Hunter v. United States, 3075.

• Decision Date: 17 November 1930
• Docket Number: No. 3075.,3075.
• Citation: 73 ALR 870,45 F.2d 55
• Parties: HUNTER v. UNITED STATES.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

73 ALR 870, 45 F.2d 55 (1930)

HUNTER v. UNITED STATES.

No. 3075.

Circuit Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

November 17, 1930.

A. J. Lubliner and John Kee, both of Bluefield, W. Va., for appellant.

James Damron, U. S. Atty., of Huntington, W. Va. (Philip Angel, Asst. U. S. Atty., of Huntington, W. Va., on the brief), for the United States.

Before NORTHCOTT, Circuit Judge, and GRONER and SOPER, District Judges.

GRONER, District Judge.

Harold Edward Hunter, whom we shall speak of as defendant, was indicted for violation of the Act of June 25, 1910 (Mann Act, § 2) 36 Stat. 825, 18 USCA § 398, convicted, and sentenced to confinement in the penitentiary. At the time of the trial, defendant was about twenty-four years of age. In 1925, when he was nineteen years old, he went from Asheville, N. C., to Princeton, W. Va., to visit a brother, and there met the prosecutrix, a sister of his brother's wife, then about sixteen years old. In the latter part of 1925, he accompanied his brother from Princeton to Hagerstown, Md., and there, about two months later, he went to board with the mother of prosecutrix, who had in the meantime moved from Princeton to Hagerstown. Some four or five months after this, prosecutrix returned to Princeton, where she gave birth to a child, the father of whom admittedly was not defendant. Defendant followed her back to Princeton, and, though apprized of her delinquency, proposed marriage, and a trip to Baltimore was made for this purpose. The marriage, for some reason not shown in the evidence, was never consummated, but defendant and prosecutrix had unlawful relations in Baltimore for the first time, and after a few days returned to Hagerstown, and informed their respective families they had been married, and thereafter lived together in Hagerstown as husband and wife for more than two years, and then removed to Asheville, N. C., where the same relationship continued for five or six months, after which they moved to Atlanta, Ga., where defendant was employed as the driver for a bus line operating between Atlanta and nearby cities, and where they lived together in a hotel for one month. In June, 1929, defendant purchased a railroad ticket for the prosecutrix from Atlanta to the residence of her mother in Princeton, W. Va., and gave her money for expenses, and told her he would come on to Princeton in about a month, and join her, and continue to live with her as he had for the past two and a half or three years. She accordingly made the trip alone to West Virginia, where, about a month later, defendant, without previous notice to her, rejoined her, and lived with her two or three days, stating to her at the time that he was enroute to Chicago to get a bus for delivery in Atlanta, and had dropped off to see her on the way. Shortly after defendant left West Virginia, he was married in Georgia, and did not see prosecutrix again until the trial. During the period of their relationship, two children were born, one of whom died, and one of whom survived.

At the close of all the evidence, the defendant moved that the jury be instructed to find him not guilty on the ground that the evidence as to the purpose of the alleged transportation was insufficient to warrant a conviction, and insufficient to justify the submission of the case to the jury. This instruction the court refused to give, and this we think was error.

The purpose of the Mann Act, as was said by the Supreme Court in the Caminetti Case, 242 U. S. 470, 491, 37 S. Ct. 192, 197, 61 L. Ed. 442, L. R. A. 1917F, 502, Ann. Cas. 1917B, 1168, is "to reach and punish the movement in interstate commerce of women and girls with a view to the accomplishment of the unlawful purposes prohibited." It was not intended to make unlawful a journey from one state to another, though followed by unlawful cohabitation, where the journey was not...