Court Opinion

ID: 9465793
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 00:55:49.380544+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:22.033593
License: Public Domain

ALVIN B. RUBIN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part:
I concur in Parts I and IV of the opinion, and all of Part II save the phrase on typewritten page 987 that states, “Although there may be sufficient evidence to indicate that Meadows’ conduct in continuing to pick up _the paychecks that he knew were mistakenly issued to him constituted fraud . . .” Respectfully I dissent from this observation, from all of Part III of the opinion and from some of the observations in Part V.
To begin at the end, I do not think that a trial judge, when asked a direct question by a jury that he answers in a completely neutral fashion, needs to embellish his answer with unnecessary admonitions. Of course, the court should never give an unbalanced charge either initially or in responding to jury inquiries. If a jury asks a question that can be answered succinctly, directly and dispassionately, I would not require the district judge to renew other parts of his charge.
The jury here asked for a supplemental instruction on fraud; the trial judge reread just that charge, without additions, deletions or further explanations. When the judge receives such requests, he may use his sound discretion in responding. He may choose merely to answer what is asked, or he may consider it desirable to add further instructions. I would not, therefore, add the suggestion included by my brethren that the court “could simply” do something other than he did “without any undue burden.” If this is admonitory or precatory, it can lead only to confusion and serve as a fulcrum for other appeals. If this is a mandate, I think it inappropriate and incorrect.
Returning to the issue of sufficiency of the evidence, I do not think the evidence warranted a verdict of guilty on the charge that remained when the case went to the jury, and I, therefore, would hold that the trial court erred in refusing to direct a verdict of acquittal. The best resume of the evidence against Meadows is in the phrase quoted: all he did was continue to pick up the checks and then to cash them. There is no evidence that he ever spoke a word or did an act affirmatively misrepresenting a single fact. Silence constitutes fraud only when there is a “duty to speak or where an inquiry left unanswered would be intentionally misleading.” United States v. Prudden, 5 Cir. 1970, 424 F.2d 1021, 1032, cert. denied, 400 U.S. 831, 91 S.Ct. 62, 27 L.Ed.2d 62. See also Atilus v. United States, 5 Cir. 1969, 406 F.2d 694, 698; American National Insurance Co. v. Murray, 5 Cir. 1967, 383 F.2d 81, 86-87. Nothing in the evidence indicates that Meadows had a duty to volunteer the information, “I am no longer employed in the Bureau of Pollution Control,” or was ever asked about his position.
There are many cases holding that conduct like that engaged in by Meadows is stealing. See the cases cited in footnote 2 of the majority opinion. See generally Fletcher, Rethinking Criminal Law, § 2.4.2 at 107 (1978).1 Indeed, the government *993charged that he “did embezzle, misapply, steal and obtain by fraud” the money he received from CETA. Only because the trial court, perhaps erroneously, dismissed all of the charges based on other provisions of § 665 was the jury left to struggle with the definition of “fraud.” The government should have appealed the dismissal of the parts of the charge that alleged criminal acts other than fraud. It failed to do so. I would not allow it to retrieve that apparent error.
What Meadows was charged with was obtaining money by fraud. What he did was immoral, but he should not, indeed, under the constitutional guarantee of due process can not, be convicted merely because he got and kept money that was not rightfully his unless this conduct has been condemned by statute. Before a person can be convicted of a crime, due process demands both that there be a statute proscribing the conduct that is considered criminal and that the crime be defined with sufficient clarity “that men of common intelligence” need not “guess at its meaning.” Connally v. General Construction Co., 1926, 269 U.S. 385, 391, 46 S.Ct. 126, 127, 70 L.Ed. 322, 328. The first concept was embodied in the maxim “nulla poena sine lege ” long before the Constitution embraced it; the second is the familiar void-for-vagueness standard. It appears to me that to punish Meadows on the ground that his conduct constituted obtaining money by fraud violates both.
' A little over a century ago in The Queen v. Middleton, 1873, L.R. 2 Cr.Cas.Res. 38, 56, Justice Bramwell said in dissent that the justices who had concurred in a conviction believed that “the prisoner was as bad as a thief . . . and being as bad, ought to be treated as one. . . . ” Like my brethren, I believe that Meadows was as bad as a defrauder; I simply do not find that he committed the statutory offense.
Congress doubtless could have so defined Meadows’s conduct as to make it criminal, not only as larceny, but as a special crime or as a species of fraud by imposing a statutory duty on persons who receive federal checks to say they are not entitled to them, if they are not, or even by constituting as fraudulent the mere act of receiving delivery of a check knowing it is not due with intent to convert the money to one’s own use. It has simply not done so. Due proc*994ess forbids us to remedy the lacuna we perceive in its draftsmanship of a criminal statute. See United States v. Perrin, 5 Cir. 1978, 580 F.2d 730, 738-39 (Rubin, J., dissenting).
It is difficult to determine exactly what Meadows did that constituted obtaining by fraud. Was it his failure to speak when he picked up and cashed the first check? The second? Was it his pattern of conduct from October to December? My brethren characterize as fraud “his conduct in picking up checks for several months which he admittedly knew were erroneously issued . . ” (emphasis supplied), so apparently the mere act of presenting himself more than once to receive delivery of a check is what they consider fraudulent. I cannot so characterize that simple act, nor does it appear to fit into any accepted definition of fraud. The opinion does not help us in that regard; instead of defining fraud, it quotes some aphorisms about rectitude as a help in describing what is labelled an “amorphous concept.”
It is difficult for me to find a person guilty of violating a criminal law that relies on an “amorphous concept,” that forbids acts that simply are not “morally upright,” or “fundamentally honest,” that is based on “fair play and right dealing” and proscribes conduct that “needs no definition; . . .. is as old as falsehood and as versatile as human ingenuity.” These are all nice turns of phrase and I, like other judges, have used similar language to make or explain a point. They do not, however, define fraud or tell us what is fraudulent or what Meadows had a duty to do or to say and when.
To my brethren “it is clear that Meadows made no false inducements to obtain the extra pay checks initially.” There is no evidence that he made any false inducement thereafter. And, finally, repetitiously, I fail to find that he had a statutory or common law duty to speak. Therefore, I would free this immoral and corrupt man and allow the government to seek restitution civilly rather than go beyond the statute to give him the penalty he may deserve but one that Congress has not imposed.

