The Sheriff and the Mail

In Kentucky, a grand jury indicted a man — who happened to carry the United States mail on a steamboat route — for murder. The Defendant, a county sheriff, together with his posse, boarded the steamboat and arrested the mail carrier on the murder warrants, temporarily halting the mail he was carrying. Federal prosecutors then charged the Sheriff and his men under an 1825 Act making it a crime to "knowingly and wilfully" obstruct or retard the passage of the mail or of any carrier of it. The Prosecution's theory was straightforward: the mail was in fact delayed, and the Sheriff had knowingly done the arresting that delayed it. The Defense answered that the Sheriff was executing valid state murder warrants, that he had no purpose to interfere with the mail, and that no legislature could have meant to make a mail carrier immune from arrest for murder. The case reached the Supreme Court on a certified division of opinion between the judges below.