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415 F.2d 1130

Docket No. 23759.

United States v. Johnson

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Decided Aug. 26, 1969.

Rehearing Denied Oct. 31, 1969.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals · decided 1969-08-26

2 counsel of record

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Opinion by (per_curiam) · Decided 1969-08-26

How this case has been cited

Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently June 2006

11 federal appellate ·

6019691970198019902000decided

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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¶1*1131Peter Heintz (argued), Sacramento, Cal., for appellant.

¶2William B. Shubb (argued), Special Asst. U. S. Atty., Cecil F. Poole, U. S. Atty., San Francisco, Cal., for appellee.

¶3Before MERRILL and ELY, Circuit Judges, and KILKENNY District Judge.*

¶5PER CURIAM:

¶6This appeal is from an order revoking probation. In 1966 Johnson pleaded guilty to the offense of dispensing narcotic drugs in an unstamped package (26 U.S.C. § 4704(a)) and was awarded probation by the same district judge who made the order in question. In 1967 Johnson entered a plea of guilty to second degree burglary in a California state court. This came to the attention of the district judge, who then advised Johnson that he was placed on “final warning” status. In 1968 Johnson pleaded guilty to traffic violations arising out of an automobile collision. After a series of evidentiary hearings, the District Court, on Nov. 26, 1968, made the order which is now challenged.

¶7Johnson’s counsel argues, quite forcefully, that the District Court, having “forgiven” Johnson for the state burglary offense, revoked the probation upon the basis of minor traffic violations alone and thus so grossly abused its discretion that we should intervene. We cannot accept the argument. In the first place, we do not interpret the “warning” letter as such total forgiveness of the California crime that the district judge, after having written the letter, was thereafter required to eliminate the offense from his consideration for all future time. Secondly, although the subsequent state law traffic violations, if viewed in isolation, were relatively minor, it is obvious that the District Court considered them to be the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” Probation was originally granted as a matter of grace, and we cannot hold that the court which extended the favor was, in the circumstances, disempowered to revoke it.

¶8Affirmed.

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