Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol III).djvu/114

 106 committed within a fort, or any other place or district of country, under the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, is punished with death. Thus congress legislates in the same act, under its exclusive and its limited powers.

§ 1227. The act proceeds to direct, that the body of the criminal, after execution, may be delivered to a surgeon for dissection, and punishes any person, who shall rescue such body during its conveyance from the place of execution to the surgeon, to whom it is to be delivered. Let these actual provisions of the law, or any pother provisions, which can be made on the subject, be considered with a view to the character, in which congress acts, when exercising its powers of exclusive legislation. If congress is to be considered merely as a local legislature, invested, as to this object, with powers limited to the fort, or other place, in which the murder may be committed, if its general powers cannot come in aid of these local powers, how can the offence be tried in any other court, than that of the place, in which it has been committed? How can the offender be conveyed to, or tried in, any other place? How can he be executed elsewhere? How can his body be conveyed through a country under the jurisdiction of another sovereign, and the individual punished, who, within that jurisdiction, shall rescue the body? Were any one state of the Union to pass a law for trying a criminal in a court not created by itself, in a place not within its jurisdiction, and direct the sentence to be executed without its territory, we should all perceive, and acknowledge its incompetency to such a course of legislation. If congress be not equally incompetent, it is, because that body unites the powers of local legislation with those, which are to