Court Opinion

ID: 9468110
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:05:04.773297+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:41.482463
License: Public Domain

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Circuit Judge
(concurring and dissenting).
The regulation should, I agree, have been promulgated under 33 U.S.C. § 3, not section 1. It does not follow, however, that defendants are entitled to a remand, for the purpose of an evidentiary hearing on a factual issue they never raised before the district court — namely, whether the regulation constituted an unreasonable interference with the food fishing industry.
Defendants’ pre-trial motion only claimed that the information failed to state an offense because the regulation they were charged with violating was invalid, having been expressly promulgated under section 1, not section 3, of Title 33. The district court properly denied the motion. As this court in effect holds, citation to an inappo-*1140site enabling statute is not a sufficient reason to invalidate an information where authority for the challenged regulation exists in another statute. See Johnson v. United States, 206 F.2d 806, 807, 14 Alaska 380 (9th Cir. 1953).
At no time below did defendants advance the further and distinct proposition that the information was invalid because the regulation did not comply with the proviso in section 3 that a regulation thereunder must not interfere unreasonably with the food fishing industry. Nothing on the face of the regulation gives rise to such a claim. There was nothing whatever to prevent defendants from making this claim in the district court had they wished to do so. To be sure, the judge might have overruled such a claim, had it been made, on one or another ground, including, possibly, the mistaken ground that section 1 applied, and that no such proviso existed in section 1. But the court might not have adopted this approach. We shall never know. In any event, litigants are not excused from presenting matters in the trial court simply because they believe the judge will deny their request. Surely if defendants here had any real belief that the regulation could be shown to interfere with food fishing, they would have made the point in their motion and extensive supporting brief filed in the district court. They did not. I am therefore at a loss to understand why we permit them to raise the matter at this juncture. The question was, indeed, not even raised in their appellate brief. It first surfaced during oral argument before this court.
Citation to Fed.R.Crim.P. 12(b)(2) is not, I think, an adequate explanation of the court’s result. An indictment may be challenged for the first time on appeal under Rule 12(b)(2) where it omits a necessary element of the crime charged, see Walker v. United States, 342 F.2d 22 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 382 U.S. 859, 86 S.Ct. 117, 15 L.Ed.2d 97 (1965); where it charges a defendant with a crime that does not exist under the statute, see United States v. Meacham, 626 F.2d 503 (5th Cir. 1980); Government of Virgin Islands v. Greenidge, 600 F.2d 437 (3d Cir. 1979); or where the statute creating the offense is unconstitutional, see United States v. Seuss, 474 F.2d 385 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, 412 U.S. 928, 93 S.Ct. 2751, 37 L.Ed.2d 155 (1973). It may even be the case that a challenge to the validity of a regulation may be raised for the first time on appeal if an adequate basis for decision is to be found in the appellate record. See Johnson, 206 F.2d 806. But I have found no case in which Rule 12(b)(2) has been invoked to allow a defendant to raise for the first time on appeal such factual and wholly undeveloped issues as are at stake here. Moreover, I have found no case in which the issue of an indictment’s failure to state an offense has been remanded to the district court. This is but further illustration of the point that under Rule 12(b)(2) issues requiring extensive factual development may not be raised for the first time on appeal. If this sort of procedure is to be allowed, litigants will not only be encouraged to save up ammunition for de novo use in the appellate court, but already overburdened courts will end up holding double hearings at the expense of other litigants whose claims have yet to be heard at all.
I would affirm the judgment below.