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Supreme Court upholds bank robbery law from John Dillinger era

 
Published Jan. 14, 2015

A 1930s federal law directed at bank robbers such as John Dillinger who would take hostages means the same thing now as it did then, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday.

That was bad news for a modern-day criminal whose sentence had been increased for violating the law, which prohibits a culprit from forcing any other person "to accompany" him while robbing a bank or fleeing from the deed.

There was a tragic ending when Larry Whitfield, on the run after an unsuccessful 2008 attempt to rob a savings and loan in Gastonia, N.C., broke into the home of 79-year-old Mary Parnell. Whitfield guided the terrified Parnell a short distance from a hallway into another room. She later died of a heart attack.

Whitfield contested the extra years in prison he received for violating the federal law, saying that the word "accompany" indicated a longer distance than the one he traveled with Parnell.

But Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the Supreme Court, consulted Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, a 1930 New York Times marriage announcement and a 1927 Washington Post story to say accompany means simply to go with someone.

"The word does not, as Whitfield contends, connote movement over a substantial distance," Scalia wrote.

"It was, and still is, perfectly natural to speak of accompanying someone over a relatively short distance, for example: from one area within a bank 'to the vault'; 'to the altar' at a wedding; 'up the stairway'; or into, out of, or across a room."

There were concerns at oral argument in the case that the government was reading the statute so literally that even a single step at the direction of a robber would trigger the law.

But Scalia said the law did not cover "minimal movement — for example, the movement of a bank teller's feet when the robber grabs her arm."

In upholding a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Scalia said: "The Congress that wrote this provision may well have had most prominently in mind John Dillinger's driving off with hostages, but it enacted a provision which goes well beyond that."