence. With the indictment thus reciting that it was laid under section 46, with the money thus expressly charged to be “personal property of the United States”, with a plea of guilty thus entered to the charge as made, with a conviction thus entered by the court on section 46, and with a sentence thus imposed for a violation of that section, I can see nothing in the situation that entitles appellant, five years later, to a vacation of his sentence as illegal and void.
The majority opinion says that section 190 should be held to be a special and exclusive statute for all Post Office Department property. I do not believe that the circumstances of the present case reach to that question. But, if the question is entitled to consideration here, and if it can be claimed that the section originally was intended as a special and exclusive statute, any construction now attempted to be made of it, as an initial declaration, must reasonably, it seems to me, take into account that for forty-six years the right optionally to charge an offense under section 46— at least as to such property as money, postage stamps, money orders, and the like —has in actual practice been read into section 190, from the declaration of the Jolly case and by general acceptance of its expression. The construction of a statute, like any other judicial task, is not just a consideration of artificial canons, but a recognition of accepted realities as well.
' If, at this late date, and on this occasion, it seems desirable to make any exposition of section 190 as a special and exclusive statute, I would hold that any such character which it now possesses is limited to equipment and instruments of the mail service and of the incidental operations of the Department such as maintaining a post office building. This seems to me a reasonable construction from the very specifications made in the section, of “any mail bag”, of appropriating any “property to * * * any other than its proper use”, and of conveying away any property “to the hindrance or detriment of the public service”. Phillips v. Biddle, 8 Cir., 15 F.2d 40, fits readily in with such a construction, for the property there involved was mail bags.
I would affirm the judgment of the district court.