Court Opinion

ID: 9481851
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:33:41.118817+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:37.128434
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
with whom CUMMINGS, CUDAHY, EASTERBROOK, and RIPPLE, Circuit Judges, join,
dissenting.
As a result of the introduction by the prosecutor of unauthorized materials into the jury room, and the trial judge’s failure to apply the correct legal standard in determining whether that introduction had prejudiced the jury’s deliberations, the three defendants were improperly convicted, and are entitled, as the panel unanimously found, to a new trial. Although there was adequate evidence of the defendants’ guilt, it was a close case, and defendant Conarty in particular might well have been acquitted but for the business with the binders.
At the beginning of this seven-week trial of a complicated financial fraud, the government, with the judge’s permission, supplied each juror with a loose-leaf binder containing the key government exhibits, arranged by transaction, to assist the jury in following the evidence. Because the exhibits in the binders had not yet been placed in evidence, the judge told the jurors not to look in the binders until a particular exhibit was admitted into evidence, and then to look only at that exhibit. He also told them to leave the binders in the jury box during recesses. When the trial ended and the jury left the box, the binders were still there, lying on the floor beside each juror’s seat; several spare binders were also lying on the floor. The original exhibits were in ten boxes, nine containing the government’s exhibits and one the defendants’. (The defendants had not supplied the jurors with copies, bound or otherwise, of their exhibits, so the only defendants’ exhibits that the jurors had seen or would ever see were the original exhibits.) At this time the defendants’ lawyers, according to affidavits they submitted, had a brief discussion with the prosecutor about which exhibits would go to the jury room, and it was agreed that only the ten boxes of original exhibits would go, together with some charts summarizing parts of the evidence— not the government’s binders.
The defendants’ lawyers then left the courtroom, and the judge turned to his motion call. The prosecutor was still in the courtroom. In her presence an FBI agent who had assisted in the prosecution loaded both the ten boxes of original exhibits, which had been lying on the first-row spectators’ bench, and the government’s binders, onto a cart that the marshal then wheeled into the jury room. The prosecutor denies having told the defendants’ lawyers that the binders would not be going to the jury room, but she did not make this denial in an affidavit under oath, as the defendants’ lawyers had done with their version of the conversation. According to the FBI agent’s “affidavit,” which was also unsworn, the prosecutor actually helped him load the binders onto the cart. The district judge made no finding as to who was telling the truth, so for purposes of this appeal we must (even if we disregard *433the prosecution’s unexplained failure to execute proper affidavits) assume that the binders were sent to the jury without the consent or acquiescence of the defendants’ lawyers.
A chance remark by the marshal to one of the defense lawyers that the jury room was getting messy with all the exhibits and books lying around revealed, after the jury had been deliberating for four days, that the binders were in the jury room. The defense immediately protested to the judge, moved for a mistrial, and demanded that the binders be withdrawn from the jury room as soon as the jury broke for the weekend. The prosecutor made no objection to that demand. The judge waited until the jury had left and then had the binders withdrawn and sealed in a garbage bag together with yellow sheets of paper, which had been inserted in the binders, on which the jurors had made notes.
The jurors had been told nothing about the contretemps over the binders, but when they arrived Monday morning to resume their deliberations they immediately noticed that the binders were gone. The jury foreman went to the judge’s chambers and told the judge’s secretaries that the binders had disappeared and that he was afraid that someone had broken into the jury room and stolen them. He was given no explanation for the disappearance of the binders, or of the jurors’ notes that disappeared with them. Those notes, by the way, were all the notes the jurors had made during their deliberations to date. For, concerned lest the cleaning staff or other building personnel read the notes, the jurors had adopted the practice of tucking all their notes into the government binders at the end of each day’s deliberations.
