Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-14-03730/USCOURTS-ca7-14-03730-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Karenza Pickering
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

In the 

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ 

No. 14-3730 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

v.

KARENZA S. PICKERING, 

Defendant-Appellant. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the 

Northern District of Illinois, Western Division. 

No. 14 CR 50056-1 — Frederick J. Kapala, Judge. 

____________________ 

ARGUED JULY 8, 2015— DECIDED JULY 23, 2015 

____________________ 

Before POSNER, SYKES, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges. 

POSNER, Circuit Judge. On June 17, 2014, Karenza Pickering was mailed a summons to show up for federal jury duty 

on July 18. A follow-up letter, intended to remind her of the 

summons, was mailed on July 8. When she neither responded to the summons nor appeared for duty on July 18, the district judge asked the Justice Department to institute a criminal contempt proceeding against her. The government responded by filing a motion for a rule to show cause why the 

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defendant should not be held in criminal contempt of court 

for failing to obey the summons, a procedure authorized by 

Fed. R. Crim. P. 42(a)(1) despite its seeming tension with the 

requirement that there must be proof beyond a reasonable 

doubt to convict a person of a crime. Cf. Federal Trade Commission v. Trudeau, 579 F.3d 754, 769 (7th Cir. 2009). The tension can however be dissolved by noting, as the Eighth Circuit did in In re Van Meter, 413 F.2d 536, 538 (8th Cir. 1969), 

that the “order to show cause is merely a method of serving 

notice of the alleged violation of an order. ... The alleged 

contemnor is at all times clothed with the presumption of 

innocence and the Government has the continuing burden of 

proving his guilt.” 

In response to the government’s motion the district judge 

held a hearing to determine the defendant’s guilt. An Assistant U.S. Attorney appeared at the hearing but said only that 

the government had “no recommendation as to an appropriate disposition” of the case. At the request of the defendant’s 

lawyer, the judge allowed the defendant to testify to her reasons for not complying with the summons. She testified that 

she had received the summons but had then forgotten about 

it. She explained that when she received it she’d been almost 

five months pregnant with her first child, that it was a complicated pregnancy closely monitored by medical personnel, 

and that she had been placed on modified bed rest to reduce 

the risk of a miscarriage. And at the same time she was taking intermittent leave under the Family and Medical Leave 

Act from her work as a bill collector for a bank in order to 

care for her mother, who was undergoing a total knee replacement and also suffering from a disease called angioedema, a swelling of the skin that can cause stomach 

cramps and breathing difficulty. Although mother and 

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No. 14-3730 3 

daughter live in Rockford, the mother was being treated for 

her knee problem and her angioedema at Northwestern 

Hospital in Chicago, and the defendant drove her to and 

from the hospital and sat in on all her doctors’ appointments. The mother was sometimes hospitalized during this 

period and on those occasions the defendant would stay 

with her in the hospital. The defendant testified that she is 

not opposed to serving on a jury—she had appeared for jury 

duty twice in the state courts. The government’s lawyer declined to cross-examine her. 

At the conclusion of her testimony the judge declared her 

guilty of willful contempt beyond a reasonable doubt. He 

did not explain the basis of his conclusion beyond saying “I 

think that she in essence just didn’t want to be bothered with 

this summons.” He sentenced her to pay a fine of $250. That 

is not a heavy punishment by federal criminal justice standards, but it placed a federal criminal conviction on her record—not a good thing for a bank employee to have. 

Obviously if she merely forgot the summons amidst the 

distractions of a complicated pregnancy and a seriously ill 

mother whom she was ferrying from Rockford to Chicago 

and back—89 miles each way—she was not guilty of willful

disobedience of the summons. See United States v. Mottweiler, 

82 F.3d 769, 771–72 (7th Cir. 1996). Nor did the government 

argue that she was lying in saying she had forgotten the 

summons. Indeed no evidence of willfulness was presented 

by anyone. The judge had asked the government to initiate 

criminal contempt proceedings and it had done so, but all it 

had said (in the motion for a rule to show cause that was its 

sole participation in the case) was that she hadn’t complied 

with the jury summons, which of course was conceded. 

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Although the judge said that he had found her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, actually he’d shifted the burden of 

proof to her—she had to convince him that she had not willfully disobeyed the summons. She was the only witness. She 

testified in detail and without contradiction or internal inconsistency that she had “had a lot of things that were happening all at one time”—that she “was trying to help my sick 

mother and out on family medical leave. I was pregnant. I 

experienced complications with my first child,” and so she 

had forgotten the summons. The judge, consistent with his 

shifting the burden of proof to her, said (to whom? Oddly 

not to her): “I’m not persuaded by her statement that she was 

busy and forgot” (emphasis added). Yet obviously she was

very busy and harassed during the critical period, and he 

could not lawfully place the burden of proving innocence on 

her in a criminal proceeding. 

Had either the government’s lawyer or the judge questioned the defendant, evidence of guilt might conceivably 

have been elicited. One can even imagine evidence presented by jury officials regarding willful disobedience of jury 

summons. There was nothing like that. The only reason the 

judge gave for finding the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt was that he thought “that she in essence just 

didn’t want to be bothered with this summons.” He did say 

at one point that “Karenza is an intelligent person. She 

works at a bank. She’s articulate.” But he did not say that no 

intelligent person who works at a bank and is articulate 

could forget a jury summons no matter what pressures she 

was under—which would amount to saying that no intelligent and articulate person employed by a bank has ever forgotten a jury summons. 

