Opinion ID: 2656159
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Legal Standard for Compelled Immunity

Text: In Straub, we held that a defendant could establish a Fifth and Sixth Amendment violation by showing that: “(1) the defense witness’s testimony was relevant; and (2) either (a) the prosecution intentionally caused the defense witness to invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination with the purpose of distorting the fact-finding process; or (b) the prosecution granted immunity to a government witness in order to obtain that witness’s testimony, but denied immunity to a defense witness whose testimony would have directly contradicted that of the government witness, with the effect of so distorting the fact-finding process that the defendant was denied his due process right to a fundamentally fair trial.”1 Straub, 538 F.3d at 1162. Straub also recognized that “[a] survey of our opinions suggests that in the majority of cases where a defendant seeks to compel immunity for a witness, that witness’s testimony will not be ‘directly contradictory’ to that of the prosecution’s witness, or there will have been no distortion of the fact-finding process, and the district court may deny immunity on those bases.” Id. at 1161. 1 Our cases make clear that government witnesses who are granted favorable plea deals in return for their testimony are encompassed by Straub’s use of the term “immunized.” See United States v. Young, 86 F.3d 944, 948 (9th Cir. 1996) (“Of the remaining four witnesses who testified against Young, two . . . had entered into plea agreements with the government, and two . . . received immunity. In light of these plea agreements and grants of immunity, there is a serious danger that the government’s denial of immunity to Delfs—the only witness who could have impeached Drake as the government’s critical witness—distorted the fact-finding process.”). UNITED STATES V. WILKES 9 We have found direct contradictions where witnesses offer differing accounts of factual circumstances. For example, in Straub, immunized government witness Adams admitted that, if asked, he would deny that he had walked into a bar in 2003 and confessed to Mike Baumann that he had “just shot a guy.” Straub, 538 F.3d at 1162. The defense sought to compel immunity for Baumann, who was prepared to testify that Adams, the key prosecution witness, had arguably confessed to the very crime attributed to Straub. Id. at 1162–63. Similarly, in United States v. Young, the government offered testimony from John Drake to the effect that two defendants, Tamez and Young, used Drake as a middleman to distribute cocaine. 86 F.3d at 946. Tamez and Young sought immunity for David Delfs, who was prepared to testify that he had heard government witness Drake state that he was “falsely accusing somebody as being [his] supplier in the Tri-Cities.” Id. at 947. Delf’s testimony—that Drake said either Tamez or Young was falsely accused—directly contradicted Drake’s own testimony—that Tamez and Young both supplied him with cocaine. Accordingly, we remanded the case to the district court for the purpose of determining whether the failure to grant immunity had intentionally distorted the fact-finding process. Id. at 949; see also Benjamin v. Prosper, No. 2:03–cv–1166, 2010 WL 4630252 at –14 (E.D. Cal. 2010) (noting that proffered witness who would testify that she had stolen Sudafed directly contradicted police offer’s statement that the defendant had stolen the drugs). By contrast, in United States v. Alvarez we held that failure to immunize a defense witness was appropriate where that witness “had been to several ‘stash’ house locations and 10 UNITED STATES V. WILKES would have testified that [the defendant’s] home was not one of those she visited.” 358 F.3d at 1216. We held that “this does not directly contradict the testimony of the government’s witnesses that [the defendant’s] house was in fact used to store cocaine in 1996. In fact, [the defense witness] was not present during any of the shipments of cocaine to various ‘stash’ houses, so she was not in a position to directly contradict the government’s witnesses’ testimony that implicated [the defendant] in the scheme.” Id. Our cases thus illustrate what Aristotle expressed more than two-thousand years ago—that “contradictory propositions are not true simultaneously.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV 1011b13–14. Thus, a witness directly contradicts another witness if their respective testimonies cannot simultaneously be true, although in this context the proffered defense testimony “need only support (as opposed to compel) a finding by the jury that it was ‘directly contradictory.’” Straub, 538 F.3d at 1163. We next turn to the question of whether Williams’s testimony directly contradicts testimony given by either Combs or Wade.