Bernard Bloch v. United States

The United States has petitioned for a rehearing in this case and introduces its petition by confessing prejudicial error resulting from the prosecutor’s cross-examination of appellant concerning illegal operations, fees received from such operations, illicit relations with a named woman, and denial of a haedical license. These are the questions to which our opinion alluded in connection with the discussion of appellant’s second specification of error. The Government then suggests that since it concedes that a reversal of the appellant’s conviction is proper, we should reexamine what we had to say upon the instruction concerning willfulness which we held was plain error and which constituted the basis for our judgment of reversal. The argument is that our views about that instruction are not in line with what this court held in Bateman v. United States, 9 Cir., 212 F.2d 61, 70 . It is urged that our decision here is contrary to the decision in the Bateman case where a similar instruction was said not to be prejudicially erroneous when viewed with due regard to the “instructions considered as a whole.”

Subsequent to our opinion in this case, another division of this court handed…