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No. 14-3730 5 

The summons had stated that the recipient could ask for 

a “hardship excuse” from having to appear on the date specified in the summons. Since the defendant had adequate 

grounds to be excused, had she not forgotten the summons 

she would have been likely (being intelligent) to invoke the 

excuse rather than risk getting into trouble (she’s a bank 

employee and therefore needs to have a clean record). 

The point is not that she must have forgotten the summons—who knows? It is that proof beyond a reasonable 

doubt that she did not forget it is woefully lacking. The only 

solid evidence in the case is that she didn’t appear for jury 

duty on July 18. That cannot be proof of willfulness—

certainly not in the face of the uncontradicted evidence of 

the pressures she was under, her previous compliance with 

jury summonses, the availability of a hardship excuse, and 

the de facto refusal of the government to prosecute her. All 

the government did was carry out the judge’s order to initiate a criminal proceeding—it made no effort to demonstrate 

that she was guilty of a crime. 

We can imagine a parallel case in which, in the course of 

a criminal jury trial in which the defendant is testifying, the 

judge thinks he’s just heard the defendant tell a lie on the 

stand. Despite this belief he would be mistaken to send the 

jury from the courtroom, find the defendant guilty of criminal contempt, and sentence him on the spot, with the sentence to be added to the sentence for the crime for which the 

defendant is being tried, if he’s convicted, or to be served 

separately if he’s acquitted. In both our case and the hypothetical case the judge would have only a vague impression 

that the defendant might be lying, rather than evidence 

amounting to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. 

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Lying on the stand (to continue with our hypothetical 

case) is a basis for conviction of criminal contempt only if it 

amounts to a more serious obstruction of justice than ordinary perjury does; if not, the proper charge is perjury and 

the defendant is entitled to trial by jury. In re Michael, 326 

U.S. 224 (1945). A trial would generate evidence. The Supreme Court’s refusal in the Michael case to allow a perjury 

trial to be shortcutted by a summary criminal contempt proceeding reflects a natural discomfort with resting a criminal 

conviction on a judge’s determination of the credibility of a 

single witness, the defendant, with no other evidence being 

presented in support of or opposition to so thinly based a 

determination. 

The government, although as we said it did not prosecute 

the defendant in a meaningful sense, in our court defends 

the conviction on the ground that the judge, since he “was 

able to listen to not only the defendant’s words, but also to 

how she spoke and was able to observe her demeanor while 

she testified ... [was] in the best position to assess her credibility.” But the judge did not mention demeanor, unless his 

remark that the defendant is intelligent and articulate should 

be taken as a comment on her demeanor. Anyway, demeanor evidence, such as tone of voice, or gestures or posture, can 

be an unreliable clue to truthfulness or untruthfulness, and 

thus distract a trier of fact from the cognitive content of a 

witness’s testimony. See, e.g., Scott Rempell, “Gauging Credibility in Immigration Proceedings: Immaterial Inconsistencies, Demeanor, and the Rule of Reason,” 25 Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 377 (2011); Max Minzner, “Detecting 

Lies Using Demeanor, Bias, and Context,” 29 Cardozo Law 

Review 2557, 2566 (2008); Jeremy A. Blumenthal, “A Wipe of 

the Hands, A Lick of the Lips: The Validity of Demeanor EvCase: 14-3730 Document: 25 Filed: 07/23/2015 Pages: 8
No. 14-3730 7 

idence in Assessing Witness Credibility,” 72 Nebraska Law 

Review 1157 (1993); Olin Guy Wellborn III, “Demeanor,” 76 

Cornell Law Review 1075 (1991). 

There’s still more that was wrong with the district court 

proceeding. Neither the government in its motion to show 

cause or at the hearing before the judge, nor the defendant or 

her lawyer, nor the judge himself, mentioned a statutory basis for adjudging the defendant guilty of willful and therefore criminal contempt. The government did state in the fine 

print of the “Designation Sheet” filed with the court that the 

prosecution was pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 401 and 28 U.S.C. § 

1866, but the designation sheet was not mailed to the defendant or the defendant’s lawyer, nor referred to by the 

judge, who cited no statute during the hearing at which he 

convicted and sentenced the defendant. 

18 U.S.C. § 401(3) punishes criminal contempt but requires proof of willfulness, which is absent in this case. See 

United States v. Mottweiler, supra, 82 F.3d at 771. The written 

judgment order (usually filled out by a clerk rather than the 

judge) bases the defendant’s conviction on 28 U.S.C. § 

1866(g), which provides that “any person who fails to show 

good cause for noncompliance with a summons [for jury duty] may be fined not more than $1,000, imprisoned not more 

than three days, ordered to perform community service, or 

any combination thereof.” The statute does not mention willfulness and there is no appellate authority on whether a $250 

fine would be considered a civil or a criminal penalty for a 

violation of that statute. Conceivably the judge thought he 

was basing his sentence not on a statute but on inherent judicial authority to punish for contempt, see, e.g., Young v. 

United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S.A., 481 U.S. 787, 798–99 

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(1987), but he gave no hint of that. The essential point is that 

the judge thought he was sentencing the defendant for criminal conduct (the judgment order is captioned “Judgment in 

a Criminal Case”), and there was a failure of proof of such 

conduct beyond a reasonable doubt. 

A final point: during the brief hearing the judge seven 

times addressed the defendant by her first name. Calling a 

witness, let alone a testifying criminal defendant, by his or 

her first name is not proper conduct for a judge. 

This litigation has been mishandled by both the district 

court and the Justice Department, which should not be defending the judgment. The judgment is reversed and the 

case remanded with instructions to enter a judgment of acquittal. The $250 fine that the defendant has paid must be 

refunded to her forthwith. 

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