Court Opinion

ID: 9422151
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:01:28.611392+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:32.962272
License: Public Domain

MR. Justice Clark,
whom Mr. Justice Whittaker joins, dissenting.
My duty here is to help fashion rules which will assure that every person charged with an offense receives a fair and impartial trial. But that obligation does not require my ferreting out of the record technical grounds for reversing a particular conviction, grounds which could not possibly have affected the jury’s verdict of guilt as a factual determination. If the Government perseveres, the Court’s order contemplates a new trial for one of five safecrackers who beyond any evidentiary doubt is guilty of aiding and abetting in looting a government safe of about $14,000, and of thereafter receiving part of the proceeds. The case was tried before a jury for 10 days with scrupulous adherence to proper procedure. Judge Hoffman gave a clear and, I think, correct charge to which petitioner made no objection on the ground upon which the Court now bases its reversal. Nor did petitioner offer a proposed instruction covering that issue. Furthermore, the motion for new trial, as *563set forth in the record, urged no such ground as error. Nonetheless, the Court reverses, saying that “counsel for the petitioners consistently maintained the position” throughout the trial “that a thief could not be convicted of receiving from himself.” Judge Hoffman did not try the case, nor was it submitted to the jury, on that theory. The record shows, as my Brother Frankfurter points out, that beyond question Mrs. Milanovich took no part in the actual physical looting of the safe, and first received any of the stolen money more than two weeks later, not from herself, but from where the safecrackers had buried it. It was on that theory, to which petitioner made no objection, that Judge Hoffman submitted the case to the jury-
With all deference I must point out that in support of its view as to Mrs. Milanovich the Court has quoted merely an excerpt from a statement of this petitioner’s counsel, ante, p. 552, n. 2, made in chambers on his motion to require the United States Attorney to elect as between the two counts of aiding and abetting, and receiving. Admittedly, this motion was not well taken. However, during that presentation counsel stated: “we will ask the Court to instruct the jury” that it cannot find petitioner guilty on both counts. (Emphasis supplied.) But, after the motion to elect was denied, no such instruction was offered nor was there made on that ground any objection to the charge omitting such instruction. Now petitioners have chosen to abandon a claim of error in the denial of their motion to elect, and rely instead upon error in the charge, although no objection had been made on that ground.
Moreover, the charge as given could not possibly have prejudiced Mrs. Milanovich on sentence. She was found guilty both of aiding and abetting, and of thereafter receiving part of the stolen loot. She now stands, after the action of the Court of Appeals, sentenced only on the *564aiding and abetting count. Each count carried the same possible penalty, and, even if the case had been submitted to the jury as is now required, it seems rather unreal for us to consider as anything more than so remotely possible as to be highly improbable, that in sentencing this petitioner on the single count the trial judge, who would nonetheless have heard all the evidence on both counts, would be more likely to impose a lesser sentence than the 10 years already given.
The Court does not mention the dilemma which its ruling produces. It says the jury should have been instructed that a guilty verdict could be returned on either count, but not both. This would require the jury to return a not guilty verdict on one count. Here, where the jury had in fact found Mrs. Milanovich guilty of both offenses, it could yet be required to return a false verdict, i. e., false in fact even if true in law, on one of them. Except for its imperfect analogy to the case of factually inconsistent counts charging lesser-included offenses of the main count (as in first degree murder), in which the trial judge gives the jury instructions to be applied successively, the rule suggested today is unheard of in our jurisprudence. For here the jury is invited to consider counts not factually inconsistent, and in such sequence as it chooses, with no more reason to convict on one rather than another except its election on how to characterize the grounds supporting petitioner’s imprisonment. Since such a result is required by the present disposition, it would have been better to rule that the prosecutor must elect between the counts, as petitioner originally wished.
As I see the case, however, the jury could not on the evidence here have found the petitioner not guilty, as a matter of fact, on the aiding and abetting count, and guilty on the receiving one. To be guilty of receiving she must have had knowledge of the stolen character of the money taken from the safe. In this case the only *565means through which the fact of this requisite knowledge was demonstrated was the clear and convincing proof given by her partners in the crime whose testimony beyond any peradventure proved her guilty of both offenses. How, I ask, could she have been harmed by the jury finding her guilty of both offenses rather than choosing between the two?
To me it is clear that where the evidence is sufficient the jury should be left free, as it always has been, to find the fact of guilt. If in law the verdicts so found, although proper determinations of fact, are not all enforceable, the dilemma is adequately resolved by requiring the trial judge to forego sentencing on the unenforceable verdicts.
For these reasons, and those of my Brother FRANKFURTER, whom I join, I dissent.