18 U.S.C. § 1655 — Assault on commander as piracy

This section covers a seaman, meaning a crew member on a ship. It applies when that seaman "lays violent hands" on the ship's commander. That means the seaman physically attacks the commander. The law only covers an attack made for a specific purpose. The purpose must be to "hinder and prevent" the commander from fighting to defend the vessel. It also covers stopping the commander from defending goods that were entrusted to him. So the attack has to be aimed at keeping the commander from protecting the ship or its cargo. If a seaman attacks a commander for that purpose, the law treats the seaman as a pirate. The section calls this act "piracy," even though it does not describe a robbery at sea. Being treated as a pirate here carries one fixed punishment. That punishment is imprisonment for life. The section does not offer a shorter prison term, a fine, or any other option. It does not describe exceptions, defenses, or lesser versions of the offense. It also does not define "seaman," "commander," or "vessel" beyond what is written here, so those words keep their plain, ordinary meaning.

The record establishes that this section was enacted on June 25, 1948, through chapter 645, 62 Stat. 774. According to the source credit, the provision has not been amended since that original enactment; no subsequent Public Laws are listed as having altered its text. The 1948 act of which this section is a part is generally understood to have been a broad recodification of federal criminal law—the enactment that created present-day Title 18 of the United States Code as a positive-law title. In that revision, many older, scattered federal criminal statutes were consolidated, reorganized, and restated in more uniform language, without necessarily reflecting a new policy judgment by the 1948 Congress about each individual offense carried forward. The substantive prohibition on a seaman assaulting a ship's commander to prevent him from defending the vessel—treating such conduct as piracy—reflects a much older body of federal maritime and admiralty criminal law addressing shipboard mutiny, violence, and threats to vessels and their cargo, a category of concern with deep roots in early American statutes governing piracy and offenses at sea. However, the record here—the source credit itself—does not document the specific legislative reasoning of the 1948 Congress in retaining this particular provision, and no committee report or floor statement is reproduced in the material provided. Accordingly, beyond this general historical association with earlier piracy and maritime-crime legislation, the reasons for this section's particular wording and continued inclusion are not established by the record.