Court Opinion

ID: 9470630
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:11:28.284807+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:01.199193
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
The role of a trial judge approaches at times the impossible in terms of the demands placed on him or her, especially when decisions must be made in the pressure-packed surroundings of a jury trial in a criminal case. When, in the cool of an appellate judge’s chambers, the action of the district judge is reviewed there is inevitably the troubling aspect that the appeals judge can decide with the benefit of a hindsight not available to the judicial official who presided at trial.
However, the test is not whether the appellate judge could have performed any better, or even as well, had his and the trial judge’s roles been reversed. The question is rather whether the key consideration of impartiality has been achieved throughout the trial. Quercia v. United States, 289 U.S. 466, 53 S.Ct. 698, 77 L.Ed. 1321 (1933). I have no doubt that the district judge intended to be impartial and strove to achieve even-handedness. Regrettably, however, I am compelled to dissent for the remarks made, in the course of supplemental jury instructions, indicated clearly to me a predilection for a certain outcome, a predisposition favoring a verdict of guilty.
Twice the pejorative adjective “faceless” preceded references to a supposed vendor of the bag carrying cocaine concealed within a hidden compartment. That usage conveys to me a marked disbelief in the existence of the “individual” or “person.” With that as a mood-setter, the district judge went on to ask “who had an opportunity to do anything?”, thereby evidencing strong distrust in a principal factual ingredient of the defense theory. That same distaste for the defendant’s story stands revealed by the statement beginning “So, you can think to yourself ...” (English translation: “How in the world could anything so improbable ever have happened?”).
That summary dismissal of the essentials of the defendant’s case as unworthy of serious consideration is finally underscored by the district judge’s concluding remark: “So, you stop and think about all that sort of *91thing, because these are the facts in the case.”
In sum, the defendant in a close case, where the jury, prior to the supplemental instructions, had been deadlocked 6-to-6, was denied a fair and impartial trial. Accordingly, I dissent from the refusal to reverse and remand for a new trial.