Court Opinion

ID: 9651407
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:18:42.656588+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:33.599190
License: Public Domain

ALSCHULER, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The imposition under three counts of one indictment of an aggregate penalty of fifteen years’ imprisonment and $6,000 fine, where the maximum penalty for the crime denounced by the statute is five years’ imprisonment and $2,000 fine, suggests careful search of the record to see whether such triple maximum is sustainable.
In United States v. Daugherty, 269 U. S. 360, 46 S. Ct. 156, 70 L. Ed. 309, where, as here, there was imposed a penalty of five years’ imprisonment under each of three counts charging violation of the Anti-Narcotic Act, it was held that the Court of Appeals was right in denying the contention that the indictment charged but a single crime. Erom the opinion of the Court of Appeals therein [2 F.(2d) 691] it appears that the first count charged a sale January 4, 1923, to Elmer; the second, January 10 to Entriken; and the third, January 17 to Ellison. The Supreme Court held unsound the contention that each sale proceeded from the same criminal intent and was therefore but a single crime, “because criminal intent is not an element of the crime, and because each count charges a different sale to a different person and on a different day, and if the sales were made as charged they constituted three separate offenses.”
But here, accepting at par the evidence for the government, it seems to me hut a single crime appears. Witness Ella Rush, herself an addict, was the keystone of the government’s case. She had been regularly employed by a federal narcotic agent as a decoy to ferret out persons faho were unlawfully selling narcotics. She reported for duty at Springfield and sought out a woman named Walker (a eodefendant), representing that she wished to buy morphine. On the night of May 27, 1929, Walker brought appellant to Rush, who, after various pretenses concerning herself, gave appellant $2, requesting him to get her some morphine. He went out and returning a little later brought her the morphine. At the same time she gave him $8 more, requesting him to bring her more of the drug. In a few hours he again returned with about ten grains more; and a little later the same day she gave him $10 for more morphine, which he brought her the day following. ' She asked him for more, but he evidently had become suspicious and did not bring it, whereupon he was arrested. She also paid Walker $10 for introducing her to appellant, all the funds being supplied by the narcotic agent.
The situation here is decidedly different from that in the Daugherty Case, where the sales were to different persons, and separated by intervals of several days. Here the trans*799actions were between the same parties, and in pursuance of the same definite purpose and plan of the narcotic agent to have this person detected and taken in the act of violating the law. The transactions between appellant and Rush, which are alone the foundation of the charge, show a sort of “continuous performance,” Rush supplying him with the government’s money, and employing each delivery of the drug as an immediate leverage for inducing him to procure more of' the same. There was substantially no interval of time between the receiving of one and the advancing of the money for the next installment.
I do not question the propriety, in proper eases such as this, of resorting to such means for detecting and punishing crime; but if in the detecting process the government sees fit to make an installment affair of it, I do not think the government is in position to say that each installment of such a general operation constitutes a separate crime. The agent conducted the affair with an unbroken continuity, with the motive and plan of adducing proof that this man could and would and did unlawfully procure and sell and deliver narcotic drugs. It was essentially more a buying than a selling transaction. The government procured it to be done. The sectional nature of the transaction was a device of the agent, not of appellant, who would no doubt have been quite as willing to sell the entire quantity at once instead of on the federal agent’s “installment plan.”
Upon the count which involved the $2 sale appellant was acquitted by the jury. Of the three counts on which he was convicted, counts 3 and 5 involved the very same transaction; count 3 charging that the morphine sold was not in nor from the original stamped package, and count 5 that the sale was not made in pursuance of a written order of Ella Rush and upon a form issued in blank for that purpose by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The incriminating acts of appellant under each of these counts are precisely the same — the same sale of the same drug, and all pursuant to the same scheme of having appellant caught in the act of selling the drug which appellee’s agent was to buy.
That the “bootlegging” of narcotics is a most reprehensible and dastardly business should have no bearing on whether a single unlawful sale may be twice punished — once because the purchaser supplied no written order, and again because there was no stamp on the package.
I do not think the penalty section of the statute contemplates such double punishment for the same transaction. Section 705, title 26, U. S. C. (26 USCA § 705), provides: “Any person who violates or fails to comply with any of the requirements of sections 211 and 691 to 707 of this title shall, on conviction, be fined not more than $2,000 or be imprisoned not more than five years, or both, in the discretion of the court.” It seems to me this wording implies that any act whereby any one or more of the requirements of the enumerated sections is violated shall subject the offender to the singular penalty which the quoted section specifies. Appellant’s one act of selling ten grains of morphine subjected him to the prescribed penalty if in the sale he violated or failed to comply with “any of the requirements” — whether one or more. The unlawful sale is the essential thing, not the particular reason or reasons because of which the sale is unlawful. If the seller in making it complies with all the statutory requirements he commits no crime; if he fails to comply with all or any of these requirements a crime is committed, for which the penalty fixed in section 705 may be imposed; but to my mind not a cumulative series of such penalties, each predicated on a different one of the quite numerous requirements of the specified sections.
The quoted sentence, from Albrecht v. United States, 273 U. S. 1, 47 S. Ct. 250, 71 L. Ed. 505, is not in my judgment applicable to these facts. There the court held that possessing and selling intoxicating liquors are separate offenses each separately punishable, or, if considered separate steps of a single offense, may be separately penalized without constitutional transgression. There the defendant possessed and he sold, and it was reasoned he might have done either without having done the other. Here he only sold — a criminal act only if any one or more of the, statutory requisites for a lawful sale were absent.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently considered the identical question in Ballerini v. Aderholt, Warden, 44 F.(2d) 352, reaching the conclusion that two penalties may not be predicated on a single sale of narcotics. The court overruled its prior decision to the contrary (by the same judge and the same judges sitting) announced in Vamvas v. United States (C. C. A.) 13 F.(2d) 347. It is to be hoped that this conflict in decisions of the United States Courts of Appeals for the Fifth and Seventh Circuits may be authoritatively resolved.
*800I believe that this one “continuous performance,” initiated and enacted under the “personal direction” of the government narcotic agent, and financed by the government, represents but a single infraction of the law by appellant, and should have been so treated in sentencing him. But I think that in any event the infliction of consecutive and cumulative penalties under each of counts three and five was unwarranted and erroneous.