United States v. Grady

OAKES, Circuit Judge.

The waves of tragedy from the internecine conflict in Northern Ireland have their ripple effects in this country. Appellants here are Frank Grady, a sympathizer with the Catholic minority in Ulster, and John Jankowski, a licensed firearms dealer in Yonkers, New York. Each was convicted of conspiracy to violate the federal firearms law, particularly 18 U.S.C. ss 922(m) and 923, which together require a licensed firearms dealer to make true entries in a federal firearms record, and of ten substantive counts of making or causing to be made false entries as to ten .30-caliber semiautomatic rifles in Jankowski's record or “logbook”; Grady was also convicted of one count of unlawful exportation without a permit of these same rifles.

Conviction after a jury trial was had in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. On appeal, appellants argue that the evidence was insufficient to convict them; that the prosecution was time-barred by the statute of limitations, 18 U.S.C. s 3282; that the statute proscribing the making of false entries in a logbook was not violated, since real people signed their own names and home addresses as purchasers of the weapons; that Irish police reports proving that rifles of the same make, appearance and registered serial numbers were found in Northern Ireland were improperly admitted into evidence; and that the trial court erred in permitting the introduction of subsequent similar act testimony as well as in its charge on aiding and abetting. We find appellants' points to be without merit and accordingly affirm the judgments.


IV. Admission of Irish Police Records.

Much is made in the briefs of the admission into evidence of records of the formidable-sounding Department of Industrial and Forensic Science of the Ministry of Commerce and of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. These were entitled “Material Forwarded for Examination” and “Order for Disposal of Firearms/Ammunition.” The ground of objection was that the documents constituted inadmissible hearsay. At most this admission would be harmless error, because the transfer of the weapons to Northern Ireland was relevant solely to Count 19, charging only Grady with unlawful export, and there was live testimony at trial (by Richard Anderson, officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary) that four of the rifles had come into his official possession in Northern Ireland subsequent to their dates of purchase from Jankowski.


For the limited purpose of showing that the specified weapons were found in Northern Ireland on dates subsequent to the May, 1970, purchases, however, we think the records were admissible under the public records exception to the hearsay rule, codified in Fed.R.Evid. 803(8)(B). Rule 803(8)(B) allows admission of records and reports of public offices or agencies setting forth “matters observed pursuant to duty imposed by law as to which matters there was a duty to report,” but is subject to an exception for “matters observed by police officers and other law enforcement personnel.” In adopting this exception, Congress was concerned about prosecutors attempting to prove their cases in chief simply by putting into evidence police officers' reports of their contemporaneous observations of crime . . . The reports admitted here were not of this nature; they did not concern observations by the Ulster Constabulary of the appellants' commission of crimes. Rather, they simply related to the routine function of recording serial numbers and receipt of certain weapons found in Northern Ireland. They did not begin to prove the Government's entire case; they were strictly routine records.


Judgments affirmed.