Court Opinion

ID: 9448382
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:34:11.766193+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:24.768801
License: Public Domain

HAYS, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
In Marshall v. United States, 360 U.S. 310, 79 S.Ct. 1171, 3 L.Ed.2d 1250 (1959) the Court reversed a judgment of conviction and ordered a new trial because some of the jurors had read newspaper articles in which it was stated that defendant, who was being tried for unlawfully dispensing certain drugs, had previously practiced medicine without a license-The Court said:
“We have here the exposure of jurors to information of a character which the trial judge ruled was so prejudicial it could not be directly offered as evidence. The prejudice to the defendant is almost certain to be as great when that evidence reaches the jury through news accounts as when it is a part of the prosecution’s evidence. Cf. Michelson v. United States, 335 U.S. 469, 475, 69 S.Ct. 213, 218, 93 L.Ed. 168. It may indeed be greater for it is then not tempered by protective procedures.”
In the present ease, ten of the jurors were informed by reading a newspaper article that Irving Bitz, one of the appellant’s codefendants had pleaded guilty. This information could not have been offered in evidence, and was, I believe, even more prejudicial to the defense than was the information to which the jury was exposed in the Marshall case.
I find nothing in the record of the present case to support the view of the majority opinion that Bitz’s plea of guilty was consistent with appellant’s defense.1 On the contrary appellant’s defense was confined to a simple, flat denial of the testimony of the government’s witnesses who testified that Bitz collected the extortion money for Feldman and his fellow union officers. It is almost inevitable that, upon being told that Bitz had pleaded guilty, the jurors would assume that Feldman was also guilty.
The judgment of conviction should be reversed and a new trial granted.

. The attempt by counsel for appellant to argue in Ms summation that Bitz was guilty but Feldman not guilty was addressed to a jury which knew from the newspapers that Bitz had pleaded guilty. Counsel was obviously forced by the circumstances to make that argument, however weak it may have been in the light of the evidence.