Rosen v. United States Pakas v. Same

• Citation: 38 S.Ct. 148,62 L.Ed. 406,245 U.S. 467
• Decision Date: 07 January 1918
• Docket Number: 438,Nos. 365,s. 365
• Parties: ROSEN et al. v. UNITED STATES. PAKAS v. SAME
• Court: United States Supreme Court

245 U.S. 467

38 S.Ct. 148

62 L.Ed. 406

ROSEN et al.

v UNITED STATES.

PAKAS

v. SAME.

Nos. 365, 438.

Argued Dec. 12, 1917.

Decided Jan. 7, 1918.

No. 438:Mr. Terence J. McManus, of New York City, for petitioner Pakas.

No. 365:Mr. Assistant Attorney General Fitts, for the United States.

Mr. Meier Steinbrink, of Brooklyn, N. Y., for petitioners.

The Attorney General, for the United States.

Mr. Justice CLARKE delivered the opinion of the Court.

These two cases present precisely the same questions for decision. They were argued and will be decided together.

In No. 365 Rosen and Wagner were indicted in the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of New York with one Broder for conspiring to buy and receive certain checks and letters which had been stolen from 'duly authorized depositories of United States mail matter,' and which were known to the accused to have been so stolen. Broder pleaded guilty, and when he was afterwards called as a witness for the government the objection was made that he was not competent to testify for the reason that, as was admitted by the government, he had theretofore pleaded guilty to the crime of forgery in the second degree, in the Court of General Sessions, in the county and state of New York, had been sentenced to imprisonment, and had served his sentence. The objection was overruled and Broder was permitted to testify. This ruling was assigned as error in the Circuit Court of Appeals, where it was affirmed, and it is now assigned as error in this court.

The second claim of error is that the trial court erred in refusing the motion of the defendants to direct a verdict of acquittal on the ground that no crime had been committed, for the reason that the box from which the mail was taken was not 'an authorized depository of the mail,' and that it was taken therefrom after it had left the possession of the government.

Broder testified, and it was not disputed, that the letters were stolen from boxes placed by tenants for the receipt of mail in the halls of buildings in which they had their places of business. The boxes bore the names of the owners and were not locked, and while mail was deposited in them by the carriers no mail was collected from them.

In No. 438 Pakas and Broder, the same Broder as in No. 365, were jointly indicted for buying and receiving three designated checks, knowing the same to have been stolen from letters which had been deposited in the United States mail for delivery by the post office establishment of the United States. The same questions are presented, raised in the same manner, as in No. 365.

For the validity of the claim that Broder was disqualified as a witness by his sentence for the crime of forgery, the plaintiffs in error rely upon United States v. Reid et al., 12 How. 361, 13 L. Ed. 1023, decided in 1851. In that case it was held that the competency of witnesses in criminal trials in United States courts must be determined by the rules of evidence which were in force in the respective states when the Judiciary Act of 1789 was passed, and the argument in this case is, that by the common law as it was administered in New York in 1789 a person found guilty of forgery and sentenced, was thereby rendered incompetent as a witness until pardoned, and that, therefore, the objection to Broder should have been sustained.

While the decision in United States v. Reid, supra, has not been specifically overruled, its authority must be regarded as seriously shaken by the decisions in Logan v. United States, 144 U. S. 263-301, 12 Sup. Ct. 617, 36 L. Ed. 429, and in Benson v. United States, 146 U. S. 325, 13 Sup. Ct. 60, 36 L. Ed. 991.

The Benson Case differed from the Reid Case only in that in the former the witness whose competency was objected to was called by the government while in the latter he was called by the defendant. The testimony of the witness was admitted in the one case but it was rejected in the other, and both judgments were affirmed by this court—however forty years had intervened between the two trials. In the Benson Case, decided in 1891, this court, after determining that the Reid Case was not decisive of it, proceeded to examine the question then before it 'in the light of general authority and of sound reason,' and after pointing out the great change in the preceding fifty years in the disposition of courts to hear witnesses rather than to exclude them, a change 'which was wrought partially by legislation and partially by judicial construction,' and how 'the merely technical barriers which excluded witnesses from the stand had been removed,' proceeded to dispose of the case quite without reference to the common-law practice, which it was claimed should rule it.

Accepting as we do the authority of the later, the Benson Case, rather than that of the earlier decision, we* shall dispose of the first question in this case, 'in the light of general authority and of sound reason.'

In the almost twenty years which have elapsed since the decision of the Benson Case, the disposition of courts and of legislative bodies to remove disabilities from witnesses has continued, as that decision shows it had been going forward before, under dominance of the conviction of our time that the truth is more likely to be arrived at by...