Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/761

725 NOTES 725 prive the Act of serious meaning.* In making it a crime to "threaten to take the life of or inflict bodily harm upon the President," Congress can hardly have intended only to protect the President's peace of mind from a threat personally communicated to him. One court relies on the rule of construction that where a word has had a legal definition the legislature must be taken to have used the word in the sense of that defi- nition, unless a different meaning appears to have been intended.'^" It is submitted that a different meaning is implicit in the words of the Act. Why make it criminal to "deposit ... in any post ofl&ce" any writing containing such a threat, if communication to the President were neces- sary? The federal statute doubtless finds its ancestry in the Statute of Treason,^"^ which made it criminal "to compass and imagine the death of the King." Under this statute in the fifteenth century two interesting indictments were brought, one against Walter Walker ^^ and the other against Sir Thomas Burdet.^^ Regarding the former. Lord Campbell relates ^* that Walter Walker kept an inn called the "Crown," and was suspected of taking part in a plot for the restoration of the imprisoned King, Henry VI; but that "there was no witness to speak to any such treasonable conduct, and that the only evidence to support the charge was that the accused had once, in a merry mood, said to his son, then a boy: 'Tom, if thou behavest thyself well, I will make thee heir to the Crown.' " We are told that the prisoner urged that he had never formed any evil design upon the King's life; that he spoke only to amuse his little boy, meaning by his statement that his son should succeed him as master of Crown Tavern. But, according to Lord Campbell, "Mr. Justice Billing ruled: 'That the words proved were inconsistent with the reverence for the hereditary descent of the Crown which was due from every subject under the oath of allegiance; therefore if the jury believed the witness, about which there could be no doubt as the prisoner did not venture to deny the treasonable language he had used, they were bound to find him guilty.' A verdict was accordingly returned, and the poor publican was hanged, drawn, and quartered." As to Sir Thomas Burdet, Lord Campbell narrates ^^ that he had been out of favor at court; and the King, making a progress in his parts, had rather wantonly entered his park, and hunted and killed a white buck of which Burdet was particularly fond; that "when the fiery knight heard of the affair — he exclaimed: ' I wish that the buck, horns, and all, were in the belly of the man who advised the King to kill it,' or, as some re- ported, 'were in the King's own belly'"; that on trial for treason Sir Thomas "proved, by most respectable witnesses, that the wish he had rashly expressed applied only to the man who advised the King to kill the deer." But, continues Lord Campbell, "The Lord Chief Justice left ' See a collection of definitions of the word "threat" in United States v. Jasick, 252 Fed. 931 (East. Dist. Mich., 1918). '" United States v. French, note 8, supra. " 25 Edw. III. ^ I Hale, Pleas of the Crown, 115; Sir Richard Baker, Chron. (ed. 1606) 215. " Ibid.; 3 HoLiNSHED, Chron. (London, 1808) 345. " I Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices (ed. 1874), 151. " Ibid., 153.