People v. Hall
Docket No. 150677
Trial Lawyers' Bottom Line: Forgery requires specific intent; signing another's name on an election petition does not.
When running for a judicial position, it is probably best to make sure your campaign is run ethically. Unfortunately for one candidate, the person he hired to gather signatures (Hall) decided to go above and beyond. Hall filled nominating petitions with false names, attempting to conceal his fraud by writing with both hands and with different colored pens. He was still filling out the petitions while his candidate drove him to Lansing to file them.
Hall was charged with both general forgery under MCL 168.937 (a felony) and signing a petition with someone else’s name under MCL 168.544c(8) (a misdemeanor). Hall argued that the statutes criminalized the same conduct and therefore conflicted. And because the misdemeanor was the more recent statute, the misdemeanor is what he should have been charged with violating.
In a unanimous opinion written by Chief Justice Young, the Court disagreed. It found that the statutes proscribe two different types of conduct. Forgery requires specific intent to defraud; signing a petition with someone else’s name does not. Because the Legislature did not define forgery for MCL 168.937, the Court used the common-law definition, which is a false making of any written instrument with intent to defraud.
Signing a petition with another’s name, however, only is the actus reus of forgery. But it does not require proof of specific intent to defraud. Because signing a petition with someone else’s name was not a crime at common law, the Court resorted only to statutory interpretation to determine if MCL 168.544c(8) required specific intent. Because there was no mention of specific intent, the Court found that the statute did not require it.
The Court pointed out that the lower courts used the presumption that if two statutes read in pari materia conflict, the more recent statute controls and also the rule of lenity to come out the other way. The Court said these are only resorted to when the statutes are ambiguous. The purpose of MCL 168.544c was to criminalize conduct that falls short of common-law forgery that still threatens the integrity of Michigan elections.
Hall also made a due-process claim for lack of warning because it is not clear that the forgery statute would still apply when reading MCL 168.544c. But a warning in 158.544c(1) states that someone who “signs a name other than his or her own is violating the provisions of the Michigan election law.” The Court said this does not describe the penalty as a misdemeanor or say exactly what statute a defendant would be charged with violating. Thus, the Court said, MCL 168.937 gave Hall fair notice that his conduct might be charged as a felony.