Schmuck v. United States

rdf:langString Schmuck v. United States

rdf:langString

rdf:langString Wayne T. Schmuck v. United States

rdf:langString Scalia

rdf:langString Brennan, Marshall, O'Connor

rdf:langString Rehnquist, White, Stevens, Kennedy

rdf:langString , F.R.Crim.P. 31(c)

rdf:langString Defendant convicted , rev'd and rem'd,

rdf:langString Schmuck v. United States,

rdf:langString Wayne T. Schmuck v. United States

rdf:langString Defendant was properly convicted of mail fraud since third-party mailings of vehicle title applications using fraudulent odometer readings were necessary to success of ongoing scheme; defendant was properly denied jury instruction allowing conviction on lesser included offense of odometer tampering since elements of that offense were not a subset of mail fraud. Seventh Circuit affirmed.

rdf:langString Schmuck v. United States

rdf:langString Blackmun

rdf:langString Schmuck v. United States, 489 U.S. 705 (1989), is a United States Supreme Court decision on criminal law and procedure. By a 5–4 margin it upheld the mail fraud conviction of an Illinois man and resolved a conflict among the appellate circuits over which test to use to determine if a defendant was entitled to a jury instruction allowing conviction on a lesser included charge. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the majority; Antonin Scalia for the dissent. The case had begun when Schmuck was prosecuted for having rolled back odometers for years on cars he sold to used-car dealers. He had been indicted for 12 counts of mail fraud, based on the vehicle title applications the dealers had then mailed to the state's Department of Transportation in order to resell the cars. Before his trial in the Western District of Wisconsin, he had been denied a motion to have the jury instructed that they could vote to convict him of tampering with the odometer, at the time a less serious offense, if they did not find him guilty of mail fraud. He raised the issue after his conviction with the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as the applicability of the mail-fraud statute to the dealers' applications. A panel rejected the latter argument but agreed that the jury should have been allowed to consider the lesser charge, reversing the conviction and remanding the case for a new trial. The government appealed that decision to an en banc panel of the circuit, which restored the conviction, holding that the odometer tampering was not "inherently related" to the mail fraud. Since other appellate circuits had preferred a different test for lesser included charges, Schmuck successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case. Blackmun ruled for the government on both questions. Since Schmuck had enjoyed a continuing relationship with the dealers he sold to, and the cars could not be resold to a retail customer without titles obtained using false information, the dealers' applications were an essential element of his crime and thus constituted mail fraud. On the second question, Blackmun said the court should have considered whether the elements of odometer tampering were a subset of the elements of the mail fraud, and since that was not the case Schmuck had been properly denied the instruction. Scalia's dissent focused exclusively on the mail fraud issue. Since Schmuck had already received his payment for the altered vehicles, it did not matter what happened afterwards, a holding he found more consistent with the Court's earlier rulings on the subject.