Court Opinion

ID: 9463822
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:17:13.926021+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:18.124227
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
The majority seems to me to reverse because Tate and Delgado were not accorded a perfect trial — only a fair one. But live criminal trials partake unavoidably of a certain catch-as-catch-can quality; and the application of so fine a degree of technical hindsight as this to the trial judge’s rulings and instructions, where no substantial harm can possibly have been suffered, tends to produce a most undesirable, almost capricious, unevenness and uncertainty of result.
The majority reverses this case because, parsing the charge in relevant part sentence by sentence, it concludes the jury may have thought that if the defendants presented no evidence of entrapment, then the government was not required to prove predisposition beyond a reasonable doubt. Whatever its merits as an abstract proposition, this reasoning can have no practical application here. For here each defendant took the stand and, testifying at length, accused the government informant of all manner of harassment, intimidation and duress which overpowered his resistance and drove him to his criminal act. It is quite inconceivable this jury could have thought, in the real world of this case, that neither1 defendant “presented evidence” on the point and impossible that the error, if such it was,2 harmed anyone.
The same observations apply to the second error which the majority claims to discern: a failure by the judge to tell the jury how much of such evidence the defendants had to present in order to have “presented such evidence.” In the first place, each defendant gave the informer his best shot: whatever quantum of evidence was required, theirs was enough. Had the jury believed them, it could not have avoided finding government inducement to the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. In the second, when a jury has been told that all a defendant must to do discharge his burden is “present evidence,” surely any reasonable juror would conclude that when he has presented any evidence on the point, he has “presented evidence.” And here, as I have noted, both defendants presented a most gracious sufficiency. Their problem was that the jury did not believe their evidence; it could never have believed they presented none.
Regretting that this effort to enforce the law has foundered on abstract propositions and demonstrably harmless error, I dissent.

. The jury was charged that evidence presented by either one sufficed, supra, at 1343.

. Pierce, cited and relied on by the majority, notes “. . .we have held that the burden of proving inducement rests on the defendant.” 414 F.2d, at 167.