Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 4.djvu/217

UNITED STATEB V. OOPPEESMITH. 203 �of the ponishment; pronounces it the njerest technicality, and holds that where a atatute creates an offenoe and deolaires' it a f elony it is not necessary to plead a felonious intent. Bouv. Dict. "Feloniously." The court also speaks of "the moral degradation attaching to the punishment actually inflicted," and intimates that it is about ail that is left to us of thecom- mon-lawidea of felony. There is just as much of moral deg- radation in an offence called by the statute-makers a misde- meanor, if punished degradingly, as if with the same character of punishment they call it a felony. �In American law, forfeiture as a consequence of crime being generally abolished, the word "felony" has lost its original and characteristio meaning, and it is rather used to denote any high crime punishable by death or imprisonment. Bur- rill's Dict. title "Felony." The term is so interwoven with our criminal law that it should have a definition applicable to its present use; and this notion of moral degradatioù by confinement in the penitentiary has grown into a general understanding that it constitutes any offence a felony, just as, at common law, the idea of capital punishment became inseparably connected with that of felony. There is, there- fore, much force in the suggestion of counsel that since we cannot define this word, as used in this statute, by the com- mon law, it must be understood that congress used ît in this modern sense. Because, where the words of a statute con- strued technioally would be inoperative, but construed aecord- ing to their common signification would have a reasonable operation, the courts do sometimes adopt the latter construc- tion. Yet it will be found that this modern idea of felony has come into general use by force of state legislation on the sub- ject, so far as it is legally established. From a very early day, and as a necessity, the state legislatures have passed laws defining and enumerating felonies as those crimes pun- ishable by confinement in the penitentiary; and this has corne to be the law in nearly every state. In Tennessee the law of 1829 elaborately enumerates felonies, and punishes them with hard labor in the jaU or penitentiary, and the aot of 1873, ehapter .57, makes ail crimes, punishable by confiàe- ����