Court Opinion

ID: 9488407
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:44:27.365315+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:52.434433
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
In In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 364, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 1072-73, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970), the Supreme Court held that due process requires “proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every fact necessary to constitute the crime with which [the defendant] is charged.” It is also familiar law that, in a federal court, a jury must be unanimous in finding a defendant guilty before he or she can be convicted. See Fed.R.Crim.P. 31(a). It seems apparent to me that we do not know whether the jurors in this case all agreed that particular language was threatening. If they did not, then defendant was not legally convicted.
With respect, I believe that the court’s reliance on Schad v. Arizona, 501 U.S. 624, 111 S.Ct. 2491, 115 L.Ed.2d 555 (1991) (plurality opinion), is misplaced. The issue there was whether a general verdict of guilty on alternative charges of premeditated murder and felony murder contained in a single count could be upheld. Id. at 631, 111 S.Ct. at 2496. The Court said that it could, but the case has no relevance to ours, since here only one crime is charged in each count. A plurality of the Court in Schad quoted McKoy v. North Carolina, 494 U.S. 433, 449, 110 S.Ct. 1227, 1236, 108 L.Ed.2d 369 (1990) (Blackmun, J., concurring), to the effect that “ ‘different jurors may be persuaded by different pieces of evidence, even when they agree upon the bottom line.’ ” Schad, 501 U.S. at 631-32, 111 S.Ct. at 2497. But that is permissible only if the facts on which the jurors disagree are inconsequential. If, for instance, half the jury believes that a defendant committed burglary by entering a building with a chisel and the other half believes that he or she entered with a knife, or a key, or some other instrument, but all agree that the defendant did not have the relevant party’s permission to enter, then the unanimity requirement is not violated, because all jurors agree that illegal means were employed to effect the entry. That is not our case. Our case is analogous to a charge that a defendant burgled two different houses, and it would hardly do to suppose that a verdict could be upheld unless the jury was instructed that it had to agree unanimously with respect to a particular burglary before it could convict with respect to it.
The district court’s instruction in response to the jurors’ quite explicit question was ambiguous and unresponsive to their quandary. It is certainly true, as the judge said, that in an appropriate ease the jury “must consider the letter as a whole,” if by that the judge meant that one cannot take statements out of their context, because context supplies meaning, and the . meaning of the defendant’s statements was the factual issue at hand. But that was not the difficulty that the jurors were experiencing. They disagreed as to whether certain language (presumably in context) was threatening. It is entirely pos*1053sible here that some jurors thought that one paragraph or sentence of a letter was threatening and others thought that another was. But that simply means that some thought that defendant committed a crime at one time and one place and others thought that he did so at another time and another place. These are distinct events and distinct crimes, like burglaries at different houses owned by the same person.
The court has recast the charge against the defendant by characterizing the “ultimate factual issue” as “whether each letter or postcard was a threatening communication.” With respect, the ultimate factual issue in this case, properly conceived, was whether certain language in each letter or postcard constituted a threat.
I find the case of United States v. Holley, 942 F.2d 916 (5th Cir.1991), entirely on point and convincing. There the court held that a unanimity instruction is required when several statements are charged as perjurious in a single count in an indictment. See id. at 928-29. What the Holley court was saying was that the unanimity requirement cannot be circumvented by the simple expedient of charging a defendant with having lied under oath sometime during his testimony. What the court allows here is precisely analogous, for it upholds a conviction essentially on a charge that a defendant has made a threat somewhere in a letter. That is not the precision that Fed.R.Crim.P. 31(a) envisions.
I have had a look at all of the letters and postcards that formed the basis of defendant’s convictions, and cannot say that any one of them was not capable of generating the kind of difference of opinion that the jury reported that it was experiencing. I therefore respectfully dissent and would reverse the convictions.