Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 836.0

529US3

Unit: $U58

[09-26-01 12:26:35] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 753 (2000)

761

Souter, J., dissenting

ant to appeal would require courts either to attempt wholly
speculative harmless-error analysis, or to grant new trials to
some defendants who were not harmed by the ruling, and
to some who never even intended to testify.
In requiring
testimony and actual impeachment before a defendant could
appeal an in limine ruling to admit prior convictions, there-
fore, Luce did not derive a waiver rule from some general
notion of fairness; it merely acknowledged the incapacity
of an appellate court to assess the signiﬁcance of the ruling
for a defendant who remains silent.

This case is different, there being a factual record on which
Ohler’s claim can be reviewed. She testiﬁed, and there is
no question that the in limine ruling controlled her counsel’s
decision to enquire about the earlier conviction; defense law-
yers do not set out to impeach their own witnesses, much
less their clients. Since analysis for harmless error is made
no more difﬁcult by the fact that the convictions came out
on direct examination, not cross-examination, the case raises
none of the practical difﬁculties on which Luce turned, and
Luce does not dictate today’s result.1

In fact, the majority’s principal reliance is not on prece-
dent but on the “commonsense” rule that “a party intro-
ducing evidence cannot complain on appeal that the evi-

1 The Luce Court anticipated as much: “It is clear, of course, that had
petitioner testiﬁed and been impeached by evidence of a prior convic-
tion, the District Court’s decision to admit the impeachment evidence
would have been reviewable on appeal along with any other claims of
error. The Court of Appeals would then have had a complete record
detailing the nature of petitioner’s testimony, the scope of the cross-
examination, and the possible impact of the impeachment on the jury’s
verdict.”
469 U. S., at 41. There are, of course, practical issues that
may arise in these cases; for example, the trial court may feel unable to
render a ﬁnal and deﬁnitive in limine ruling. The majority does not
focus on these potential difﬁculties, and neither do I, though some lower
courts have addressed them. See, e. g., Wilson v. Williams, 182 F. 3d 562
(CA7 1999) (en banc). For the purposes of this case, we need consider
only the circumstance in which a district court makes a ruling that is
plainly ﬁnal.