Morissette v. United States
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| Morissette v. United States | ||||||||||||
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| Argued October 9 – 10, 1951 Decided January 7, 1952 |
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| Holding | ||||||||||||
| Mere omission of any mention of intent from the criminal statute was not to be construed as the elimination of that element from the crimes denounced, and that where intent was an element of the crime charged, its existence was a question of fact to be determined by the jury. | ||||||||||||
| Court membership | ||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Fred M. Vinson Associate Justices: Hugo Black, Stanley Forman Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Robert H. Jackson, Harold Hitz Burton, Tom C. Clark, Sherman Minton |
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| Case opinions | ||||||||||||
| Majority by: Jackson Joined by: unanimous Minton took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. |
Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246 (1952), is a U.S. Supreme Court case, relevant to the legal topic of criminal intent.
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[edit] Background
The defendant, a part time scrap metal dealer, entered an air force bombing range, from which he collected spent bomb casings. These casings had been lying around for years. The defendant sold the casings at a junk market, earning a profit of $84. For this, the defendant was charged with violating which made it a crime to "knowingly convert" government property. The defendant conceded he had done the act. His sole defense was that he believed that the casings were abandoned property, and therefore there was no crime in taking them.[1]
After the trial, the trial judge instructed the jury with regard to the law, rejecting the defense. With regard to the intent requirement, "knowingly," the trial judge assumed Congress had meant for the statute to operate under a tort law definition of intent. The jury was instructed to find only that the defendant "intentionally exercised dominion over the property." [2]
Thus, the jury was permitted to find the defendant guilty solely on the basis of his having taken government property. They need not have found, and were not entitled to consider, any belief he may have had with respect to the abandonment of the bomb casings - that is, whether it was government property (which is clearly defined by the plain language of the statute as a crime), or abandoned property (which is not a crime). Were this reading of the statute correct, Congress would have created a strict liability crime.
The court of appeals affirmed the decision of the lower court. However, the Supreme Court, as final arbiter of federal law, heard an appeal and reversed the decision of the trial court, concluding that the defendant must be proven to have had knowledge of the facts that made the conversion wrongful, that is that the property had not been abandoned by its owner. Justice Robert Jackson, writing for the majority, emphasized the importance of individual criminal intent (mens rea) in the Anglo-American legal tradition, stating famously that crime was "generally constituted only from concurrence of an evil-meaning mind with an evil-doing hand."
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Kadish, Sanford H. and Stephen J. Schulhofer (2001). "3", Criminal law and its process: cases and materials. New York, NY: Aspen, 237. ISBN 0-7355-1990-0.
- ^ Id. at 238.
