Court Opinion

ID: 9448617
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:41:19.191341+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:30.332756
License: Public Domain

JONES, Circuit Judge
(dissenting in part).
Among the claimed errors which the majority does not pass upon is the appellant’s exception to this portion of the court’s charge to the jury:
“If you find and believe from the evidence that * * * Clarence D. Rogers * * * did utter and publish as true this check * * * and if you believe that it was forged, and that the defendant Rogers knew it was forged, then you will find the defendant Rogers guilty under the third count of the indictment. If you do not so find, or if you have a reasonable doubt as to such matters, you will find him not guilty under that count."
The check was genuine, it was not a forged check. Count 3 charges that the appellant uttered a forged check, not a genuine check with a forged endorsement. The differences between a forged check and a forged endorsement are pointed out by the Supreme Court in Prussian v. United States, 282 U.S. 675, 51 S.Ct. 223, 75 L.Ed. 610, and by the Sixth Circuit in Carr v. United States, 278 F.2d 702. The evidence showed the check to be genuine and the endorsement to be forged. There was no evidence to show a forgery of the instrument and, in my opinion, the court erred not only in giving the quoted instruction but in failing to direct an acquittal on Count 3. Carr v. United States, supra. If these errors have not been properly preserved I would look at the ten-year sentence imposed on the Count 3 conviction and apply *524the plain error rule. Because I think this Court should not subject the appellant to another trial for uttering as forged an admittedly genuine instrument, I dissent from its doing so.