Court Opinion

ID: 9475311
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:23:51.087068+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:38.936792
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the result and the opinion. I write separately to emphasize several things.
First, the prediction of then Judge, now Chief Judge, Campbell, in his dissent, 652 F.2d 1126, 1140, has come to pass. He predicted that if the procedure of remand despite the absence of trial objections is to be allowed,
litigants will not only be encouraged to save up ammunition for de novo use in the appellate court, but already overburdened courts will end up holding double hearings at the expense of other litigants whose claims have yet to be heard at all.
No longer is it “double hearings.” Now it means at least a triple hearing, assuming — a not too unlikely assumption — that the government will not once again divert the district court from conducting the mandated factual hearing. As Judge Breyer’s opinion makes so clear for us, that is exactly what took place:
The district court eventually told the parties it would hold the evidentiary hearing to determine the facts in existence at the time the regulation was promulgated in 1974. The government then asked for summary judgment, arguing that the “proviso” issue should be decided on the basis of the administrative record, without recourse to an evidentiary hearing. Despite appellants’ request for the hearing to determine whether the danger zone regulation met the test of the statute’s “proviso,” the court did not hold the hearing. Instead, the court apparently accepted the government’s argument and simply granted its motion for summary judgment.
This case is once again a spectacular example of the lack of utility — indeed, the lack of sense — in the reflex making of motions for summary judgment. With society’s demand for finality in criminal cases, the government should have read, and then heeded, the plain words of this Court to proceed with the evidentiary hearing which the trial court was ready to conduct and which the Court had so plainly ordered “to determine whether 33 C.F.R. § 204.234 unreasonably interferes with the food fishing industry.” 652 F.2d at 1134.
*274Now, five years later, we start all over again. The guilt for this lost time1 cannot really be placed on the judiciary.

. Complying with this Court’s mandate would have assured a decision which could (and ought to) have been the subject of this present appeal:
If the district court rules that the danger zone regulation complies with the fishing proviso, the convictions shall stand. If the court rules to the contrary, it shall dismiss the informa-tions.
652 F.2d at 1134.