United States v. Cushman

25 F. Cas. 731, 1 Low. 414

• Court: U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Massachusetts
• Decided: July 1, 1869
• Status: Published

Opinion

LOWELL. District Judge.

The mode of ascertaining the punishment established by the law of 1866. is unusual, but the offence is clearly the carrying on a business without due authority. The extent of the business carried on is made the measure of the lowest fine, but the offence is complete when the business is actually begun. Congress may have taken for granted that a person who did not pay the special tax or license fee would be very likely to be a defaulter in respect to the much more onerous tax on the product, but they have not said that it is the latter fraud which they intended to punish. Under this section it is not necessary for the government to allege, and they never do allege, that the taxes on the spirits themselves have not been paid; nor would it be a good defense to an indictment to aver and prove that in fact they had been paid.

In this district it has been our practice to require that the indictment should aver, and the jury should find, the number of gallons distilled by the defendant; but our reason for adopting this practice was not that the fact formed any part of the substance of the offence, but because it is proper, and according to the best precedents, for the jury to pass upon a fact upon which the minimum of fine is made by law- to depend. Without such a finding, the record would never show whether the court had obeyed the law or not. Upon careful consideration, we are not able to see that the section under review means any thing more than this, that the amount of business done without authority shall regulate the punishment. It follows that the law of’ 1868, in affixing a higher penalty for a failure to pay the tax on the spirits, was dealing with a different subject-matter, and that a conviction or acquittal under either law would be no de-fence to an indictment under the other, and that the latter does not repeal the former. The real difficulty and possible hardship arise out of the statute of 1866 taken by it-stjlf quite as much as from any conflict between the- two statutes. Motions denied.