Court Opinion

ID: 9446310
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:51:57.997126+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:36.689524
License: Public Domain

MURRAH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
We all appreciate the necessity for maintaining the inviolability of jury trials and our inescapable duty to vouchsafe them in the administration of justice. And, we know that we can do so only by wholly disinterested jurors whose judgments are based only upon a consideration of competent proof produced in open court. See Southern Pacific Co. v. Klinge, 10 Cir., 65 F.2d 85; Little v. United States, 10 Cir., 73 F.2d 861; Stone v. United States, 6 Cir., 113 F.2d 70; Briggs v. United States, 6 Cir., 221 F.2d 636. We recently had occasion to re-emphasize our solicitude in this regard. Consolidated Gas & Equipment Co. v. Carver, 10 Cir., 257 F.2d 111. And see also Rubenstein v. United States, 10 Cir., 227 F.2d 638, certiorari denied 350 U.S. 993, 76 S.Ct. 542, 100 L.Ed. 858. Our problem is to achieve this ideal in an environment where crime and violence are exploited by news media and jurors are likely to be exposed, and consciously or unconsciously influenced by the emotional impact of the exploitation. In earlier times juries were completely insulated from all outside contacts. In modern times, the rules have been relaxed to allow jurors to separate under appropriate admonition not to read news accounts of the case on trial or to discuss the case with anyone, or to allow anyone to discuss it with them. Jurors have been trusted to observe these admonitions, and our faith has, in the main, been vindicated. We have indulged in the assumption that mere opportunity for prejudice or even corruption is no proof of it. See Holt v. United States, 218 U.S. 245, 31 S.Ct. 2, 54 L.Ed. 1021.
The necessity for conducting trials in an environment where separated jurors are almost unavoidably exposed to news comment, has led some courts to accept the “standard judicial hypothesis that cautioning instructions are effective” to eradicate the contaminating effect of inflammatory exposures, unless there is a “clear and present danger” of the deprivation of a constitutionally protected fair trial. See Chief Judge Clark in United States v. Leviton, 2 Cir., 193 F.2d 848, 857. See also Reining v. United States, 5 Cir., 167 F.2d 362; United States v. Allied Stevedoring Corp., 2 Cir., 241 F.2d 925; United States v. Postma, 2 Cir., 242 F.2d 488; Henslee v. United States, 5 Cir., 246 F.2d 190. Many cases on the subject are collected in an Annotation, 31 A.L.R.2d 417.
I agree with Judge Frank (dissenting in the Levitón case, 193 F.2d at page 865) that “trial by newspaper”, even in the very midst of irresponsible news comment, is neither inevitable nor tolerable. Without assaying to curb extraneous comment on trials, it is my belief that jurors, while engaged in the trial of a case, can be appropriately and conveniently insulated from exposure to public emotionalism, which often attends criminal cases. Emphatic admonitions by the trial court at the very outset of the trial against the reading of newspapers or listening to news media, would go a long way toward safeguarding the trial against insidious and inflammatory matters. The trial court is, to be sure, the first and best judge of what is calculated to contaminate the jury or may have the ineradicable effect of doing so. Appellate courts should interfere only when matters of judicial policy are involved. In my opinion, matters of policy affecting the administration of criminal justice are involved here and it is my duty to speak.
Of course intrusions may be only trivial or innocuous and certainly cur*101able by appropriate admonitions. It is important that mistrials or new trials not be granted for “trifling reasons”. See Southern Pacific Co. v. Klinge, supra. They may not be calculated to or have the effect of unduly influencing a juror, either consciously or unconsciously. But the newspaper article to which some of the jurors in this case were exposed stated not only the developments in the courtroom, it went on to state categorically that the accused had a “record of two previous felony convictions”; that while serving a forgery sentence in a state penitentiary, he had testified before a state legislative committee then studying new state drug laws; that he had told the committee of having practiced medicine with a twenty-five dollar diploma received through the mails; and had written and passed prescriptions for dangerous drugs. The other newspaper article to which some of the jurors were exposed related that the accused had been arrested with his wife; that she had been convicted on drug charges in the same court and sentenced to jail.
Since the accused elected to stand mute and did not offer his character as a defense, these statements were inadmissible and manifestly prejudicial. See Michelson v. United States, 335 U.S. 469, 69 S.Ct. 213, 93 L.Ed. 168. Indeed, no attempt was made to inject these matters into the trial of the case, and the court would have doubtless dealt firmly with any attempt to do so. Recognizing the gravity of the matter, the court conducted a searching inquiry concerning the jurors’ exposure to the newspaper articles and elicited from each of the jurors who had read them a vow that he or she was uninfluenced thereby, and would try the ease as if they had not read them. The inquiry was as careful and the responses as positive as one could expect, and if we are to take the jurors’ conscientious word for their state of mind, we must assume that all extraneous knowledge of the accused’s prior and damaging record was completely banished from the jurors’ minds and did not influence their consideration of his only defense of entrapment. But, the “naive assumption that prejudicial effects can be overcome by instructions to the jury * * * all practicing lawyers know to be unmitigated fiction.” See Jackson concurring in Krulewitch v. United States, 336 U.S. 440, 453, 69 S. Ct. 716, 723, 93 L.Ed. 790.
Without questioning the thoroughness of the judicial inquiry, or impugning the conscientiousness of the jurors’ avowals, it is my firm conviction that no juror could try this accused on the issue of whether he was in fact induced by the government to commit the act for which he was on trial as if they did not know that his past record and moral traits inclined him toward it. I cannot believe that the untrained human mind is capable of any such nice discriminations. It is too much to expect a juror, sensing the impropriety of having read an extraneous and prejudicial account of a case he is then trying, to admit any prejudicial effect.
If the jury is yet to be the factual judge of the defense of entrapment and the predisposition of the accused rather than the conduct of the government is to be the legal test, i. e. see Sherman v. United States, 356 U.S. 369, 78 S.Ct. 819, 2 L.Ed.2d 848; and Masciale v. United States, 356 U.S. 386, 78 S.Ct. 827, 2 L.Ed.2d 859, prior record and moral traits become of primary importance in the determination of that vital issue. For in cases like this where entrapment is the only defense, prior convictions of the same offense are to be sure the best evidence to show essential predisposition. This brings us face to face with Mr. Justice Frankfurter’s warning of the “Danger of prejudice in such a situation”. For, said he, “The defendant must either forego the claim of entrapment or run the substantial risk that, in spite of instructions, the jury will allow a criminal record or bad reputation to weigh in its determination of guilt of the specific offense of which he stands charged.” Concurring, Sherman v. United States, supra, 356 U.S. at page 382, 78 S.Ct. at *102page 826. The only escape from the dilemma is to commit the issue of entrapment to the court. But, so long as it remains a jury question, record and reputation to prove predisposition or lack of it must be relevant, competent and admissible. Harbold v. United States, 10 Cir., 255 F.2d 202. If so, such evidence ought certainly to be produced in open court with the traditional right of confrontation and cross examination. If they are to be excluded, as in this case, they ought not be permitted to seep into the jury room to poison the minds of the jurors on the vital issue which divides guilt and innocence. In sum, it is my view that if the extraneous matter disclosed in the newspaper articles is forbidden, it is ineradicably prejudicial. If it is competent and admissible, it ought to be imparted to the jury in open court. In any event, I would reverse for a new trial.