Felix Frankfurter

“ Thus, underpayments based on violations of the statute as to these piece workers could not be compounded into a single offense with unrelated underpayments which resulted from the decision that a certain activity was not work, merely because the two kinds of underpayments occurred in the same workweek or involved the same employee. Whether an aggregate of acts constitute a single course of conduct and therefore a single offense, or more than one, may not be capable of ascertainment merely from the bare allegations of an information and may have to await the trial on the facts. ”

“ Not that penal statutes are not subject to the basic consideration that legislation like all other writings should be given, insofar as the language permits, a commonsensical meaning. But when choice has to be made between two readings of what conduct Congress has made a crime, it is appropriate, before we choose the harsher alternative, to require that Congress should have spoken in language that is clear and definite. We should not derive criminal outlawry from some ambiguous implication. ”

“ Underpayments of the same employees are split into separate counts of the information, and record-keeping violations during the same week are split to serve as the basis of separate counts.
It would be self-deceptive to claim that only one answer is possible to our problem. But the history of this legislation and the inexplicitness of its language weigh against the Government's construction of a statute that cannot be said to be decisively clear on its face one way or the other. ”