Court Opinion

ID: 9458506
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 20:53:40.681484+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:47.372535
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
From a technical legal view, the opinion of Judge Rubin and Judge Wisdom’s affirmance are antiseptically sound. With all due deference to their scholarship, I am compelled to dissent by my sense that this evidentiary error was beyond a doubt harmless.
At the outset I would note that we are not involved with the clearly erroneous rule. The normal deference due to a district court’s resolution of a fact or mixed fact-law issue is not apropos here; for he, as we, view only the same cold record.
Perhaps my dissent is provoked because I give too great a deference to the inherent intelligence of the jury and the independent review by the state trial judge who heard the proof, or perhaps I perceive a different legal standard for our federal review from Dutton v. Evans, supra, and Schneble v. Florida, 405 U.S. 427, 92 S.Ct. 1056, 31 L.Ed.2d 340 (1972). In either event, my concern as to the magnitude of the error does not go just to its effect on Louisiana’s system of justice, although that would be enough. Rather, my anxiety is for witnesses, such as Muriel Langston, everywhere; who must endure yet another judicial ordeal they really want no part of in the first' instance. I greatly fear that her devastating identification testimony (set out in footnotes 13 and 14 above) about this terrifying' armed robbery which was perpetrated almost six years ago will be lost or rendered substantially ineffectual by old age in the retrial that must now be held.
If it is lost or debilitated, the search for truth will be the loser. Ironically, it *368is that same essence—truth—which is supposedly at the heart of Favre’s enjoyment of the right of confrontation so zealously protected today.
Finally, it is altogether anomalous to assert that'the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment cannot be invoked to invalidate a conviction in which the only identification testimony consists of a single inconsistent statement of one witness 1 and at the same time say in the present case that because the evidentiary complaint is cast in terms of Sixth Amendment confrontation, it must result in vacating a jury verdict based on a much more solid foundation.
I would reverse the grant of habeas corpus relief.

. See Edwards v. Wainwright, 461 F.2d 238 (5th Cir. 1972).