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378 F.2d 396

Docket No. 21477.

Platts v. United States

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Decided May 23, 1967.

Rehearing Denied July 3, 1967.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals · decided 1967-05-23

Cited by 3 later decisions — most recently January 1968

3 federal appellate ·

2 counsel of record

Applies 18 U.S.C. § 2312

Relies on Anders v. California

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Opinion by (per_curiam) · Decided 1967-05-23

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

¶1*397R Lewis Brown, Jr., Butte, Mont., for appellant.

¶2Moody Brickett, U. S. Atty., Robert O’Leary, Asst. U. S. Atty., Butte, Mont., for appellee.

¶3Before CHAMBERS, MERRILL and KOELSCH, Circuit Judges.

¶4PER CURIAM.

¶5Appellant thumbed an automobile ride to St. Maries, Idaho. On arrival there, the driver befriended appellant and loaned him his Cadillac car so that appellant could seek work at a local employment office and mill. Appellant went neither place, but turned up two days later in Fargo, North Dakota, where he appeared at the police station and confessed that he had stolen a car. In the meantime, the Cadillac was found abandoned along the side of the road in Montana with an empty fuel tank.

¶6The evidence without the confession, although circumstantial, is clearly adequate to support the conviction of appellant for violating the Dyer Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2312. Mathematically it was possible that someone else drove the car to and left it in Montana, but we would think the chance was about one in a million that such a thing happened. For the same reason, there is nothing to appellant’s claim that the government failed to prove the corpus delicti, before his confession was put in.

¶7While bringing this appeal had about the same hope of success as running a three-legged filly in the Kentucky Derby, we commend appellant’s attorney for doing his best with what he had. See Anders v. State of California, 386 U.S. 738, 87 S.Ct. 1396, 18 L.Ed.2d 493 (May 8, 1967).

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