Court Opinion

ID: 9636102
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:16:47.258405+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:42.461512
License: Public Domain

WOODROUGH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I do not concur in the reversal of the conviction of the defendants in this case. I do agree with the majority that the trial court’s rulings on evidence and the instructions given the jury at the close of the evidence were not erroneous. I also agree *330that the defendants were proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt and I am satisfied they were rightly sentenced. The reasons advanced for reversal do not appeal to me. They are not directed to the merits of the case but are related solely to the form in which the court in the early stages of the trial undertook to warn the jury against the kind of misconduct on their part which occurs when jurors make up their minds before the evidence is all in. The argument is that such misconduct could occur if members of the jury should form groups and argue themselves into opinions before they have a right to do so. There is no hint or suggestion that any of the jurors in this case did anything of the kind, or that any one of them spoke an improper word throughout the trial, but the reversal is rested on the theory that the court did not sufficiently instruct the jury against that sort of misconduct. The trial court’s warning against that particular misconduct being deemed insufficient, it is reasoned that jurors may have thought themselves free to indulge in it. And as I follow the reasoning, the conviction has been reversed without finding that the defendants actually suffered any prejudice, solely on that possibility.
My guess has always been that when people bribe a juror they admonish him to keep his mouth shut in the trial, and that is what he does. The substance of the demand of the defendants in this case was that the court give all the jurors that same admonition (though they did not specify the language they wanted it to be couched in), and the court declined. It noted for one thing that it was not practical. No normal honest Americans ever worked together in a common inquiry for any length of time with their mouths sealed up like automatons or oysters. The unnatural conduct of the single juror who never said a word except “That’s the way I’m votin,’ ” drew natural suspicion. The jurors here were properly admonished by the court against the misconduct of venting expressions about the case that might commit them before the evidence was all in, and the court having indicated the purpose of the law and its own purpose to forbid such misconduct, summed up the whole matter by giving the jury the positive, traditional and proper command — “I say to you, avoid discussing the case among yourselves.” 1 Every juror obeyed that command and did avoid (i. e., “keep away from, shun, eschew, abstain from”) discussing the case, so far as the record shows. We have no right to assume the contrary.
Of course there is some discretion in the trial court as to how far he shall go in telling a jury, “Don’t do this,” and “Don’t do that,” and in this 'case the refusal of the court to say to the jury that he would rate any casual interrogation, or idle, inconsequ'ential, inadvertent or facetious remark a contempt, affords no ground for the speculations on the imaginary jury misconduct that have been elaborated. The defendants had no right to, and I assume they had no interest to have the jurors subjected to extraordinary, suspicious and unnatural silence among themselves. As I see it, if the jurors here obeyed the court and did not commit their minds till the evidence was all in, then the right of the defendants to open minded deliberation was preserved to them. They were not prejudiced and we are forbidden to reverse.
I do not find in any case that has been cited any instance in which a just verdict has ever before been vacated because of such remote possibility of misconduct of the jury as is suggested by the record here. There has been no instance of reversal of a conviction because of some remark of a juror not deemed to reflect a fixed opinion before the evidence was in. I am satisfied that there is no precedent for reversing this case upon the mere theoretical possibility of jury misconduct that has been propounded, and I would not create one. I would affirm.

 The record does not include any different admonition at any other time.