The jury resumed its deliberations and four hours later brought in its verdict. The judge then summoned the jurors to his chambers one by one and in the presence of the lawyers asked the jurors whether they had used the binders in their deliberations to the exclusion of the original exhibits. Their answers (which were brief, and there were virtually no follow-up questions) indicated, first, that they had indeed used the binders in their deliberations — and not just as a place for storing notes. One juror said, “the book [i.e., the government binder] was always in front of me.” But they had not used them to the exclusion of the original exhibits. One juror said, “we were in and out of all those boxes”; another, “one person would go through the file [in the boxes of original exhibits], and just grab whatever piece of evidence we were trying to look for. The other members of the jury would then look in the jury book if it was listed in the jury book.” A third juror said, “after you withdrew the books [i.e., the government binders]” — for the judge had now told the jurors that the binders had been withdrawn at his direction rather than just having mysteriously disappeared — “we went back to the original exhibits.” The judge then denied the defendants’ motion for a mistrial.
Both the district court and this court make much of the fact that all the exhibits in the government’s binders had been admitted into evidence. That cannot be the end of our inquiry. If the prosecutor had entered the jury room during the jurors’ deliberations and told the jurors that if they examined the original exhibits in the following sequence it would help them to understand the defendants’ guilt, no judge would think that the fact that all the exhibits were in evidence would save the conviction. Instead of visiting the jury room in person the prosecutor sent into it a road-map to a guilty verdict, in the form of suggestively sequenced selections from nine boxes of government exhibits, for the jurors to use in their deliberations. The ordering of familiar materials is a form of creativity recognized in law: you can copyright a compilation of materials that are in the public domain. And you can convict a man by a tendentious compilation of exhibits already in evidence.
The district judge brushed aside this concern after satisfying himself that the jurors had looked at the original exhibits as well as the government binders. Our court now goes him one better by holding that the judge’s initial permission to the government to give the exhibit binders to the jury was permission that the jury could use *434them in its deliberations. The judge obviously didn’t think he had given the broader permission. If he had, he would not have summoned the jurors to his chambers and quizzed them on the use they had made of the binders and of the original exhibits. He did this because it was only through a slip-up that the binders had found their way into the jury room. Why else was the prosecutor so quick to stipulate with the defendants’ lawyers for the withdrawal of the binders from the jury room in the midst of the jury’s deliberations? That withdrawal made sense only as an effort to rectify an error. Otherwise it would have been a gratuitous interference with the orderly deliberations of the jury. For remember that along with the binders were removed — also without any explanation— all of the jurors’ notes. Remember also that the jurors completed their deliberations under the impression that someone might have broken into the jury room and stolen the binders and notes. How could this deformation of the jury’s deliberations have made any sense if the binders were properly in the jury room?
I said that you can convict a man with a tendentious compilation of evidence. I will illustrate with Conarty. Best and Bewick, Conarty’s two codefendants, were, respectively, the top man and the second in command at a savings and loan association. They were charged with approving a number of improper loans, but Conarty, the association’s in-house counsel, was charged in connection with only one of these transactions, the Kings Point loan. It was a loan to a partnership, but two of the three partners were ineligible to borrow from the bank. One of them, Henning, was in bankruptcy. This much Conarty undeniably knew because he was one of Henning’s creditors and had filed a claim in the bankruptcy proceeding. Another partner, An-dreuccetti, also was uncreditworthy, although there is no evidence that Conarty knew this. At the closing, some of the loan moneys were paid directly to Henning, who then cut a check to Conarty that paid off Henning's indebtedness to him in full. Pernice, the third borrowing partner, also used a portion of the loan moneys to pay a preexisting debt to Conarty. Conarty received a total of $13,000 at the closing. The loan was improper, and if Conarty knew this he was guilty of fraud. There was circumstantial evidence — not least the use of a part of the loan to pay off unrelated debts to him — that he did know. But it was a close case. One reason Judge Bua gave for not quizzing the jurors about the binders before the jury completed its deliberations was that the issue would be moot if the jury returned verdicts of not guilty. In his words, “there’s a chance, and I see it quite possible, that Mr. Conarty’s ease could very well go not guilty.”
The government binders made it easy for the jury to infer Conarty’s guilty knowledge, because they grouped all the documents relevant to the Kings Point transaction under one tab, which the boxes of original exhibits did not do. There were the checks cut to Conarty right alongside the loan documents themselves. In fact the checks were located in the binder directly after Andreucetti’s unimpressive financial statement, demonstrating his lack of creditworthiness, even though there was no evidence that Conarty (who was not a member of the savings and loan association’s loan committee) had ever seen the statement, or for that matter the loan documents. It was a suggestive juxtaposition.
