Stoy Decker v. United States

378 F.2d 245, 65 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 3097, 1967 U.S. App. LEXIS 6064
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedJune 9, 1967
Docket16891_1
StatusPublished
Cited by18 cases

This text of 378 F.2d 245 (Stoy Decker v. United States) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Stoy Decker v. United States, 378 F.2d 245, 65 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 3097, 1967 U.S. App. LEXIS 6064 (6th Cir. 1967).

Opinions

O’SULLIVAN, Circuit Judge.

Petitioner was convicted and sentenced in 1961 for violating 26 U.S.C. § 5851 (possession of unregistered firearm) and, in a separate trial, for violating 29 U.S. C. § 501(c) (embezzlement of union funds). These convictions were affirmed by this Court in United States v. Decker, 292 F.2d 89 (CA 6, 1961) (the firearm case) and United States v. Decker, 304 F.2d 702 (CA6, 1961) (the embezzlement case). He now appeals from denial, without hearing, of his petition (28 U.S.C. § 2255) to have vacated the sentences imposed under those convictions.

1) The firearms case.

Petitioner charges that § 5851 of the National Firearms Act is unconstitutional — violating the self-incrimination •clause of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Another claim that § 5851 is a Fifth Amendment deprivation was made in Decker’s direct appeal, 292 F.2d at 91, and we there held to the contrary. Decker now relies upon the cases of Russell v. United States, 306 F.2d 402 (CA 9, 1962) and United States v. Fleish, 227 F.Supp. 967 (E.D.Mich.S.D.1964) both of which found § 5841 U.S.C. Title 26 unconstitutional, because anyone registering a firearm under that section must necessarily, by so doing, admit violation of other provisions of the Act.1 Decker claims that if Section 5841 is unconstitutional, so must be Section 5851.

This logic will not suffice. True, there is relationship between the various sections of the Firearms Act, but the offense charged to Decker was not the failure to register the firearm as required by § 5841, but, as set out in § 5851, was possessing a “firearm which has at any time been transferred in violation of [specified sections, including requirements as to tax] * * * or * * has not been registered as required by section 5841.” (Emphasis supplied.) In our earlier consideration of Decker’s conviction, we recited “There was no question but that the weapon had not been registered with the Secretary and had been transferred without payment of the tax.” 292 F.2d at 90.

The Russell and Fleish cases, supra, which held that Section 5841 was unconstitutional when used to find criminal guilt for failure to register a firearm, were not handed down until 1962 and 1964, respectively, after the first Decker opinion in 1961. In 1965, however, in United States v. Forgett, 349 F.2d 601 (CA 6, 1965) cert. den. 383 U.S. 926, 86 S.Ct. 929, 15 L.Ed.2d 845, we dealt again with an attack on the constitutionality of a section of the National Firearms Act, this time § 5855 U.S.C. 26, which made it a crime to ship firearms [247]*247which had not been registered under § 5841. We pointed out therein that Russell had to do with failure merely to register under § 5841, whereas Forgett involved a defendant who shipped unregistered firearms; and we noted that the Ninth Circuit distinguished its Russell decision in a similar fashion in Frye v. United States, 315 F.2d 491 (CA 9,1963), cert. den. 375 U.S. 849, 84 S.Ct. 104, 11 L.Ed.2d 76 and Starks v. United States, 316 F.2d 45 (CA 9, 1963), cases which were followed by the Eighth Circuit in Sipes v. United States, 321 F.2d 174, 177, 178 (CA 8, 1963). Language from the Starks opinion is relevant here:

“ * * * the defendant was not charged with failing to register the weapon, as was the defendant Russell, but was charged with possession of an unregistered weapon. Section 5841, considered in Russell, makes it an offense to fail to register, and we held in Russell to that extent, it is invalid. It is the possession of the gun that no one has registered, not the failure by appellant to register, that is the essence of the offense with which appellant was charged' in this case.” 316 F.2d at 46.

As we indicated earlier, Decker was charged with possessing a firearm transferred in violation of Section 5851, not with failing to register a weapon as required by Section 5841. The present attack upon the constitutionality of the involved sections of the Firearms Act, in the factual context of this case, is without merit.

2) The embezzlement case.

Decker attacks his conviction and sentence for embezzlement of union funds, 29 U.S.C. § 501(c) (United States v. Decker, 304 F.2d 702) upon the following several grounds:

(a) Excessive sentence.

The jury convicted Decker on 10 counts of the indictment, and he was sentenced separately upon each of them. While all the counts dealt with the embezzlement of union funds, the several acts charged extended from October 2, 1959, to October 21, 1960, and were accomplished in differing 'ways and involved varying amounts of money. Decker urges, however, that the acts of embezzlement cited in the indictment constituted but a single course of conduct, amounting to only one offense. He relies on United States v. Universal C.I.T. Credit Corp., 344 U.S. 218, 73 S.Ct. 227, 97 L.Ed. 260 (1952) where the Supreme Court sustained a District Court ruling that separate criminal violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act did not occur each week as to each employee that received less than the required wage, nor did there occur a separate violation for each uncompensated hour of overtime, nor for each failure of proper record keeping. It approved, rather, separate counts for the several categories of violations — illegal wage rate, illegal overtime and failure of record keeping— since each of these counts would respectively, and correctly, describe a course of criminal conduct. Such is not the case here where the same statute was violated on different occasions by different methods. The language of the Supreme Court in Blockburger v. United States, 284 U.S. 299, 302, 52 S.Ct. 180, 181, 76 L.Ed. 306, 308 (1932) distinguishes the action by Decker — his various pilferings from the union till — from “the course of conduct” approach in Universal C.I.T.:

“The distinction stated by Mr. Wharton is that ‘when the impulse is single, but one indictment lies, no matter how long the action may continue. If successive impulses are separately given, even though all unite in swelling a common stream of action, separate indictments lie.’ Wharton’s Criminal Law (11th Ed.) § 34.

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Stoy Decker v. United States
378 F.2d 245 (Sixth Circuit, 1967)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
378 F.2d 245, 65 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 3097, 1967 U.S. App. LEXIS 6064, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/stoy-decker-v-united-states-ca6-1967.