Court Opinion

ID: 9443921
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:33:58.558084+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:38.792517
License: Public Domain

HASTIE, Circuit Judge (concurring).
I agree with the result the court reaches because I think proof was insufficient to establish venue in the District of New Jersey. I do not agree that in this type of case, as a matter of law, venue can be only in the place where the National Labor Relations Board receives the affidavit.
We have here one of the many situations in which there is a lapse of time and a change of locale between the final wilful misconduct of the wrongdoer and the accomplishment of the intended result which the criminal law punishes. The law student is introduced to this type of problem with the case of the gunman who fires across the state line to strike and kill his victim or, more nearly analogous to the present case, the poisoner! who in California places a lethal capsule among the therapeutics in the victim’s pill box, intending that the poison be consumed in the regular course of user, with the result that a month later the victim, while cruising in the South Pacific, swallows the poison and dies.
In such cases we use the convenient terminology that the offense “begins” where the wrongdoer finishes his active participation, although the offense is later “completed” elsewhere. At the same time we avoid potentially undesirable extensions of this conception by characterizing steps taken by the wrongdoer short of finishing his own active participation as “mere preparation”. Indictment and trial of the accused either where the offense was thus “begun” or where it was “completed” is regarded as both fair to the accused and consistent .with our notion that the punishment of crime should be in the place of the offense. For present purposes the conception is authoritatively embodied in the provision of Section 3237 of Title 18 U.S.C. that “any offense against the United States begun in one district and completed in another * * * may be inquired of and prosecuted in any district in which such offense was begun, continued, or completed.” 62 Stat. 826 (1948), 18 U.S.C. § 3237 (1952 Supp.)
In the conventional terminology of the quoted statute the present offense was “completed” at the time and place that the affidavit reached an appropriate office of the National Labor Relations Board. At the other extreme it was not even “begun” until the affiant, in addition to signing and swearing to a false statement, put the affidavit out of his possession and into some appropriate custody or channel for transmission to the Board.1 However, at that point I think the offense was “begun” with the result that when, thereafter, the offense was completed it became indictable either at the place of its beginning or the place of its completion.
The shortcoming of the government’s case is that the things proved to have taken place in Camden, New Jersey fall in the preparation category. Only the execution of the affidavit is shown to have occurred in New Jersey. There was no proof whether the defendant, who was *247the business agent of the union, mailed the affidavit in that district, or left it at the union office in Camden for transmission to the Board, or personally delivered it to the regional office of the Board just across the river in Philadelphia. On the evidence, a choice of either of the first two alternatives, which would show venue in New Jersey, rather than the third, which would not, could have been achieved only by speculation. Hence the government failed to establish venue in the District of New Jersey and the defendant’s motion for acquittal should have been granted.

. The existence of this distinction allowing a locus poenitentiae during the period of “preparation” when the actor has not decisively committed himself explains such cases as Reass v. United States, 4 Cir., 1938, 99 F.2d 752, and United States v. Borow, D.N.J.1951, 101 F.Supp. 211. Cf. Bridgeman v. United States, 9 Cir., 1905, 140 F. 577.