Court Opinion

ID: 9459455
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:20:50.078192+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:09.970603
License: Public Domain

BARRETT, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I must respectfully dissent, on basically the same grounds and for the same reasons stated by Judge Breitenstein in his recent dissent in Johnson v. Patterson, 475 F.2d 1066 (10th Cir. 1973).
The search for truth is and must always be the primary object of the criminal justice system. With this in mind, we have held that it is well established that there is a vast difference in the case of an accused who voluntarily takes the stand, and of the accused who refrains from testifying. Sinclair v. Turner, 447 F.2d 1158 (10th Cir. 1971), cert. denied 405 U.S. 1048, 92 S.Ct. 1329, 31 L.Ed.2d 590 (1972). In that decision we quoted from Johnson v. United States, 318 U.S. 189, 63 S.Ct. 549, 87 L.Ed. 704 (1943) as follows:
We cannot permit an accused to elect to pursue one course at the trial and then, when that has proved to be unprofitable, to insist on appeal that the course which he rejected at the trial be reopened to him. However unwise the first choice may have been, the range of waiver is wide. Since the protection which could have been obtained was plainly waived, the accused cannot now be heard to charge the court with depriving him of a fair trial. 318 U.S. at 201, 63 S.Ct. at 555.
The crux of the controversy here does not involve the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, but rather the issue of credibility. Judge Breitenstein observed in Johnson, supra, in the dissent:
By emphasizing the Fifth Amendment right and glossing, over the policy which demands truth of a witness and which regards adversary proceedings as a search for the truth, the majority loses sight of the balance which must be maintained. The effect of the majority [opinion] is to suppress a fact which reasonably bears on credibility and, hence, on truth. 475 F.2d 1066 at 1069.
An accused has no right to set forth to the jury all of the facts which tend in his favor without laying himself open to a cross-examination on those facts. Fitzpatrick v. United States, 178 U.S. 304, 20 S.Ct. 944, 44 L.Ed. 1078 (1900); Reagan v. United States, 157 U.S. 301 (1895); Sinclair v. Turner, supra. Deats’ pre-trial silence was properly referred to for impeachment purposes because of the inconsistency between his silence at the time of arrest and his testimony at trial. The record does, in fact, reflect that Deats did speak with police officers following his arrest. At trial, not only did Deats deny his guilt of the burglary and larceny charges predicated on his defense of alibi, but he called other witnesses who testified in corroboration. This, then, was purely and simply a credibility test. Deats effectively waived his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when he voluntarily took the stand and presented his alibi defense testimony.