Court Opinion

ID: 9496584
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:30:17.365855+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:40.238687
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent from the court’s judgment because I think that Mr. Gutierrez’s right to represent himself, see Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806, 95 S.Ct. 2525, 45 L.Ed.2d 562 (1975), was interfered with when his standby counsel advised Mr. Gutierrez’s wife to seek counsel. Mr. Gutierrez had the right to maintain “actual control over the case he cho[se] to put to the jury.” See McKaskle v. Wiggins, 465 U.S. 168, 178, 104 S.Ct. 944, 79 L.Ed.2d 122 (1984). If standby counsel substantially interferes with “any significant tactical decisions” or “controls] the questioning of witnesses,” id., he or she violates the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to conduct his or her own defense. Standby counsel’s actions plainly did that here. If Rule 4.3 of the Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct requires or allows counsel to act as he did, it is unconstitutional as applied to the present circumstances.
Rule 4.3, moreover, did not, as the court intimates, require Mr. Gutierrez’s counsel to do what he did. At most, it might be interpreted to allow him to do so, but I believe that it does not even do that. First of all, the Minnesota Rule rather obviously evolved from Rule 4.3 of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct (note the identical rule number), which is aimed at ensuring that lawyers do not respond to questions put to them by an unrepresented person or otherwise give such a person the impression that they are impartial. The present case does not involve that kind of activity.
Second, if the rule were interpreted to require or allow a lawyer to deflect Mrs. Gutierrez’s intentions in the way that counsel did here, it would be unconstitutional for reasons that I have already indicated. It is a familiar rule of constitutional law that a construction of a statute or a rule that would render it unconstitutional is to be avoided if other reasonable constructions are possible, and I would apply that rule here. Construing the Minnesota Rule in the way that I propose would still leave a lot of room for its application. It might even be true that construing Rule 4.3 as the court does would require standby counsel to do something that would violate Mr. Gutierrez’s Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel, though that is not a question that we need reach here. Cf. Wise v. Bowersox, 136 F.3d 1197, 1206 (8th Cir.1998), cert. denied, 525 U.S. 1026, 119 S.Ct. 560, 142 L.Ed.2d 466 (1998).
Interpreting the rule in the way that the court does leads to the extraordinary conclusion that a lawyer has an ethical duty to act in a way that is contrary to the duty of loyalty that he owes to a party for whom the lawyer is operating as standby counsel. Such an interpretation ought to be avoided unless there is no reasonable alternative. Of course, I do not mean to intimate in the least that counsel here acted with an improper motive or for any reason other than a desire to abide by the Minnesota Rules. I would simply hold that he acted incorrectly, perhaps out of an abundance of zeal, but incorrectly nonetheless.
*904The actions of counsel interfered with Mr. Gutierrez’s right to put the case on as he saw fit because he was deprived of a witness who was going to provide significantly exculpatory testimony for him. The court suggests, as an alternative, that it was not counsel but the trial judge that caused the witness not to testify. But we cannot know that, because we cannot know what the trial judge would have done if standby counsel had not given the advice in the first place. It is significant to me that Mrs. Gutierrez had already been advised by counsel to whom she was referred that she ought not to testify, had taken the advice, and then changed her mind, only to be told by the trial judge that she should seek counsel yet again. Given Mrs. Gutierrez’s apparent willingness to testify on at least two occasions, it is a hazardous guess at best that she would not have testified when she first expressed an intention to do so but for counsel’s intervention.
It bears emphasis that Mrs. Gutierrez had as much a right to give evidence as she did to withhold it. Neither Mr. Gutierrez nor his lawyer, moreover, could deny her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent since neither was a government actor, and the right, of course, is secured only against state interference.
The government does not argue that the error here was harmless, and on this record I hesitate to say that it was. I would therefore reverse the judgment and remand for a new trial.