THE FIX WAS IN

The federal prosecutor in this case, Dan K. Webb who, by the way, is a very smart person and not stupid, thought he could finesse a slam dunk upon the defendant, the grand jury and the district and appellate courts all at the same time.

Instead having to grapple with the matter of criminal intent in the proposed indictment and realizing that he could easily intimidate the grand jury by the reputation that preceded him, he indeed allowed the grand jury to sign on to an indictment devoid of any words of criminal intent or any words of similar import.

The courts at the outset continued to ignore the phony indictment by refusing to rule on a motion to dismiss for failure to state a cause of action prior to trial which was required by rule. From that point onwards, the actions (or lack thereof) of the district and applellate courts became ludicrous.

After having to endure a show trial, wherein the indictment was allowed to be orally amended on three separate occasions, the defendant was presented with a Judgment of Conviction dated September 28, 1982 that bore no resemblance to the phony indictment.

There were no words of criminal intent or words of similar import in the indictment. However, the court saw fit to add them to the judgment: knowingly, willfully and with unlawful and fraudulent intent. The indictment did not alleged “falsely made and forged securities”. Yet the court saw fit to do just that: convict the defendant for transporting falsely made and forged securities. The specious indictment also included, as a predicate component of the alleged crime, that the defendant knew that the items transported were converted and taken by fraud.
The judgment is silent as to the defendant’s knowledge about any items converted and taken by fraud.

After pointing out the errors of the September 28, 1982 judgment to the district court, a new one was presented to me on December 5, 1984. This exercise only added to the befuddlement of the court. In it, the element of interstate transportation was absent and no mention of knowledge of the items being converted and taken by fraud.

Sometime later, the defendant filed a motion in the nature of a writ coram nobis.
The court issued an order declaring that the writ was no longer available in criminal cases.

The district court throughout this entire episode evidently did not know what it was doing. If it did, it did not show it. It is doubtful if it knew the crime proposed to be alleged in Title 18 USC Section 2314, 1st paragraph was the codification of the National Stolen Property Act. If it did know, it did not follow any of the requirements of the Act necessary to spell out crime. Neither did it pay heed to any of the plethora of case law available to them at the district, appellate and supreme court levels that conclusively supports the proposition that the indictment was void ab initio.