Court Opinion

ID: 9758883
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:54:17.173353+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:01:29.235073
License: Public Domain

RUIZ, Associate Judge,
concurring:
I agree that the judgment in this case, like in Wooley v. United States, 697 A.2d 777, (D.C.1997), also decided today, must be reversed because we cannot have confidence that the crime of which Wooley was convicted is the same as the crime for which he was indicted by the grand jury. In this case, the trial court, at the instance of the prosecutor, deleted the language in the indictment which specified the drug which Robinson was charged with distributing (heroin) in order to allow the prosecutor to prove, at trial, that Robinson was distributing cocaine. The question in this case is not whether there has been a constructive amendment of the grand jury’s indictment, but whether the actual amendment of the indictment in this case requires reversal.1 There is no dispute that the trial court altered the charging terms of the indictment to fit facts developed by the prosecution subsequent to presentation to the grand jury. The stark circumstances of this case crystallize the danger of my two “concurring” colleagues’ (really dissenting) conclusion that, absent prejudice to Robinson, his conviction should not be set aside— once found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury after a fair trial — because of “a single misstep” by the prosecution and “an inadvertent error in the indictment.” See ante at 791, 792. Under that view, the grand jury is but a quaint technicality. That kind *794of reasoning, though facially appealing as “common sense” with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight provided through the lenses of a petit jury’s verdict, simply misses the point of the protection offered by the Fifth Amendment’s Grand Jury Clause.
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that “[n]o person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” The language of the amendment limiting the government’s power to “h[o]ld to answer” only those persons who have been indicted by a grand jury imposes a condition precedent on the government’s authority to prosecute. Ex parte Bain, 121 U.S. 1, 12-13, 7 S.Ct. 781, 787, 30 L.Ed. 849 (1887), overruled on separate grounds by United States v. Miller, 471 U.S. 130, 144, 105 S.Ct. 1811, 1819, 85 L.Ed.2d 99 (1985). Thus, a petit jury’s verdict cannot retroactively cure an unauthorized prosecution. Moreover, under traditional concepts of constitutional error analysis, where there has been a violation of a constitutionally-mandated “structural” feature of a criminal proceeding, harmless error analysis is inapplicable. As a result, reversal is required. See Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 309-10, 111 S.Ct. 1246, 1264-65, 113 L.Ed.2d 302 (1991); Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U.S. 254, 106 S.Ct. 617, 88 L.Ed.2d 598 (1986) (holding unlawful exclusion of grand jurors of defendant’s race to be structural error).2
Each of the concurring opinions in Wooley explains in slightly different terms how to distinguish between permissible and impermissible differences between what is contained in the grand jury’s indictment and the case presented at trial. That is the difficult question, defining when the constitutional line has been crossed in a particular case. There is no need to repeat their painstaking analyses here. What is worth bearing in mind, however, is that any analysis must be consistent with the purpose of the Grand Jury Clause to provide a community-based check before the full force of the law enforcement power of the federal government— prosecutors and judges — can be brought to bear on a particular defendant.3 Thus, any analysis that permits supplanting the judgment of the grand jury by a prosecutor or a judge defeats the very purpose of the protection intended by the Fifth Amendment. See Russell v. United States, 369 U.S. 749, 770, 82 S.Ct. 1038, 1050, 8 L.Ed.2d 240 (1962). Whether the inquiry is framed in terms of whether there has been a “broadening” of the charge, as Judge Ferren’s opinion in Wooley emphasizes, or whether the grand jury was presented with the same “nucleus of operative facts” or the “same crime legally understood” as the petit jury, as Judge Farrell’s concurrence in Wooley specifies, the underlying question is the same: do we know, with the certainty required to safeguard the Fifth Amendment’s structural constitutional protection, that this prosecution is what the grand jury intended when it returned an indictment against this defendant? That is a different question from asking what the grand jury might have done if it had been presented with the same facts presented at trial. Because the grand jury’s action is a condition precedent to the government’s *795prosecution, the trial must have proceeded as the grand jury intended. What the grand jury intended, of course, can only be based on the evidence presented to it. In most cases, however, a reviewing court is ignorant of that fact.
It is in this context that I take issue with Jackson v. United States, 123 U.S.App. D.C. 276, 359 F.2d 260 (1966), relied upon by both concurring opinions in Wooley and by my colleagues in this case. In Jackson, Judge Leventhal concludes that the crime of which the jury convicted was contained within the same robbery statute, although not within the specific statutory language quoted in the grand jury’s indictment. Id. at 278, 359 F.2d at 262. That conclusion, unassailable from the face of the indictment itself, still does not address the question whether the defendant was convicted of the “same offense,” in the factual sense of the same conduct, for which the grand jury indicted him. See Stirone v. United States, 361 U.S. 212, 215-17, 80 S.Ct. 270, 272-73, 4 L.Ed.2d 252 (1960). Thus, Judge Leventhal asserts that, unlike in Sti-rone, both the grand jury and the petit jury in Jackson were presented with “a single set of facts,” Jackson, supra, 123 U.S.App. D.C. at 279, 359 F.2d at 263, and that at trial the prosecution did “not add a new set of facts,” Id. at 280, 359 F.2d at 264. Thus, there was no fatal variance.
I do not quarrel with Jackson’s legal reasoning, but I question whether it can be employed in the usual ease. Jackson’s sweeping assertion distinguishing it from Sti-rone is unwarranted and impermissible; there is simply nothing in the language of the indictment itself nor in Judge Leventhal’s opinion to justify the statement that the same facts were presented at trial as were presented to the grand jury.4 The court in Jackson, like the court in Wooley and in this case, simply have no information whatsoever about what evidence was presented to the grand jury other than as can be gleaned from the indictment itself. Another appellate judge considering the indictment in Jackson could have, and, I submit, more justifiably would have, come to exactly the opposite conclusion that Judge Leventhal did. Based on the only known fact that the grand jury indicted for a crime committed “by force and violence, and against resistance and by putting in fear,” id. at 278, 359 F.2d at 262, the logical assumption has to be that the grand jury was presented with evidence that the defendant acted in a manner consistent with that description. The type of aggressive confrontation that would satisfy a description of “against resistance and by putting in fear,” however, is unlikely to satisfy the description of “sudden or stealthy seizure or snatching” that formed the basis on which the defendant was actually tried and convicted involving the surreptitious taking of the complainant’s wallet from her bag while she waited at a bus stop. Id. at 277, 359 F.2d at 261. Therefore, it is not at all self-evident from the language in the indictment that the same facts were presented to both grand and petit juries. The kind of hypothesizing upon which Jackson's analysis is based places the judge in the untenable position of evaluating unknown evidence that the judge can only attempt to guess at from the face of the indictment.
Concerns for judicial efficiency can create a temptation to affirm the conviction of a defendant found by a jury to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In this difficult area of the law, where the best-intentioned judicial assumptions easily can slip into impermissible judicial second-guessing of the grand jury, it is important that judicial opinions come down squarely in favor of constitutionally sound practice. Judges ought not to engage in reading grand jury tea leaves when reindictment provides the government with a simple and direct means to ensure that its prosecution is constitutionally authorized.

