Court Opinion

ID: 9467807
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:57:13.547044+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:32.502787
License: Public Domain

WIDENER, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
While I concur in . the reasoning of the court as well as in the result obtained, I have one reservation.
So far as our opinion may be said to equate the standard for sufficiency of evidence necessary to sustain the conviction in Jackson with that announced by this court in Sherman, as the present opinion construes Sherman, I think it unnecessarily discusses a matter acknowledged by the opinion to be not before us. While it is true that in Sherman, p. 199, we did use remarkably similar language to that later used in Jackson, we also copied, in the same paragraph, in haec verba, the language from Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 80, 62 S.Ct. 457, 469, 86 L.Ed. 680 (1942), which we cited. I do not equate the Jackson standard, reviewing the sufficiency of evidence to sustain a State conviction when tested by habeas corpus, with the Glasser standard, when a conviction in a federal court is upon direct review. The Glasser standard is: “The verdict of the jury must be sustained if there is substantial evidence, taking the view most favorable to the government, to support it.” Glasser p. 80, 62 S.Ct. at 469.
While the Glasser standard, of course, would be subject to the Jackson constitutional limitation, nevertheless the Glasser standard should be construed to give a federal appellate court more leeway in reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence on appeal from a conviction in a federal district court than it has in reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence of a conviction in a State court by way of habeas corpus. That same difference, of course, would at the very least not lessen the power of the district court in reviewing a verdict of guilty. So, if the Glasser standard is valid, as I think it is, for it has not been overruled, it would serve to further bulwark the judgment of the district court appealed from.