United States v. American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corp.

433 F.2d 174 (3rd Cir. 1970)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

This was a suit involving the unfair competition to discontinue the manufacture of regular enameled cast iron plumbing fixtures, which were lower priced than acid resistant enameled cast iron plumbing fixtures. An alleged meeting for this violation occurred at the Palm Beach Biltmore Hotel. One of the documents the government wanted to admit at trial was handwritten notes found on a one Raymond Pape, a Crane official. The government claimed that Pape wrote a series of notes on the illegal meeting; the notes were found in Pape's files and were stapled together. A former secretary of Pape was called to make a lay handwriting identification of the notes. She testified that at least four of the six pages were written by Pape. All six pages were admitted, two without any handwriting identification. The two with no identification carried instructions from the judge to the jury that they might compare them with the four other pages for handwriting similarities. D disputed the use of the documents as a standard for comparison to the other remaining unidentified documents. D was convicted and appealed.