Court Opinion

ID: 9445596
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:34:06.585322+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:20.586353
License: Public Domain

JONES, Circuit Judge
(specially concurring) .
This Court holds merely that the trial court should have conducted a hearing on the matter put forward by the appellant as his reason for- not testifying and with that holding I am in accord. The majority seems to say that the absence of a certificate would require reversal. I doubt that there is any rule of reason or any precedent that makes the certificate a jurisdictional requirement to the imposition of summary punishment under Rule 42(a). The appellant did not raise the question in his motion to vacate. Had! he done so the error, if any there was, could have been corrected by the trial court. Field v. United States, 2 Cir., 1951, 193 F.2d 86. The appellant does not raise the question here. There is not, in the case before us, any suggestion that the tone of voice or demeanor of the appellant was contemptuous or a contributing factor to the contempt. He merely refused to testify on the stated ground that doing so would imperil his life. The record, without the certificate, fully re-*108fleets the facts out of which the adjudicated contempt arose. The certificate would be superfluous. Believing that the requirement of a certificate was not jurisdictional and that the error, if any there was, worked no prejudice, I would not consider the question in this case.