To bring a corporation into court criminally requires many additions to the present criminal procedure. While it may be said to be the duty of courts to see to it that criminals are punished, it is no less their duty to follow prescribed forms of procedure and to go out upon unauthorized ways or act in an unauthorized manner.
FACTS:
The petitioner is a foreign life-insurance corporation, duly organized under and by virtue of the laws of the State of California, doing business regularly and legally in the Philippine Islands pursuant to its laws. West Coast Life Insurance Company, John Northcott, and Manuel C. Grey, conspiring and confederating together, and to the damage of the Insular Life Insurance Company, a domestic corporation and doing business in the Philippine Islands, and with intent to cause such damage and to expose the said Insular Life Insurance Company to public hatred, contempt, and ridicule, compose and print, and cause to be printed a large number of circulars, and, in numerous printings in the form of said circulars, did publish and distribute, and cause to be published and distributed, among other persons, to policy holders and prospective policy holders of the said Insular Life Insurance Company, among other things, a malicious defamation and libel in the Spanish language.
That the said Insular Life Insurance Company was then and there in a dangerous financial condition and on the point of going into insolvency, to the detriment of the policy holders of the said Insular Life Insurance Company, and of those with whom the said Insular Life Insurance Company have and have had business transactions.
ISSUE:
WON West Coast Life Insurance should also be criminally charged.
HELD:
NO. There are many cases cited by counsel for the defendant which show that corporations have been proceeded against criminally by indictment and otherwise and have been punished as malefactors by the courts. Of this, of course, there can be no doubt; but it is clear that, in those cases, the statute, by express words or by necessary intendment, included corporations within the persons who could offend against the criminal laws; and the legislature, at the same time established a procedure applicable to corporations. No case has been cited to us where a corporation has been proceeded against under a criminal statute where the court did not exercise its common law powers or where there was not in force a special procedure applicable to corporations.
The courts of the Philippine Islands are creatures of statute and, as we have said, have only those powers conferred upon them by statute and those which are required to exercise that authority fully and adequately. The courts here have no common law jurisdiction or powers. If they have any powers not conferred by statute, expressly or impliedly, they would naturally come from Spanish and not from common law sources. It is undoubted that, under the Spanish criminal law and procedure, a corporation could not have been proceeded against criminally, as such, if such an entity as a corporation in fact existed under the Spanish law, and as such it could not have committed a crime in which a willful purpose or a malicious intent was required. Criminal actions would have been restricted or limited, under that system, to the officials of such corporations and never would have been directed against the corporation itself. This was the rule with relation to associations or combinations of persons approaching, more or less, the corporation as it is now understood, and it would undoubtedly have been the rue with corporations. From this source, then, the courts derive no authority to bring corporations before them in criminal actions, nor to issue processes for that purpose.
WON West Coast Life Insurance should also be criminally charged.
HELD:
NO. There are many cases cited by counsel for the defendant which show that corporations have been proceeded against criminally by indictment and otherwise and have been punished as malefactors by the courts. Of this, of course, there can be no doubt; but it is clear that, in those cases, the statute, by express words or by necessary intendment, included corporations within the persons who could offend against the criminal laws; and the legislature, at the same time established a procedure applicable to corporations. No case has been cited to us where a corporation has been proceeded against under a criminal statute where the court did not exercise its common law powers or where there was not in force a special procedure applicable to corporations.
The courts of the Philippine Islands are creatures of statute and, as we have said, have only those powers conferred upon them by statute and those which are required to exercise that authority fully and adequately. The courts here have no common law jurisdiction or powers. If they have any powers not conferred by statute, expressly or impliedly, they would naturally come from Spanish and not from common law sources. It is undoubted that, under the Spanish criminal law and procedure, a corporation could not have been proceeded against criminally, as such, if such an entity as a corporation in fact existed under the Spanish law, and as such it could not have committed a crime in which a willful purpose or a malicious intent was required. Criminal actions would have been restricted or limited, under that system, to the officials of such corporations and never would have been directed against the corporation itself. This was the rule with relation to associations or combinations of persons approaching, more or less, the corporation as it is now understood, and it would undoubtedly have been the rue with corporations. From this source, then, the courts derive no authority to bring corporations before them in criminal actions, nor to issue processes for that purpose.
No comments:
Post a Comment