A Treatise on Federal Criminal Law Procedure with Forms of Indictment and Writs of Error (Hardcover)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: that the books contained evidence that might tend to criminate him. The bankrupt relied upon the fifth amendment and Counselman v. Hitchcock in 142 U. S. 547, but the Court said "If the order to the bankrupt standing alone infringed his Constitutional rights, it might be true that the provisions intended to save them would be inadequate and nothing short of statutory immunity would suffice. But no Constitutional rights are touched. The question is not of testimony, but of surrender?not of compelling the bankrupt to be a witness against himself in a criminal case, present or future, but of compelling him to yield possession of property that he no longer is entitled to keep. If a trustee had been appointed, the title to the books would have vested in him by the express terms of Section 70 and the bankrupt could not have withheld possession of what he no longer owned on the ground that otherwise he might be punished. That is one of the misfortunes of bankruptcy if it follows crime. The right not to be compelled to be a witness against one's self is not a right to appropriate property that may tell one's story. As the bankruptcy court could have enforced title in favor of the trustee, it could enforce possession ad interum in favor of the receiver, Section 2. In the properly careful provision to protect from use of the books in aid of prosecution, the bankrupt got all that he could ask." In the above case the Supreme Court merely decides that a bankrupt may not retain possession of his books, the title to which is vested in his trustee, on the ground that they contain matters which would subject him to criminal prosecution, but the decision does not lessen in any degree the protection of the amendments of the Constitution about which we are talking. In other words, having secured s...