Court Opinion

ID: 9425661
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:15:21.708947+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:56.818115
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
dissenting.
This case presents a minor version of the problem confronting the Court in Rosenberg v. United States, 346 U. S. 273. That case involved an ambiguity in a criminal law, an ambiguity that normally would be resolved *834in favor of life. A split Court in a tense period of American history unhappily resolved the ambiguity against life — a break with history which the conscience of our people will sometime rectify.
The present case is a minor species of the same genus. A person who took his gun to a pawnshop for a loan undoubtedly had “acquired” the gun prior to that time. It is therefore odd to think of the “acquisition” occurring when he redeemed his own gun from the pawnshop. I agree with the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, United States v. Laisure, 460 F. 2d 709, that the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of the accused. That is what we have quite consistently done, except in Rosenberg, in the past. See United States v. Bass, 404 U. S. 336, 347-348, and cases cited.*

Civil cases cited by the Court, e. g. American Tobacco Co. v. Werckmeister, 207 U. S. 284, 293, are wide of the mark. For application of a law that sends people to prison for years where Congress has not made it clear they should be there, United States v. Bass, supra, at 346, is only another device as lacking in due process as Caligula’s practice of printing the laws in small print and placing them so high on a wall that the ordinary man did not receive fair warning.
“When taxes of this kind had been proclaimed, but not published in writing, inasmuch as many offenses were committed through ignorance of the letter of the law, he at last, on the urgent demand of the people, had the law posted up, but in a very narrow place and in excessively small letters, to prevent the making of a copy.” Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars 192 (Modern Lib. ed. 1931).