Jones v. United States
| Decision Date | 10 October 1960 |
| Docket Number | No. 7926.,7926. |
| Citation | 282 F.2d 745 |
| Parties | Samuel G. JONES, Sr., Appellant, v. UNITED STATES of America, Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit |
Plato Cacheris, Asst. U. S. Atty., Washington, D. C. (Joseph S. Bambacus, U. S. Atty., Richmond, Va., on the brief), for appellee.
Before SOBELOFF, Chief Judge, and SOPER and HAYNSWORTH, Circuit Judges.
The defendant was convicted on each of six counts in an indictment charging the evasion of income taxes due by the defendant, and by a corporation owned and controlled by him, through the filing of false and fraudulent returns.
The Government's case was founded principally upon the fact that corporate funds had been used to construct and maintain two residences and in connection with the operation of a farm when such expenditures in fact served the defendant's individual purposes and inured to his benefit, but served no corporate purpose. The corporation did not own either of the residences or the farm. There were other miscellaneous corporate disbursements, said to have been only for the personal benefit of the defendant. All of these corporate expenditures were expensed on the corporation's books and deducted in computing its income tax obligations for the years 1952, 1953 and 1954. The defendant did not include these disbursements as income to him in his individual returns for those years.
The defendant urged, principally, on this appeal that he was denied a fair trial because a computation of corporate income tax deficiencies for the years in question included certain adjustments which the Government conceded were not fraudulent. The construction and operation of a third residence, which the Government conceded on the trial was used for corporate purposes, and the purchase of certain machinery and capital assets for the corporation had been expensed on the corporate books and deducted in computing corporate income tax liabilities. The deduction of such capital items the Government conceded was not fraudulent, but their capitalization resulted in adjustments which made a substantial contribution to the overall deficiencies shown in computations which were offered in evidence by the prosecution and received without objection.
The defendant complains that the effect of these computations was to suggest to the jury that all of the deficiencies of corporate income tax were attributable to corporate payment of the defendant's personal expenses and to inflate the apparent effect of the alleged fraudulent transactions.
The prosecution was required to offer computations along the line that it did offer in order to show that full and proper returns would have resulted in larger tax obligations than those shown in the returns actually filed. If that fact were not shown, the return, however fraudulent, would not have resulted in the evasion of any income tax liability. The jury was clearly and repeatedly told that there was no claim of fraud or of wrongdoing in connection with the corporation's expensing disbursements for capital assets, nor was fraud inferable from income tax adjustments resulting from their subsequent capitalization. If the defendant had wished at the time of the trial, he could have introduced a computation which would have shown exactly what contribution to the overall deficiencies had been made by the...
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