Court Opinion

ID: 9482979
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:07:05.556912+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:20.352552
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in Parts I, III and IV of the court’s opinion, but I respectfully dissent from Part II and from the judgment. To the extent that the district court erred in *88not requiring production of the grand jury transcript and the letter relating to defendant Rumler’s charge of prosecutorial misconduct in Rumler I, I think the error was clearly harmless.
The Jencks Act does not require the production of anything except a “statement ... which relates to the subject matter as to which the witness has testified.” 18 U.S.C. § 3500(b). In the grand jury proceedings that led to issuance of the indictments in Rumler II, Assistant United States Attorney Janice gave the grand jury a brief “overview” of the Rumler I investigation. This overview constituted a “statement,” and the government readily acknowledged before the district court that Mr. Janice had made statements on the grand jury transcript that “may” be construed as Jencks Act material. The overview obviously fell in this category, and it obviously should have been produced. The failure to produce it, however, resulted in no conceivable prejudice to any of the defendants.
The statement before the grand jury merely indicated that there had been a trial in Rumler I for the importation of marijuana by air; that a question arose as to where the money to buy the airplane came from; that there was an indication that the money came from a person named Scott Nickerson; that a subpoena was issued directing Mr. Nickerson to produce his records on a day certain; that he provided some documents on the day following the specified date; and that a police laboratory analyzed the documents to see whether they had been prepared in 1986 (the time specified on the face of the documents) or had been falsified later. The statement contained absolutely no information of which the defendants were not fully aware, and it was entirely consistent with Mr. Janice’s testimony at trial. Almost everything else said by Mr. Janice before the grand jury constituted either statements that did not relate to the subject matter on which he subsequently testified (advice to grand jury witnesses on their legal rights, e.g.) or questions posed to witnesses.
There may be rare occasions when a lawyer’s question to a witness can constitute a “statement” by the lawyer, but it does not seem to me that this grand jury proceeding represented such an occasion. As I read the transcript, it shows that Mr. Janice was doing nothing more than asking straightforward questions; he was not making “statements” in the normal usage of that term.
In any event, I am at a loss to understand how the defendants could have benefited from knowing the precise wording of the questions Mr. Janice posed to the witnesses before the grand jury. Counsel for one of the defendants stated frankly, in argument to the district court, that he was more concerned about the letter Mr. Janice wrote to the Department of Justice in response to Rumler’s misconduct charge than he was about the grand jury transcript. I have no reason to doubt that counsel for the other defendants would have shared that view.
The letter in question is relatively brief, consisting of only six paragraphs. It has nothing to do with the defendants’ falsification of the documents, because Mr. Rum-ler’s charges of prosecutorial misconduct had nothing to do with that subject. What Rumler’s complaint dealt with, insofar as it related to Mr. Janice, was the alleged fabrication of evidence by the government to show Rumler’s involvement in a criminal conspiracy to smuggle marijuana into the United States. It did not deal at all with the alleged falsification of documents by Rumler and his friends.
Mr. Janice’s response starts out by describing the charges of prosecutorial misconduct, and it goes on to deny Rumler’s charge that Janice conspired to manufacture evidence of marijuana importation. The letter explains that the marijuana case was developed primarily by another assistant United States Attorney — a fact brought out in the Rumler II trial and never challenged by the defendants — with Mr. Janice becoming involved only after the debriefing of key witnesses had been completed.
With reference to a charge by Rumler that Janice “deceived and deluded” the trial *89judge in Rumler I, the letter makes the obvious point that the record of those judicial proceedings speaks for itself. The letter also points out that Rumler made no such contention in his brief on appeal.
The letter then gives a short description of the indictment against the defendants in Rumler II, asserts that a person incarcerated with Rumler reported to federal agents that Rumler had told him he made his allegations in an effort to derail the investigation that led to the second indictment, and concludes with a flat denial that Rumler’s charges are true. The letter contains no information on the withdrawal of defendant Susskind’s original counsel, Neil Fink, and as far as I can see it contains nothing whatever that could have been of any possible use to the defendants in cross-examining Mr. Janice on the matters about which he testified in Rumler II.
Mr. Janice’s direct testimony in the Rumler II trial explained what happened during the earlier trial on the marijuana charges and dealt extensively with the falsified documents; it did not touch on Rum-ler’s allegations of prosecutorial misconduct in proving the conspiracy to import marijuana. For the most part, the subject matter of Mr. Janice’s direct testimony in Rumler II and the statements in Mr. Janice’s subsequent letter to the Department of Justice are only tangentially related— and although the relationship may be close enough to bring the letter within the Jencks Act, any error in not requiring the production of the letter was patently harmless.
With the possible exception of what the letter says as to Rumler’s telling a fellow prisoner about his effort to derail the Rumler II investigation, and the far-from-surprising fact that Janice denied Rumler’s misconduct charges, the letter contains no information that was not known by all three defendants. It contains nothing inconsistent with the testimony that Mr. Janice gave on direct examination, and it has no apparent impeachment value.
Even the strictest application of the harmless error doctrine should not, in my view, necessitate a new trial here. See United States v. Sink, 586 F.2d 1041, 1050-51 (5th Cir.1978) (failure to produce government agent’s investigative report was harmless error even though there were minor discrepancies between the report and the agent’s testimony), cert. denied, 443 U.S. 912, 99 S.Ct. 3102, 61 L.Ed.2d 876 (1979); United States v. Welch, 817 F.2d 273, 274 (5th Cir.) (failure to produce a witness’ reports was harmless error because there were no apparent inconsistencies), cert. denied, 484 U.S. 955, 108 S.Ct. 350, 98 L.Ed.2d 376 (1987); United States v. Roberts, 848 F.2d 906, 908 (8th Cir.) (“In the absence of evidence of either bad faith on the part of the government or prejudice to the defendant, a failure to disclose Jencks Act material ordinarily will not result in a reversal”), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 931, 109 S.Ct. 322, 102 L.Ed.2d 340 (1988); United States v. Sanchez, 927 F.2d 376, 379 (8th Cir.1991) (same); United States v. Boshell, 952 F.2d 1101, 1105 (9th Cir.1991) (“Without any suggestion that the notes would have helped appellant overcome the hard evidence the district court used to convict him, we cannot reverse”); United States v. Sperling, 726 F.2d 69, 72 (2d Cir.) (“even if the government withheld the [Jencks Act] tape deliberately, which it denies,” reversal is not required where “there is no reasonable likelihood that the timely production of the tape would have affected the verdict”), cert. denied, 467 U.S. 1243, 104 S.Ct. 3516, 82 L.Ed.2d 824 (1984).
In the case at bar there is simply no reasonable likelihood that production of Mr. Janice’s letter or the grand jury transcript would have affected the verdict. Accordingly, and because I see no merit in any of the defendants’ remaining assignments of error, including the ones we have not felt it necessary to discuss, I would affirm the convictions.