The utility of the binders as a guide to guilt was enhanced by the fact that there were so many of them — sixteen or seventeen: one for each juror, with several extras. There were of course no defense exhibits in them. If the jurors wanted to look at defense exhibits they had to go to the original exhibits, which contained one box of defense exhibits: one box, for twelve jurors.
There is nothing wrong with a party’s placing its key exhibits in binders for the jurors to use during their deliberations, as well as during the trial itself. But of course the other party is entitled to notice that this is going to be done. If the defendants’ lawyers had known that the jury would have the government’s binders in the jury room, they might have supplied their own binders to the jury, with their own *435ordering of exhibits, and they might have objected to the selection and arrangement of the exhibits in the government’s binders. They had no opportunity to do these things. The fact that the jury had the government’s binders and no binders from the defendants was calculated to enhance the authority of the government’s binders in the jurors’ eyes and to validate the suggestive order in which the exhibits were arranged in those binders. Note that when questioned by the judge, the jurors referred to the government binders not as a government compilation but simply as “the jury book.” So, as a matter of fact, did the judge.
The district court’s lack of control over what went to the jury room, the prosecutor’s and the FBI agent’s failures (unexplained to this day) to attest their affidavits, the prosecutor’s opposition to an evidentiary hearing to clear up the issue of responsibility for the binders’ having found their way into the jury room, the disrespect shown the jurors by the spiriting away of the binders and especially of all their notes without any explanation — all these are deeply regrettable features of this case, and in fact embarrassments to federal justice. But we cannot reverse the convictions unless there was a “reasonable possibility” that the presence in the jury room of unauthorized materials affected the jury’s verdict. United States v. Bruscino, 687 F.2d 938, 940 (7th Cir.1982) (en banc). That is a judgment to be made in the first instance by the trial judge, who having observed the jury during the trial is in a better position than we to gauge the probable impact of the unauthorized materials on the outcome. Our review of his judgment is therefore deferential, which explains the cases such as United States v. Weisman, 736 F.2d 421 (7th Cir.1984), cited in the majority opinion, in which we and other courts of appeals have affirmed refusals by district judges to grant a mistrial on the basis of the introduction of unauthorized materials into the jury room when the judge had framed the inquiry relevant to his exercise of discretionary judgment in a proper and responsible fashion. Id. at 426. In this case he did not. He asked the jurors whether they had consulted the original exhibits as well as the binders, and when they said they had he denied the motion for a mistrial. He asked the wrong question. It is the rare case of introducing unauthorized materials into the jury room in which the jury looks only at those materials. That cannot be the decisive consideration. Nor the fact that the exhibits in the binders were in evidence (and in fact when the judge denied the mistrial right after interviewing the jurors, there was an open question whether all the exhibits really had been admitted into evidence). The binders —Ariadne’s thread through the maze constituted by the ten boxes of original exhibits — were not in evidence.
The rule that precludes inquiry into the reasoning process by which a jury reached its verdict does not preclude inquiry into the prejudicial impact of extraneous information on the jury’s deliberations. Fed.it. Evid. 606(b). The judge should have inquired into the effect on the jury’s deliberations of the order of exhibits in the government binders — for example, had the jurors assumed that Conarty had seen Andreucet-ti’s financial statement and the other documents for the Kings Point loan? On the basis of such inquiry, plus an evaluation of the strength of the evidence against Conarty and the other defendants, the judge could have made an informed and responsible decision as to whether there was a reasonable possibility that the use of the binders in the jury’s deliberations had changed the outcome of the case — and we would be bound by that decision. The judge’s perfunctory and loaded inquiry (e.g., “Did you use the jury book to the exclusion of all the other exhibits and evidence you heard in the case?”) suggests more than anything else a determination not to have to sit through another seven-week trial.
Ordinarily when a district judge has failed to exercise the discretion that is his the remedy is a remand to enable him to exercise it. That is not feasible here. The jurors are scattered to the winds and can no longer be questioned about the impact of the binders, and the judge has commit*436ted himself to the view that the binders did no harm. The bell cannot be unrung. The defendants are entitled to a new trial.