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''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. ==Underlying prosecution== For 15 years, Wayne Schmuck of Harvard, Illinois, owner of Big Foot Auto Sales, had sold used cars he had bought in his state, where vehicle titles did not then require a statement on the title of the odometer reading at the time of the transaction, to dealers in Wisconsin, which did. Unbeknownst to the dealers, he had in some cases hired someone to roll back the odometers on them, making the vehicles appear to have less mileage than they actually did. Thus they commanded an artificially higher price, both when the dealer paid Schmuck and when they sold it to a customer. In order for the retail transaction to take place, the dealers needed to mail a title application, including the falsified odometer reading, to the state Department of Transportation. Around 1981 his scheme was discovered when suspicious regulators wrote to the vehicles' previous owners, whose addresses were on the dealer's applications, and learned what the odometers had said at the time of sale. He was arrested by federal authorities and indicted on 12 counts of mail fraud, a felony, for cars he had sold to five different dealers, some as many as five times〔''United States v. Schmuck'', hereafter ''Schmuck II'', (840 F.2d 384 ), 386 (7th Cir., 1988)〕 over a two-year period. At his trial, presided over by district judge Barbara Brandriff Crabb, he admitted that he had rolled back the odometers, but denied that he had committed mail fraud since the dealers had sent the applications ''after'' they had bought the cars from him, therefore it wasn't necessary that they do so for him to have realized the proceeds of the odometer tampering. Before his trial in United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, his attorney, Peter Lewis Steinberg, moved that the jury be instructed that they could convict Schmuck on the lesser included charge of odometer tampering, at the time a misdemeanor, if they did not feel his actions constituted mail fraud.〔''United States v. Schmuck'', hereafter ''Schmuck I'', (776 F.2d 1368 ) (7th Cir., 1985)〕 It was denied, and the jury convicted Schmuck on all 12 counts.〔 In late 1983 he was sentenced to 90 days in jail and four years of probation.〔 His lawyers appealed the conviction to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Schmuck v. United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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