ITEMS OF INTEREST December 24, 1910 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Announcing that conspiracy under the Sherman antitrust law is a continuing offense, the supreme court of the United States holds as good the indictment in New York in 1909 of two men identified with the sugar cases, who pleaded the statute of limitation. Justice Holmes, in announcing the opinion of the court, said: "It is true that the unlawful agreement satisfied the definition of the crime, but it does not exhaust it. It also is true of course, that the mere continuance of the result of a crime does not continue the offense. But when the plot contemplates bringing to pass a continuance cooperation of the conspirators to keep it up, and there is such continuous cooperation, it is a perversion of natural thought and of natural language to call such continuous cooperation a cinematographic series of distinct conspiracies, rather than to call it a single one. The indictment charges a continuing conspiracy. Whether it does so with technical sufficiency is not before us. All that we decide is that a conspiracy may have continuance in time, and that where, as here, the indictment, consistently with the other facts, alleged that it did so continue to the date of filling, that allegation must be denied under the general issue and not by special plea. Under the general issue all defenses, including the defense that the conspiracy was ended by success, abandonment, or otherwise, more than three years before July 1, 1909, will be open and unaffected by what we now decide."

Attorney-General Wickersham expects to reach all the officers of both the sugar and beef trusts under the supreme court decision. He says the court has at last given to his a crushing blow at both of these combinations and at the men who have engineered the lawbreaking operations.

While the question of a conspiracy under the Sherman antitrust act being "continuing" did not become the leading issue in either the Standard Oil or the tobacco corporations, both of which are soon to be reargued before the full bench of the court, it figured in the argument in both cases, especially in the Standard Oil suit. It is said that the decision may have an appreciable effect on the argument as to what weight should be given the acts of the corporations before the Sherman antitrust act was passed.

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