. As the government's brief states, amendments occur "when the charging terms of the indictment are altered, either literally or in effect, by prosecutor or court after the grand jury has last passed upon them.’’ Johnson v. United States, 613 A.2d 1381, 1384 (D.C.1992). In this case, the charging terms of the indictment were literally altered by the court at the request of the prosecutor and over the objection of defense counsel.

. Harmlessness analysis is applied under the plain error rule where there has been no timely objection. Johnson v. United States, - U.S. -,-, 117 S.Ct. 1544, 1548-50, 137 L.Ed.2d 718 (1997). In this case, there was a timely objection.

. The grand jury is an integral part of our constitutional heritage which was brought to this country with the common law. The Framers, most of them trained in the English law and traditions, accepted the grand jury as a basic guarantee of individual liberty; notwithstanding periodic criticism, much of which is superficial, overlooking relevant history, the grand jury continues to function as a barrier to reckless or unfounded charges. 'Its adoption in our Constitution as the sole method for preferring charges in serious criminal cases shows the high place it held as an instrument of justice.' Costello v. United States, 350 U.S. 359, 362 [76 S.Ct. 406, 408, 100 L.Ed. 397] (1956). Its historic office has been to provide a shield against arbitrary or oppressive action, by insuring that serious criminal accusations will be brought only upon the considered judgment of a representative body of citizens acting under oath and under judicial instruction and guidance.
United States v. Mandujano, 425 U.S. 564, 571, 96 S.Ct. 1768, 1774, 48 L.Ed.2d 212 (1976).

. The court did not refer to any facts underlying the indictment, but summarized the case as one involving "a single set of facts, the obtaining of property of the complaining witness on the date in question by force and violence.” Jackson, supra, 123 U.S.App. D.C. at 279, 359 F.2d at 263.