Opinion ID: 110933
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Harmless Error

Text: Since the Court of Appeals focused its attention on Griffin rather than Chapman, an appropriate starting point is to recall the sequence of these two cases. Griffin was decided first. In that case, a California prosecutor, in accordance with a provision of the California Constitution, commented to the jury on a defendant's failure to provide evidence on matters that only he could have been expected to deny or explain. In reliance on Wilson v. United States, 149 U. S. 60 (1893), the Griffin Court interpreted the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination to mean that comment on the failure to testify was an unconstitutional burden on the basic right. Accordingly, the Court held that the constitutional provision permitting prosecutorial comment on the failure of the accused to testify violated the Fifth Amendment. Soon after Griffin, however, this Court decided Chapman v. California , which involved prosecutorial comment on the defendant's failure to testify in a trial that had been conducted in California before Griffin was decided. The question was whether a Griffin error was per se error requiring automatic reversal or whether the conviction could be affirmed if the reviewing court concluded that, on the whole record, the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. In Chapman this Court affirmatively rejected a per se rule. After examining the harmless-error rules of the 50 States along with the federal analog, 28 U. S. C. § 2111, the Chapman Court stated: All of these rules, state or federal, serve a very useful purpose insofar as they block setting aside convictions for small errors or defects that have little, if any, likelihood of having changed the result of the trial. We conclude that there may be some constitutional errors which in the setting of a particular case are so unimportant and insignificant that they may, consistent with the Federal Constitution, be deemed harmless, not requiring the automatic reversal of the conviction. 386 U. S., at 22 (emphasis added). In holding that the harmless-error rule governs even constitutional violations under some circumstances, [6] the Court recognized that, given the myriad safeguards provided to assure a fair trial, and taking into account the reality of the human fallibility of the participants, there can be no such thing as an error-free, perfect trial, and that the Constitution does not guarantee such a trial. Brown v. United States, 411 U. S. 223, 231-232 (1973), citing Bruton v. United States, 391 U. S. 123, 135 (1968); cf. Engle v. Isaac, 456 U. S. 107, 133-134 (1982). Chapman reflected the concern, later noted by Chief Justice Roger Traynor of the Supreme Court of California, that when courts fashion rules whose violations mandate automatic reversals, they retrea[t] from their responsibility, becoming instead `impregnable citadels of technicality.'  R. Traynor, The Riddle of Harmless Error 14 (1970) (quoting Kavanagh, Improvement of Administration of Criminal Justice by Exercise of Judicial Power, 11 A. B. A. J. 217, 222 (1925)). Since Chapman, the Court has consistently made clear that it is the duty of a reviewing court to consider the trial record as a whole and to ignore errors that are harmless, including most constitutional violations, see, e. g., Brown, supra, at 230-232; Harrington v. California, 395 U. S. 250 (1969); Milton v. Wainwright, 407 U. S. 371 (1972). The goal, as Chief Justice Traynor has noted, is to conserve judicial resources by enabling appellate courts to cleanse the judicial process of prejudicial error without becoming mired in harmless error. Traynor, supra, at 81. Here, the Court of Appeals, while making passing reference to the harmless-error doctrine, did not apply it. Its analysis failed to strike the balance between disciplining the prosecutor on the one hand, and the interest in the prompt administration of justice and the interests of the victims on the other. [7]