Archer

This is an appeal from an order discharging the appellee from the custody of the warden of the United States penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington, to whose custody he had been committed in execution of a final judgment of the United States Court for China. Tho reason for the discharge was that the information upon which the conviction was had failed to charge that the appellee was a citizen of the United States at the time of tho commission of the crime. A similar question was presented to this court, by writ of error, in Husar v. United States, 26 F.(2d) 847 , hut was left undecided.

In considering the question thus presented we must bear in mind the nature of tho attack on tho judgment of conviction and the wide distinction between a direct and a collateral attack. Where a judgment of a United States court is attacked directly by appeal, the judgment will be reversed, unless the jurisdictional facts appear some place in the record; but on a collateral attack, such as by habeas corpus, the judgment is presumptively valid, unless it appears affirmatively from the record that tho court was without jurisdiction. This distinction has been repeatedly recognized by the Supreme…