Court Opinion

ID: 9448569
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:40:12.484818+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:29.330857
License: Public Domain

ALDRICH, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
While the court is perhaps right that subsection (2) does not require further comment, in case someone might think otherwise I might point out that the court found, on unimpeached testimony, that the disc from which the report was transcribed constituted Staula’s words, “some recorded in the jottings [notes], some carried in Toomey’s memory.” It must follow that the notes contained less than what Staula told Toomey and less than what Toomey later dictated. Thus it must be clear that the notes were not the “substantially verbatim recital” described in section (e) (2). I do not gather the district court purported to find they were. It so described the combination of notes and memory which was the report. But section (e) (2) requires a “stenographic, mechanical, electrical, or other recording,” “recorded contemporaneously with the making of such oral statement,” not one prepared in the present manner a number of hours later.
*751With respect to section (e) (1) if this court is in error and the decision should turn on the correctness or incorrectness of the district court’s findings I do not think that all of them should stand. The principal basis for the court’s finding, concededly an inference, that what “Toomey dictated to the disc * * * was almost in ipsissima verba the narrative he had just checked with Staula,” was stated by the court to be Toomey’s testimony that “anyone who heard Staula and had Toomey’s jottings would have dictated the same words,” and that “if the first disc had been destroyed, he would have dictated the same words to a second disc half an hour later.” This was less than a precise representation of the testimony. While I do not wish to quibble, the witness twice added to “hearing Staula,” the broader qualification “[who had] the same knowledge of the case.” Rather than the phrase “the same words” twice used by the court, on the first occasion the witness stated, “substantially the same thing,” and on the other that the second disc would be “substantially the same.”
The court’s emphasis on ipsissima verba is heightened when one realizes that “just checked with Staula” means checked some seven hours before. I cannot bring myself to believe that the checking back with a witness at noontime of a consolidation of jottings and memory, and the dictation of a report in the evening, would result in the identity inferred by the court. If it happened it would be a surprising coincidence. I agree with my brethren that the statute is not satisfied in such a manner.