Court Opinion

ID: 9476034
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:46:26.161895+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:06.158217
License: Public Domain

McMILLIAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in Parts I, II, and III of Judge Hanson’s opinion. I, however, must dissent from Part IV. I agree that the decisions of the Supreme Court and prior decisions of this court compel us to hold that Thomas’ constitutional rights were violated by the vacation of the sentence for attempted robbery, which had been completely served, and his continued confinement under the life sentence for felony murder. E.g., Ex parte Lange, 85 U.S. (18 Wall) 163, 21 L.Ed. 872 (1873); United States v. Edick, 603 F.2d 772 (9th Cir.1979). I do not agree, however, that this violation can be cured by sentencing or retrying Thomas on the lesser included offense of murder. I would reverse the judgment of the district court and remand with instructions to issue the writ.
The double jeopardy clause provides that no person shall twice be put in jeopardy for the same offense. I believe the clause prohibits not only multiple trials for the same offense and multiple punishments for the same offense, but also multiple trials for different offenses arising from the same transaction. Mathews v. Morris, 106 S.Ct. 1032, 1044 (Brennan, J., dissenting). “ ‘All the charges against a defendant that grow out of a single criminal act, occurrence, episode, or transaction’ shall be prosecuted in one proceeding.” Id. (citation omitted). The state should not be permitted to try or sentence a defendant on a lesser included offense, after a conviction for the greater offense is vacated because it is jeopardy barred.
However, even if a second prosecution is permissible under the circumstances of this case, I believe, contrary to the majority in Mathews v. Morris, that the correct test for determining whether a new trial is necessary is the test applied by the Sixth Circuit in Mathews v. Marshall, 754 F.2d 158, 162 (6th Cir.1985), rev’d Mathews v. Morris, 475 U.S. 237, 106 S.Ct. 1032, 89 L.Ed.2d 187 (1986). The Sixth Circuit held that a defendant should be granted a new trial if he or she can demonstrate a reasonable possibility that he or she was prejudiced in the trial of the lesser included offense by the evidence of the greater offense, which was jeopardy barred. As Justice Blackmun points out in his concurring opinion in Mathews v. Morris, the reasonable probability of prejudice standard is inconsistent with the harmless error test adopted in Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967) and Fahy v. Connecticut, 375 U.S. 85, 84 S.Ct. 229, 11 L.Ed.2d 171 (1963) and applied repeatedly to constitutional errors, which are not per se reversible errors. Mathews v. Morris, 106 U.S. at 1043. “Once it has *372been established that the state has violated the Constitution in the course of a prosecution, the proceedings lose whatever presumption of regularity they formerly enjoyed, and the state bears a heavy burden in arguing that the result should nonetheless be treated as valid.” Id.