Court Opinion

ID: 9483335
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:17:44.918037+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:34.124926
License: Public Domain

McKAY, Chief Judge,
concurring:
I agree with the result of the majority opinion but not its reasoning with reference to who the victim is. The victim in this case is the bank and not its elderly patrons. The court appears to be suffering from a fundamental misconception about banking. A bank account is not a storage vault for a depositor’s money. It is nothing more than evidence of a credit relationship between a bank and its customer. See, e.g., 12 U.S.C. § 1818(1X1). The funds are “owned” by the bank which has borrowed from its depositor. Until repaid, the funds “on deposit” belong to the bank which is a debtor of the customer. The customer does not “own” any money until the bank honors a withdrawal record of transfer request. One cannot replevin deposited funds.
The only issue here is whether we have a legal deposit when the funds were handed for purposes of deposit to the bank employee. I think as a matter of law that is so. Michie on Banks and Banking, Ch. 9, § 20 (deposit still valid when depositor gives money to agent of bank for deposit who then converts money to own use); First Nat’l Bank v. Dickinson, 396 U.S. 122, 137, 90 S.Ct. 337, 345, 24 L.Ed.2d 312 (1969) (when depositor delivers funds for deposit to armored truck used by bank to transport funds to bank from off-premises location, a “deposit” has occurred). Thus, the bank is not the insurer of the funds of the customer but the owner of the funds with a credit obligation to its customer. After the ownership of the money itself transfers from depositor to bank upon deposit, it is the bank — not the depositor — who would be harmed by the conversion or embezzlement of that money. The depositor still owns the credit obligation of the bank to repay the deposit upon demand, but the bank must subtract the lost funds from the pool of resources the bank uses to invest or to repay its credit obligations to depositors when they withdraw funds from their accounts.
Absent anything further in the record, I see nothing more in this case to support the notion that the depositor is the “victim” than in a case of a bank robber taking all of the day’s receipts from the tellers’ drawers with proof that all of the day’s deposits came from elderly people.