Record
Court opinion
1971-04-05
CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
Rewis v. United States, 401 U.S. 808 (1971)
Supreme Court decision of 5 April 1971 holding that the Travel Act did not reach the operators of a numbers game in Yulee, Florida merely because some of their customers crossed from Georgia to bet.
- Date
- 1971-04-05
- Kind
- court-opinion
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- No. 5342
- Rights
- Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States, a federal work in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. CourtListener (Free Law Project) hosts the text; it is not the source institution.
Argued January 19, 1971; decided April 5, 1971. Justice Marshall wrote for the Court; Justice White took no part. The petitioners challenged “their convictions under the Travel Act, 18 U. S. C. § 1952, which prohibits interstate travel in furtherance of certain criminal activity.” The convictions “arose from a lottery, or numbers operation, which petitioners admittedly ran in Yulee, Florida, a small community located a few miles south of the Georgia-Florida state line.” Two Georgia residents who had travelled to place bets were convicted with them. The Court of Appeals had narrowed the District Court’s reading of the Act but affirmed.
The Court reversed. It said it was “not informed of any action by petitioners, other than actually conducting their lottery, that was designed to attract out-of-state customers,” so the Government’s alternative reading of the Act could not uphold the convictions. A footnote quotes Attorney General Kennedy’s 1961 testimony on the bill: “The target clearly is organized crime.”
The Travel Act, 75 Stat. 498, is filed in the Laws section; Kennedy’s May 1961 House statement is filed in this section.
