Court Opinion

ID: 9429793
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:27:55.170127+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:21.618774
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
with whom Justice Marshall joins,
concurring.
I join the opinion of the Court because I understand it to hold only that a defendant who does not testify at trial may not challenge on appeal an in limine ruling respecting admission of a prior conviction for purposes of impeachment under Rule 609(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence. The Court correctly identifies two reasons for precluding appellate review unless the defendant testifies at trial. The careful weighing of probative value and prejudicial effect that Rule 609(a) requires of a district court can only be evaluated adequately on appeal in the specific factual context of a trial as it has unfolded. And if the defendant declines to testify, the reviewing court is handicapped in making the required harmless-error determination should the district court’s in limine ruling prove to have been incorrect.
*44I do not understand the Court to be deciding broader questions of appealability vel non of in limine rulings that do not involve Rule 609(a). In particular, I do not read the Court’s quotation of Justice Powell’s concurring opinion in New Jersey v. Portash, 440 U. S. 450, 462 (1979), see ante, at 48, as intimating a determination with respect to a federal court’s in limine ruling concerning the constitutionality of admitting immunized testimony for impeachment purposes. In that case, and others in which the determinative question turns on legal and not factual considerations, a requirement that the defendant actually testify at trial to preserve the admissibility issue for appeal might not necessarily be appropriate. The appellate court’s need to frame the question in a concrete factual context would be less acute, and the calculus of interests correspondingly different, than in the Rule 609(a) case the Court decides today.