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369 F.2d 183

Docket No. 19763.

Scott v. United States

District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals

Argued Sept. 13, 1966.

Decided Oct. 26, 1966.

District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals · decided 1966-10-26

2 counsel of record

Applies 18 U.S.C. § 2312

Relies on Wilson v. United States · Travers v. United States · Bray v. United States

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1966-10-26

How this case has been cited

Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently January 2011

7 federal appellate · 6 state decisions

70196619701980199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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¶1Mr. Charles R. Work (appointed by this court), with whom Mr. Paul K. Murphy, Washington, D. C., was on the brief, for appellant.

¶2*184Mr. Edward T. Miller, Asst. U. S. Atty., with whom Messrs. David G. Bress, U. S. Atty., Frank Q. Nebeker and William H. Collins, Jr., Asst. U. S. Attys., were on the brief, for appellee.

¶3Before Danaher, Circuit Judge, and Bastían, Senior Circuit Judge, and Wright, Circuit Judge.

¶4DANAHER, Circuit Judge.

¶5Scott was convicted of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle in violation of D.C. Code § 22-2204 (1961).1 The jury also found the appellant guilty of interstate transportation of a stolen motor vehicle in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2312 (1964). In the District Court concurrent sentences were imposed with respect to the conviction on each count.

¶6The appellant and the Government stipulated at trial that a certain identified Dodge automobile was owned by a resident of Richmond, Virginia, whose daughter had authorized the car to be parked on a Richmond street in front of a funeral home; further it was stipulated that the car bore a certain serial number and Virginia registration tags. Neither the owner of the car nor his daughter knew the appellant and conced-edly neither had given him permission to use the car.

¶7The car was stolen on May 28, 1964. On the afternoon of November 25, 1964, a Metropolitan Police officer stopped the car for a speeding violation. The car then bore 1964 North Carolina license tags. When called upon to produce evidence of registration, the appellant opened the glove compartment and produced the Virginia registration which had been issued to the owner. A check of the serial number identified the car as that described in the Virginia registration. A similar check with North Carolina authorities developed that the North Carolina tags had been issued for a 1963 Ford.

¶8The appellant offered no explanation for his possession of the stolen vehicle. Rather, he claimed to have been suffering from a form of amnesia and that he had no recollection of events over the period from May, 1964 to the date of his arrest.

¶9In rebuttal, a psychiatrist on the staff at St. Elizabeths testified that he found the appellant had not suffered from mental disease or mental defect. The arresting officer testified that Scott had talked coherently, had answered questions put to him and had seemed normal in all respects.

¶10There would seem to be no possible basis upon which this appellant’s use and operation of the stolen car on the public streets of the District of Columbia could be anything but “unauthorized” as the term is used in the pertinent section of our Code. We find no error.

¶11Appellant contends that his conviction on either count may not stand in that the lapse of time between the theft in Richmond and his being arrested while driving the car in the District of Columbia had been so great that the car could not in any legally satisfactory 2 sense be described as “recently stolen.” We need not decide the point, in the absence at trial of a request for limiting instructions or of objections to the charge as given.

¶12Affirmed.

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