Opinion ID: 608628
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Preclusion of Defendant's Testimony

Text: 24 In a pretrial deposition, Hartstein asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination in response to questions concerning his employment, his knowledge of and association with World Marketing Concepts (WMC), his knowledge of whether WMC ever did business in Washington, his knowledge of World Travel Concepts (WTC), and his knowledge of and advice to Washington resident George Moore. 2 At trial, Rainier objected to Hartstein testifying about his lack of business contacts in the State of Washington. The district court sustained the objection and precluded this testimony. 25 The district court did not abuse its discretion or render Hartstein's invocation of his Fifth Amendment privilege too costly by precluding Hartstein's testimony regarding his affirmative defense of lack of jurisdiction. See Campbell v. Gerrans, 592 F.2d 1054, 1057 (9th Cir.1979) (a person invoking the Fifth Amendment is to suffer no penalty for his silence--a penalty is the imposition of any sanction which makes assertion of the Fifth Amendment privilege 'costly' ). 26 The cases holding a civil litigant was impermissibly penalized for asserting the Fifth Amendment in pretrial discovery involve situations where the litigant's entire suit was dismissed by the district court without any consideration of whether less burdensome remedies were available to prevent unfairness to the party deprived of discovery by the assertion of the privilege. 3 See, e.g., Wehling, 608 F.2d at 1088 (when a plaintiff's silence is constitutionally guaranteed, dismissal of civil action is appropriate only when other, less burdensome remedies would be ineffective means of preventing unfairness to defendant); Campbell, 592 F.2d at 1054 (district court abused discretion in dismissing the case due to Fifth Amendment plea during discovery). 27 In the present case, the district court did not grant summary judgment or enter a directed verdict for Rainier, but rather employed the less burdensome vehicle of preclusion of Hartstein's testimony to prevent unfairness to Rainier. The district court appropriately balanced Hartstein's right to assert his Fifth Amendment privilege with Rainier's right to obtain discovery of nonprivileged information. 28 Evidence presented at trial indicates opposing counsel did not threaten Hartstein with criminal penalties to coerce him to invoke the privilege, but rather Hartstein invoked the privilege because of a pending FBI investigation of WTC. The district court also received evidence from Hartstein's deposition, in which Rainier warned Hartstein and Hartstein's counsel that if at any time Hartstein decided not to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege, Hartstein should give Rainier due notice of that so that we can have adequate opportunity to make discovery prior to the trial date.... [or] we will move to exclude any evidence at trial. Transcript at 6. Hartstein never notified Rainier prior to trial of his intention to testify. 29 Hartstein argues that the deposition questions concerning his employment, his knowledge of and association with WMC, his knowledge of whether WMC ever did business in Washington, his knowledge of WTC, and his knowledge of and advice to Washington resident George Moore involved separate legal issues unrelated to jurisdictional questions. He contends he did not refuse to answer jurisdictional questions, and thus he should not have been precluded from presenting evidence on the jurisdictional issue at the time of trial. We reject this argument. Hartstein's assertion of the Fifth Amendment at his deposition did apply to jurisdictional questions. 4 If Hartstein had not asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege, Rainier might have ascertained Hartstein's position on the controverted issue of jurisdiction. Furthermore, if Hartstein had not asserted the privilege, Rainier could have discovered Hartstein's association with WMC and WTC and WMC's and WTC's business operations in Washington, thereby establishing Hartstein's business contacts in Washington. In these circumstances, preclusion was the price of, not a penalty for, Hartstein's invocation of the Fifth Amendment. The district court did not err in precluding Hartstein's testimony.