Court Opinion

ID: 9492225
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:35:27.085828+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:11.305915
License: Public Domain

SHADUR, District Judge,
dissenting:
By framing the question as one of contract law approached from the perspective of the United States, the majority has reached a seemingly unimpeachable result. True enough, we are confronted with a plea agreement (“Agreement”) that was silent on the issue of Ralph Altro’s being subject to being haled before a grand jury in the future and that concluded with a classic integration clause negating any promises not set forth in the Agreement. In those terms the problem does not even appear to qualify as a tough question for a first year law school contracts exam.
But I suggest that oversimplifies the issue at Altro’s expense. As his current counsel frames the question presented in the opening appellant’s brief before us:
Whether the civil contempt order should be vacated because the district court’s order compelling appellant to testify in the Grand Jury violated the implicit terms of the plea agreement between the parties.
That may perhaps be less than felicitously phrased, so as to fuel the analysis in the preceding paragraph. But it must be recognized that is not Altro’s fault. After all, it is neither his original appointed counsel (who obviously did not anticipate the grand jury testimony problem that later faced Altro1) nor his present appointed counsel *378who must serve the custodial time for civil contempt — it is Altro himself.
Because the issue is one of contempt — of Altro’s violation of a court order — I submit that it is his mindset, and not that of the government in its impersonal embodiment, that is at issue. To reframe the question in terms of the statutory source for the civil contempt order (28 U.S.C. § 1826(a), quoted in footnote 2 of the majority opinion), the necessary finding that Altro’s refusal to testify was “without just cause shown” squarely places his reason for doing so, and hence his own intention and understanding in entering into the Agreement, into issue. And the record is totally devoid of direct information from Altro on that score (it is of course obvious that his intention and his understanding had to be derived from his client-lawyer communications with his district court counsel, rather than from the prosecutor).
But I further suggest that one need not accept that approach to find the government’s, and hence the majority’s, position flawed. Where I regretfully part company with the majority is in its emphasis on the absence of “any statement — oral or written — that could be construed as a ‘no cooperation’ promise.” Let me elaborate on why I believe that approaches the question before us from the wrong direction.
For that purpose it seems useful to pose a hypothetical that is clearly at odds with the facts, but that highlights the problem to be laid at the doorstep of the government in its collective sense — in this instance attributable not to any conduct on the part of the prosecutor who handled Altro’s criminal case, but rather to the conduct of the different AUSA who later came up with the idea of calling Altro before the grand jury in aid of the separate case being handled by that second prosecutor. There is of course nothing at all to suggest that either Altro’s prosecutor or Altro’s original counsel (or for that matter Altro himself) had the possibility of such later testimony in mind when Altro’s plea agreement was in the works. Indeed, if anyone had in fact thought of and addressed that possibility at that time, we can be sure that the United States would now have adduced that information and argued that point in opposition to Altro’s current effort.
But let us indulge a different and totally hypothetical scenario, purely for the sake of argument and to throw a searchlight on the problem that I see with the majority’s emphasis on the fact that the Agreement was coneededly silent on the subject of such later grand jury testimony. Suppose that the contrary had been true on the government’s side of the negotiation — suppose instead that the prosecutor handling Altro’s case, at the time that the plea agreement was being negotiated, had in mind that as soon as the Agreement was signed and accepted he would call Altro before the grand jury to provide incriminating information as to the very people with respect to whom Altro had refused to cooperate, at the price of his being sentenced to additional hard time under the Sentencing Guidelines. There still would not have emanated from the government “any statement — oral or written — that could be construed as a ‘no cooperation’ promise.” Yet would anyone view that kind of “Gotcha!” position as acceptable prosecutorial conduct? 2 Would not that have evoked the same kind of judicial response that this Circuit voiced so eloquently in United States v. Ready, 82 F.3d 551, 558-59 (2d *379Cir.1996)?3
As we said in [United States v.] Yemitan, [70 F.3d 746 (2d Cir.1995),] “[p]lea agreements are construed according to contract law principles.” 70 F.3d at 747. But of course, different types of contracts are subjected to different interpretive rules and background understandings. See, e.g., Farnsworth on Contracts § 4.26 at 313-15 (2d ed.1990)(in interpreting' “standardized agreements,” courts use several “judicial techniques” which sometimes have the effect of relieving the non-drafting party of its contractual obligations). “Plea agreements ... are unique contracts ‘in which special due process concerns for fairness and the adequacy of procedural safeguards obtain.’ ” Carnine v. United States, 974 F.2d 924, 928 (7th Cir.1992)(quoting United States v. Ataya, 864 F.2d 1324, 1329 (7th Cir.1988)); see also United States v. Herrera, 928 F.2d 769, 773 (6th Cir.1991)(“Although the plea agreement is contractual in nature, it is by no means an ordinary contract.”); United States v. Giorgi, 840 F.2d 1022, 1026 (1st Cir.1988)(“unique nature of a plea agreement”); Frank H. Easterbrook, Plea Bargaining as Compromise, 101 Yale L.J.1969, 1974-75 (1992)(“The analogy between plea bargains and contracts is far from perfect. .. .Plea bargains are preferable to mandatory litigation' — not because the analogy to contract is overpowering, but because compromise is better than conflict.”); Robert E. Scott & William J. Stuntz, Plea Bargaining as Contract, 101 Yale L.J. 1909, 1930 (1992).
