Court Opinion

ID: 9454868
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:02:38.229186+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:21.578338
License: Public Domain

KILKENNY, District Judge
(dissenting) :
Even conceding the correctness of the doctrine branding the order of call as an essential “element of the offense”, as stated in United States v. Lybrand, 279 F.Supp. 74 (E.D.N.Y.1967), I would not place on the Government the burden of producing other registrants’ records to show a proper order of call. Greer v. United States, 378 F.2d 931 (5th Cir. 1967) ; United States v. Sandbank, 403 F.2d 38 (2d Cir. 1968); and Yates v. United States, 404 F.2d 462 (1st Cir. 1968) , do not require that result.
Those in charge of the administration of our Selective Service System face monumental problems in exercising their legal discretion on when and under what circumstances a registrant’s call should be deferred, and another called in his stead. The decisions in Greer, Sandbank and Yates are on sound ground in requiring a registrant to show the invalidity of the call as part of his defense. Yates did not depart from that teaching in recognizing that “rare case where a defendant can produce evidence of a person who should have been called before him but was not.” Yates, supra, p. 466. Here, the appellant asked for and received a hearing before the Judge, outside the presence of the jury. He called Colonel Neilson, a qualified officer of Selective Service, and developed that the call numbers of six registrants were ahead of appellant's. However, no evidence was produced that the six registrants, or any one of them, “should' have been called” before appellant. It is conceded that the files of the other registrants are confidential. 32 C.F.R. §§ 1606.31, 1670.5. The Director, however, on proper application may waive the privilege and permit an examination. 32 C.F.R. §§ 1606.35(b), 1670.17(b). Appellant, if he believed that there had been an abuse of discretion in the deferment of any one or more of these registrants, had a right to file a petition and ask for permission to examine the respective files. In other words, the right to seek this permission is not limited to the Government. When the author of Yates, p. 466, concluded that: “since the clerk must testify in any case to the validity of the order to report, there is little extra burden on the government to have him prepared to testify on order of call,” he did not, in my belief, intimate that the Clerk should have available the files of other registrants, nor did he intend to place on the Government the burden of securing from the Director ■ a waiver of the confidential privilege. All the author said was that a clerk might testify that he had reviewed the records and found that the registrant was next in the order of call. The naked fact that six registrants, originally subject to call before appellant, were not called, does not, to my way of thinking, overcome the presumption of regularity as to those postponements. If the presumption is to be meaningful, it must encompass the discretion of the Board in granting postponement of calls.
Aside from the above, we must remember that appellant asked for this hearing. He there put in issue the regularity of the call by making Colonel *207Neilson a witness and developing through him the names and call numbers of six other registrants whose call numbers were numerically prior to appellant’s. The Colonel testified that he had examined each of the files of the six registrants and others and had determined why none of those registrants had been ordered to report before the appellant. After testifying that the call of any registrant might be postponed for many reasons, including a sprained ankle or a sprained wrist, he continued: “Mr. Brunwasser1 requested I look up each of them but by law I can’t reveal any individual case. I did make a summary of all the reasons for the eight men that he requested, but I can’t assign a reason to an individual man without violating the law concerning confidentiality of an individual registrant’s file.” We must keep in mind that Colonel Neilson was called as a witness by the defendant. On cross-examination, he testified that he made a determination with regard to why the particular registrants were not ordered to report on or before the same day as Mr. Baker was ordered to report. When asked to advise the Court on what he had found on the postponements in examining the files of the registrants, defendant’s counsel made a general objection and thus prevented the Government from developing the reasons. No where in the record did defendant raise the issue of the best evidence rule. If such an objection had been made, the Judge might well have continued the hearing until the files had been made available by the Director. By telephone this consent could have been obtained within minutes or, at most, hours.
I need not cite authorities in support of the universal rule permitting a wide latitude in cross-examination. On the record before us, the appellant vouches for the credibility of Colonel Neilson by calling him as a witness to establish the six postponements, but cries “objection” when the Government attempts to cross-examine the Colonel on the reasons for the postponements. The appellant, not the Government, is responsible for the lack of evidence, if any, on why the calling of the other registrants was postponed. He created this record and should be bound by it. In these circumstances, the Colonel’s testimony was sufficient to show that appellant was not called out of order.
I would affirm.

. Defendant’s counsel.