Court Opinion

ID: 9483545
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:23:45.259201+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:41.094501
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment:
Chief Judge Henry J. Friendly was a major critic of the Federal Rules of Evidence. “Evidence,” he maintained, “is not the kind of subject that lends itself to codification.” Under the pre-Rules common-law system, Judge Friendly argued, “if the appellate court believe[d] the result was just and there were no other errors, it [would] ‘find a way’ to sustain the trial judge. It will be immeasurably harder for an appellate court to reach such sensible results if the trial court has violated a black letter rule prescribed by the Supreme Court under authority from the Congress ....”1
Judge Friendly needn’t have worried. Appellate courts, district judges and the bar haven’t been buffaloed by “black letter rule[s] prescribed by the Supreme Court under authority from the Congress.” One need spend only a short time in our federal courtrooms to realize that a lively common law tradition continues to flourish in matters of evidence.2
This is a case in point. The government wanted to prove Wales was carrying two false driver’s licenses. The only possible purpose for this was to show Wales’s criminal propensities, something the character evidence rule forbids. See Fed.R.Evid. 404(b). The district judge at first excluded the licenses, but changed his mind after Wales introduced evidence that his passport and other documents were legitimate. By pointing to his legitimate documents, the judge ruled, Wales had “opened the door” to the fake ones. The majority agrees.
This “opening the door” doctrine has a certain common-sense appeal, but where is it to be found in the Rules of Evidence? I’m aware of no authority for admitting inadmissible evidence just because we think turnabout is fair play. Perhaps it would be sensible to let the licenses in, but lots of violations of the Rules seem equally sensible. It may seem sensible to admit hearsay whenever the declarant is unavailable at trial.3 But see Fed.R.Evid. 802. It may seem sensible to let witnesses be impeached with evidence of their past lies. *1329But see Fed.R.Evid. 608(b). It may seem sensible to allow defendants to prove their good character using specific acts. But see Fed.R.Evid. 405. But rules are rules. The basic policy judgments were made by their drafters; when we rely on common sense in admitting evidence contrary to the Rules, we’re simply substituting our own judgments for theirs.
In fact, the drafters considered the very issue presented in this case — whether the prosecution may introduce evidence of a defendant’s bad character once the defendant has introduced evidence of his good character. Rules 404(a)(1) and 405 allow such bad character evidence, but only in the form of reputation or opinion, not specific instances of conduct.4 The majority opinion directly contravenes this specific judgment.5
Even had we the authority to substitute our judgment for that of the drafters, this is surely not the way to do it. Look at just how little guidance the majority’s “opening the door” doctrine gives to judges and litigants. What evidence will open a door? How wide will the door open? If a defense lawyer calls his client a “law-abiding citizen,” does he invite evidence of every crime the defendant has committed? If Wales’s legitimate documents opened the door to otherwise inadmissible character evidence, would they have opened the door to inadmissible hearsay? Inadmissible opinion?
A lawyer anxious to keep out damaging information needs to know what subjects to sidestep in order to keep it out. A district judge deciding evidentiary questions needs to know what he may admit and what he must exclude. The majority’s opinion offers no assistance in answering these questions. Not only does it fail to announce a clear rule, it provides no basis for extrapolating a rule by analogy: Both the opinion here and United States v. Segall, 833 F.2d 144 (9th Cir.1987), on which it relies, fail to even mention the objection interposed to admission of the evidence. Can we infer that “opening the door” will sweep out of the way any and all rule-based evidentiary objections?
I’m unwilling to join my colleagues in their leap into the unknown reaches beyond the Federal Rules of Evidence. I conclude therefore that the district court should have kept the licenses out, as the Rules mandated. The district court’s mistake, however, wasn’t fatal. The evidence against Wales was so substantial that the admission of the licenses was harmless. Wales just didn’t behave like someone who had made an honest mistake. He declared $40 worth of purchases but somehow forgot the $48,000 in cash, even when the inspector asked how much money he was carrying. After the inspector found one packet of undeclared money, Wales said nothing. It was only after the inspector found a second packet that Wales finally owned up to the truth. Wales’s subsequent attempt to hide the gold coins helped show a motive for lying on the declaration. Faced with all this, any jury would certainly have convicted Wales even without the fake licenses.
Because the error was harmless, I concur in the majority’s result on this point. See Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 764-65, 66 S.Ct. 1239, 1247-48, 90 L.Ed. 1557 (1946) (error harmless if court can say with “fair assurance” that error had no “substantial influence” on the verdict); *1330United States v. Webbe, 755 F.2d 1387, 1389 (9th Cir.1985) (same). And, while I don't join Part B(l), I do join the rest of Judge Thompson’s well-written opinion.

. Hearings Before the Special Subcomm. on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws of the Comm, on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 93rd Cong., 1st Sess., at 262-63.

. The federal courts aren’t alone in this respect; there seems to be something inherent in evidence law that stubbornly resists codification. See, e.g., Frederick C. Moss, Beyond the Fringe: Apocryphal Rules of Evidence in Texas, 43 Baylor L.Rev. 701 (1991):
Beyond the fringe of the rules of evidence lies a dim region of trial practice where lawyers and judges toil in the shadows of the written rules. It is a world where the admission of evidence is sometimes governed by folk rules passed down from generation to generation of litigators. When litigators become trial judges, the bench, too, embraces these eviden-tiary customs. And when litigators and judges ascend to the court of appeals, occasionally these folk rules become enshrined in appellate opinions.
... [S]ome informal evidence rules have only a shaky footing in the legitimate evidence law of the codes and cases. Others have none at all. Yet, they thrive with daily usage. Many are the illegitimate offspring of genuine evidentiary principles that trial practitioners and judges have distorted so regularly that the distortions have independent lives. Others are completely spurious, the product of blind, unthinking acceptance of apocryphal evidentiary doctrines and rules of thumb.
Id. at 702-03; see also Victor J. Gold, Do the Federal Rules of Evidence Matter?, 25 Loy. L.A.L.Rev. 909 (1992).

.See Model Code of Evidence Rule 503(a) (1942) (making this proposal).

. The two situations in which Rule 405 allows evidence of specific instances of conduct — when cross-examining a witness who’s given reputation or opinion evidence, and when the defendant’s character is actually an element of the offense — don’t apply here.

. I realize there’s Ninth Circuit case law that talks of "opening the door,” but all these cases involve applications of "opening the door” doctrines present in the Rules themselves. For instance, United States v. Segall, 833 F.2d 144 (9th Cir.1987), which the majority cites, seems to apply the principle that otherwise irrelevant evidence can become relevant when other evidence is introduced. See Fed.R.Evid. 401, 402. The same is true of United States v. Joetzki, 952 F.2d 1090, 1094 (9th Cir.1991), on which the government’s brief relied, and of the majority’s Part B(4). Likewise, United States v. Stuart, 718 F.2d 931 (9th Cir.1983), also cited by the government, involved prior consistent statements, which are generally inadmissible hearsay but are made admissible by allegations of recent fabrication or improper influence or motive. See Fed.R.Evid. 801(d)(1).