The petitioner was indicted and convicted in a District Court for violating the Federal Kidnapping Act, 47 Stat. 326, 48 Stat. 781, 18 U.S.C.A. § 408a et seq., by transporting in interstate commerce a person whom he had kidnapped and held for a reward. The jury recommended and the court imposed the death penalty. The Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed, 144 F.3d 392. We granted certiorari limited to the sole question of the court's statutory authority to impose the death sentence.
The Act authorizes the death sentence when recommended by a jury 'provided that the sentence of death shall not be imposed by the court if, prior to its imposition, the kidnapped person has been liberated unharmed.' The indictment charged, and there was evidence before the jury, to the effect that the kidnapping victim yielded to capture only after the petitioner had twice violently struck her on the head with an iron bar; that while held in custody her lips were abraised and made swollen by repeated applications of tape on her mouth; and that wounds resulting from these assaults were not healed when she was liberated after six days' captivity. No evidence was introduced, nor did the indictment charge, that the injuries inflicted were permanent, or that the victim still suffered from them when the petitioner was sentenced, nine years after commission of the offense. The trial court charged the jury that in determining whether the victim had been 'liberated unharmed' they were limited to a consideration of her condition at the time she was liberated, and that they were not authorized to recommend the death penalty if at the time of her liberation she had recovered from her injuries. Petitioner took no exception to the charge, and asked no other. Its correctness is before us only to the extent that we are asked to say that the injuries inflicted must be permanent or they must be in existence at the time of sentence in order to authorize the infliction of the death sentence.
The scant legislative history of the Act is of little assistance to us in interpreting this proviso. Two possible reasons suggest themselves, however, as to the motivation of Congress in making the severity of a kidnapper's punishment depend upon whether his victim has been injured. The first reason is the old belief that the severity of the injury should measure the rigor of the punishment. If this be the reasoning implicit in the statute, it would appear that Congress intended that for a kidnapper to obtain the benefit of the proviso he must both liberate and refrain from injuring his victim. Congress may equally have intended this provision as a deterrent, on the theory that kidnappers would be less likely to inflict violence upon their victims if they knew that such abstention would save them from the death penalty. This assumption finds some slight support in the legislative history, is not contested by the government, has been accepted in one case and is the chief prop for the interpretation which the petitioner urges. He argues upon this assumption that the wider the scope of the exemption from the death penalty, the greater the inducement for the kidnapper to release the victim. To magnify the inducement, we are asked to interpret the proviso as granting immunity from the death sentence to any kidnapper who does not permanently injure his victim. We cannot expand the meaning of the statute on such a hypothesis and we turn to its language.
We accept the word 'unharmed' appearing in the proviso as meaning uninjured. Neither the word 'permanent' nor any other word susceptible of that meaning was used by Congress. The quality of the injury to which Congress referred is not defined. It may be possible that some types of injury would be of such trifling nature as to be excluded from the category of injuries which Congress had in mind. We need indulge in no speculation in regard to such a category. The injuries inflicted upon his victim were of such degree that they can not be read out of the Act's scope without contracting it to the point where almost all injuries would be excluded. We find no justification whatever for grafting the word permanent onto the language which Congress adopted.