. Professor Fletcher points out in this seminal work:
The following four cases of dishonest acquisition have taxed the ingenuity of courts and scholars across the Western world:
I. The suspect D hires a horse from X with the intent to steal it and later does appropriate the horse to his own use. The same type of case is raised by anyone who, with a fraudulent purpose, receives the chattel from a prior possessor.
II. The suspect D finds a ring on the street that is apparently lost. He picks it up and keeps it without reporting the finding to the police or taking other measures to locate the owner.
III. The suspect D requests the withdrawal of funds from his account; X, a bank teller, mistakenly delivers excess funds to D, who knows of the mistake and leaves the bank with the intent to keep the money.
IV. A customer enters a bank, hands a note to the teller D with the intent of depositing it. D pockets the note without putting it in the customary cash drawer.
All four of these cases are instances of dishonest, immoral behavior and for that reason, there is considerable pressure in virtually every legal system to bring them within *993the ambit of one of the theft offenses. Yet because they all lie at the boundaries among the three offenses, each of the leading Western legal systems classifies these problems differently. And not all systems punish all four forms of dishonest acquisition. The remarkable feature of Anglo-American law is that the courts concluded that the first three of these problematic cases were to be resolved by distending the law of larceny.
(Emphasis supplied.)
The text continues:
The problem of mistaken delivery and receipt is the third of the points at which the common law felt pressure in the course of the nineteenth century. In the typical case, the suspect passively and quietly receives a mistaken remittance from a bank teller. Though he leaves the bank with a fraudulent intent to keep the funds transferred to him, he does nothing except take advantage of someone else’s mistake.
Though nineteenth-century English and American courts extended the crime of larceny to cover this type of dishonest acquisition, the French and German systems still balk at subjecting this conduct to any form of criminal liability. French writers steadfastly maintain that the dishonest depositor who takes advantage of the teller’s mistake is exempt from all criminal liability. The crime of larceny does not apply because the voluntary delivery precludes the requisite taking (soustraction). Embezzlement is precluded, for it appears that the teller intended to part with title as well as possession of the excess funds. The crime of fraud would not apply, for there is no fraudulent maneuver. The French stand on this case reflects a strong commitment to the literal and restrictive interpretation of criminal statutes.
Relying on the same reasoning, German judges would decline to punish the depositor’s acquisition as either larceny or embezzlement. Fraud remains an option, for German law recognizes a broadly defined crime of fraud that covers implicit misrepresentations by conduct as well as explicitly fraudulent maneuvers. The precise facts of this problematic case came before the German courts in 1968 and the trial court convicted the depositor of fraud. The appellate court reversed the judgment. [Id. at pp. 20-21.]
Soviet law also would not classify this conduct as fraud. Id. at p. 22.