Court Opinion

ID: 9452601
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:46:00.834776+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:16.983312
License: Public Domain

FRIENDLY, Circuit Judge
(concurring) :
The history of 18 U.S.C. § 659 told in Judge Bryan’s thorough opinion, although, as so often is the case, it was not developed at all by counsel, is an interesting example how draftsmen and revisers can create problems as to the meaning of statutes without busy legislators having any notion what is occurring. Cf. People of State of N. Y. v. Galamison, 342 F.2d 255, 260-261, 8 A.L.R.3d 263 (2 Cir.), cert, denied, 380 U.S. 977, 85 S.Ct. 1342, 14 L.Ed.2d 272 (1965). It seems clear to me as a matter of the natural meaning of language that when the statute was enacted, see fn. 4 to Judge Bryan’s opinion, and as it stood when United States v. De Normand, 149 F.2d 622 (2 Cir. 1945), was decided, the “from” phrase related solely to cases where the charge was that the defendant had “by fraud or deception obtain[ed],” with the other verbs applying to any goods or chattels constituting interstate or foreign shipments of freight or express. The comma before the words “with intent to convert” etc. effectively insulated the “by fraud or deception obtain” phrase. That, I think, was the precise basis for Judge Swan’s holding in De Normand, 149 F.2d at 624, as well as for what Judge Hough said in White v. United States, 273 F. 517, 518 (2 Cir. 1921). It is equally clear to me that, as the statute stood between the Act of July 24, 1946, see fn. 5 to Judge Bryan’s opinion, and the 1948 codification, the reading my brothers give the present act would have been so contrary to the ordinary meaning of language as to be impermissible in the construction of a penal statute where, despite such decisions as United States v. Turley, 352 U.S. 407, 417, 77 S.Ct. 397, 1 L.Ed.2d 430 (1957) and United States v. Cook, 384 U.S. 257, 86 S.Ct. 1412, 16 L.Ed.2d 516 (1966), we encounter the opposite pull of the “rule of lenity,” Bell v. United States, 349 U.S. 81, 83-84, 75 S.Ct. 620, 99 L.Ed. 905 (1955) — although I agree that almost certainly Congress was unaware of the change the draftsman had wrought. Then came the 1948 codification which, asserting its purpose to preserve throughout “the original intent of Congress,” S.Rep.No.1620, 80th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 1, gave this statute a form that was neither what it had originally been nor what it had unintentionally become.
I am content to join my brothers in following the legislative zig with a judicial zag, first narrowing the statute from its “ur” form by making the “from any station” etc. language apply to all the verbs and then broadening it by reading “from” to include “in” — although it would not take much to persuade me that Congress might have been content to *789allow such minor offenses as Padilla’s to be handled by the states rather than to invoke against them the mighty apparatus of the federal criminal law.