As the Fourth Circuit has recognized, in interpreting plea agreements,
courts have necessarily drawn on the most relevant body of developed rules and principles of private law, those pertaining to the formation and interpretation of commercial contracts. But the courts have recognized that those rules have to be applied to plea agreements with two things in mind which may require their tempering in particular cases. First, the defendant’s underlying “contract” right is constitution-ally based and therefore reflects concerns that differ fundamentally from and run wider than those of commercial contract law. Second, with respect to federal prosecutions, the courts’ concerns run even wider than protection of the defendant’s individual constitutional rights— to concerns for the honor of the government, public confidence in the fair administration of justice, and the effective administration of justice in a federal scheme of government.
United States v. Harvey, 791 F.2d 294, 300 (4th Cir.1986) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted).
Several rules of interpretation, consistent with general contract law principles, are suited to the delicate private and public interests that are implicated in plea agreements. First, courts construe plea agreements strictly against the Government. This is done for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the Government is usually the party that drafts the agreement, and the fact that the Government ordinarily has certain awesome advantages in bargaining power. See Carnine, 974 F.2d at 928; Giorgi, 840 F.2d at 1026; United States v. De la Fuente, 8 F.3d 1333, 1338 (9th Cir.1993); see also Farnsworth on Contracts, § 7.11 at 518 (“common” rule that terms are construed against drafter “often operates against a party that is at a distinct advantage in bargaining ... [but] may be invoked even if the parties bargained as equals.”).
Although no inquiry was ever made on those lines by the district court, I would be *380astonished if the AUSA handling Altro’s prosecution and negotiating a plea agreement had any such hide-the-ball tactic in mind. And that clearly unacceptable fictional scenario cannot fairly be brushed aside as noncomparable to the present case just because in that instance the AUSA would have been guilty of a misleading omission, which was absent here. Instead I submit that it simply will not do for an AUSA who comes on the scene later, having his own fish to fry (quite properly, to be sure) in a separate prosecution, to advance that same “Gotcha!” argument by pointing to the fact that neither Altro’s prosecutor nor Altro’s defense counsel (to say nothing of Altro himself, of course) had thought of or had anticipated the possibility of later grand jury compulsion during the course of negotiation of the plea agreement.
In that situation it surely cannot be said that it is unreasonable for a lay person such as Altro to have believed that he had bargained away more time in custody in exchange for his having put behind him any prospect of incriminating his compatriots in any way. And it just as surely follows that such a reasonable belief must satisfy the showing of “just cause” that under the statute negates any incarceration for civil contempt. This is why the conventional contractual approach that would fit a commercial transaction cannot fairly be employed as the predicate for tacking added time onto Altro’s criminal sentence with the label of civil contempt.4
It is true, as the majority opinion states, that United States v. Garcia, 956 F.2d 41 (4th Cir.1992) may arguably be distinguished from Altro’s situation in some of its factual aspects. But I suggest that no distinction of that case is persuasive in terms of undercutting the sound policy that it reflects. And it should be remembered that Garcia came from the same court as Harvey, which this Court’s earlier-quoted opinion in Ready quoted so approvingly.
If the government is viewed, as it should be, as a unitary whole having the kinds of obligations (such as maintaining the “hon- or of the government” and “public confidence in the fair administration of justice”) that are expressed in Harvey, Ready and like cases, what the new prosecutor has done by defeating Altro’s obvious expectations is unacceptable. Though I certainly ascribe no fault to the well-reasoned majority opinion once its basic premise is accepted, I respectfully suggest that the premise itself is flawed. Accordingly I respectfully dissent.

. Indeed, as I point out later, there can really be no doubt that the prospect of taking Altro before a grand jury to implicate others, despite his express rejection of a lesser prison term for himself if he had agreed to cooperate against the same people, was not contemplated by the prosecutor who negotiated the Agreement either. And I submit that has to *378be considered as a key factor in whether Altro's later refusal to testify before the grand jury was contemptuous.

. After all, under that fictional scenario Al-tro's original prosecutor could also have pointed to the plea agreement's silence on the subject of grand jury testimony, and to the integration clause negating any further promises — just as the new AUSA who was assigned to handle not Altro's criminal case, but one brought against other targets who were as-sertedly Altro’s confederates, has done both before the district court in the grand jury proceedings and in his arguments before us.

. Ordinarily I am loath to repeat quotations from earlier cases at any length, preferring instead simply to cite them as authority. In this instance, however, it seems to me that the teaching of Ready is so powerful, and is so out of synch with the approach taken by the meticulously articulated majority opinion, that repetition of the earlier language is important.

. Because of the contractual analysis employed by the district court, and now endorsed by the majority, that inquiry into — and more importantly, that evaluation of — Altro's belief and its reasonableness in terms of the statutory "just cause” inquiry has never been made.