Court Opinion

ID: 9419307
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:48:35.690568+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:17.346461
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring:
In reviewing criminal cases, it is particularly important for appellate courts to re-live the whole trial imaginatively and not to extract from episodes in isolation abstract questions of evidence and procedure. To turn a criminal appeal into a quest for error no more promotes the ends of justice than to acquiesce in low standards of criminal prosecution.
An examination of the entire record of the proceedings leaves me without doubt that Judge Maris conducted the trial with conspicuous fairness, and that he committed no error in the rulings complained of unless it be one in favor of the defendant. In allowing the defendant to withhold testimony regarding gambling receipts for 1938, the trial court, in recognizing the threat of future prosecution of the defendant for evading taxes in that year, was exercising a merciful discretion. For this avenue of inquiry plainly was relevant to the truth of the charges against Johnson in the present proceeding. In view of all that took place at the trial, to have denied the jury an opportunity to consider the significance of the defendant’s desire not to testify regarding gambling receipts in 1938 would have been to withhold from them a factor relevant-in determining whether Johnson’s explanation of what he did with the “protection” money received by him in 1936 and 1937 was the truth or just a cock-and-bull story.
*203That the defendant’s senior counsel, a lawyer of long experience in federal criminal practice, did not take exception to the manner in which Judge Maris tempered concern for the proper administration of justice with solicitude for the rights of the defendant, indicates not “waiver” of a right which had been denied but recognition that the action of the trial judge was unexceptionable. The claim that the trial was conducted improperly is obviously an afterthought. Only after conviction and in an effort to upset the jury’s verdict on appeal was the fair conduct of the trial court sought to be distorted into an impropriety.