Court Opinion

ID: 9456503
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:55:02.404388+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:00.298627
License: Public Domain

FRIENDLY, Circuit Judge,
(concurring), with whom MOORE and HAYS, Circuit Judges, concur:
I agree that the denial of the writ should be affirmed. But I would vacate the order granting in banc consideration as having been made under a misapprehension of the facts.
If ever there were a defendant who suffered no prejudice from trial delay, it was Calvin Frizer. As the panel’s per curiam affirmance made clear, he was under almost continuous observation by Mrs. Hubbell from the moment he began entering her home to help himself to her property until she identified him and his truck when the police, responding to her telephone call, produced him for identification only a few minutes after he had left the premises. Frizer offered no semblance of a defense. Such appeal as there was in the case lay in counsel’s assertion that Frizer had been languishing in jail for a year before the inevitable result of his trial, supposedly because of inability to make bail.
It now develops that during eight of these twelve months Frizer was serving a sentence for another attempted grand larceny in an adjacent county, a charge to which he had pleaded guilty. Despite some language in Smith v. Hooey, 393 U.S. 374, 378-379, 89 S.Ct. 575, 21 L.Ed.2d 607 (1969), where there had been a six-year delay, I cannot believe the votes necessary for in banc reconsideration could have been mustered if the court had known this. Now that we do know, we should not dignify Frizer’s case with an in banc opinion. The prescription of rules for federal trials under our supervisory power, 28 U.S.C. § 332, is quite another matter.