Court Opinion

ID: 9467224
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:41:59.478035+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:14.001392
License: Public Domain

MERRITT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The Supreme Court has never applied the concept of “vindictiveness” announced in Pearce and Perry to a prosecutor’s actions during the trial and pretrial stages of a criminal case. It declined to do so in Bor-denkircher, where the prosecutor’s conduct was clearly vindictive. Strong policy considerations lie behind what seem to some to be contradictory conclusions reached by the Supreme Court in those three cases. It seems likely that these strong policy considerations will lead the Court to limit the application of the doctrine of prosecutorial vindictiveness to prosecutorial conduct which occurs after conviction. Even if this view of the direction of the Supreme Court in the application of this doctrine is in error, the standard proposed by our Court, which focuses on the subjective intent of the prosecutor-the “realistic likelihood of prosecu-*458torial vindictiveness”-misses the point and is not workable. Any intelligible standard must focus more clearly on the nature of the constitutional or other legal right which the defendant has asserted and on whether the prosecutor’s conduct, without regard to his motives, denies to the accused the effective enjoyment of the particular right asserted.
I.
In Pearce, the Supreme Court held under the due process clause that a state trial judge may not double the punishment imposed at the first trial when the defendant is reconvicted of the same offense after a successful appeal and new trial. In Perry, the Court held that after a defendant is tried for a misdemeanor and appeals his conviction, the prosecutor violates due process at the new trial when he seeks to rein-dict and try the defendant for a felony for the same criminal event. In both cases, the problem arose because a majority of the Court, in a long line of cases, has historically read the protections of the double jeopardy clause narrowly to allow the state to “up-the-ante” on a criminal defendant at a new trial following an appeal. In Pearce and Perry, a majority of the Court was unwilling to retreat from its prior double jeopardy rulings or to reinterpret the double jeopardy clause along the broader lines suggested in the concurring opinions of Justices Douglas and Harlan in Pearce, 395 U.S. 711, 726, 744, 89 S.Ct. 2072, 2081, 2085, 23 L.Ed.2d 656 (1969). So in order to remedy the wrong, the Court conceptualized the problem more broadly under the due process clause. It found that “vindictiveness” by the state, or the apprehension of retaliation, is the key principle and declined to base its holding on a double jeopardy analysis. But the cases retain their double jeopardy flavor.
Bordenkircher, it seems to me, suggests that Pearce and Perry are limited to the post-conviction stage of criminal proceedings where the element of finality becomes a consideration and double jeopardy values come into play. It is difficult to find a clearer case of “vindictiveness” than Bor-denkircher. There the Court was faced not simply with the appearance of prosecutorial vindictiveness but with the reality. The prosecutor told the defendant that unless he gave up his right to a trial and pled guilty to fraud, he would be reindicted as a habitual criminal, an offense carrying life imprisonment. When the defendant refused to enter such a plea, the prosecutor made good his threat, and the Supreme Court upheld that habitual criminal conviction. It is hard to argue against Justice Blackmun’s observation in dissent in Bordenkircher that the Court “is departing from, or at least restricting, the principles established” in Pearce and Perry. 434 U.S. at 365, 98 S.Ct. at 669. In Bordenkircher, the Court itself says that the interest it was concerned about in Pearce and Perry was “the danger that the state might be retaliating against the accused for lawfully attacking his conviction.” 434 U.S. at 363, 98 S.Ct. at 668.
It is difficult to reconcile Pearce and Perry with Bordenkircher if we take an expansive view of the concept of “vindictiveness” announced in the first two cases. But the cases become more understandable and consistent if we put aside the concept of general prosecutorial vindictiveness under the due process clause and look at Pearce and Perry as due process cases designed to protect double jeopardy values involving post-conviction “vindictiveness.”
In both cases, the state tried to “up-the-ante” by imposing a harsher penalty on retrial after the appeal. They are both cases of successive prosecutions for the same criminal event. Except for the very broad due process “vindictiveness” language used by the Court, the two cases fit much better the double jeopardy mold, for, after all, the double jeopardy clause was designed in part to restrain a certain species of prosecutorial vindictiveness, the kind that leads a dissatisfied prosecutor to want to get the defendant again, or put him away longer, after the first trial is over. In the competitive, adversary environment of the criminal trial, it is not unnatural for a dissatisfied prosecutor to want to try the *459defendant again, but that is the precise species of vindictiveness the double jeopardy clause is designed to prevent. That is what happened in Pearce and Perry and that, it seems to me, is the only species of vindictiveness which the Supreme Court struck down in those cases.
In Bordenkircher, on the other hand, like the instant case, there was no threat of a second trial, nor any threat of greater punishment upon reconviction, and double jeopardy-type, post-trial vindictiveness did not come into play. In Bordenkircher, the Court found that prosecutorial retribution is acceptable during the preliminary and trial stages of the criminal process before double jeopardy values come into play at the end. It is not, as Judge Keith suggests, the plea bargaining context of Bordenkircher that distinguishes it from other “vindictiveness” claims. It is the double jeopardy context of Pearce and Perry that limit and control the vindictiveness principles announced in those two cases.
II.
The concept of prosecutorial “vindictiveness” or the “likelihood of vindictiveness” is theoretically endless and unmanageable unless limited to the post-conviction, double jeopardy context. Otherwise, the concept is so elusive that nobody-judge, prosecutor or defendant-can determine where it starts or stops. The concept also appears inconsistent with the competitive, adversary nature of the pretrial and trial process.
By necessity the public prosecutor must take hard positions contrary to the liberty interests of the accused. Our society and our jurisprudence have never reached agreement on whether the purpose of the penal system is to deter, to treat or to avenge. Public prosecutors, like the public at large, are sometimes motivated by a desire for retribution in criminal cases. Whether he is motivated by deterence or retribution or some more complicated but less explicable state of mind, the prosecutor’s attitude toward the defendant in a hard-fought criminal case is seldom benign or neutral.
During the pretrial and trial process, the prosecutor must decide what position to take on an endless variety of procedural, evidentiary, substantive and tactical questions. He may oppose motions to suppress evidence or for the appointment of counsel or refuse to agree to discovery, severance, bail, or plea bargaining; he may try to get into evidence prior criminal conduct or various co-conspirator and other kinds of hearsay; he may be harsh in his characterization of the defendant’s conduct to the jury; he may recommend probation or refuse to prosecute altogether; or he may make a deal with a co-defendant in exchange for incriminating testimony and on and on.
Once a defendant has successfully asserted a particular legal right in the course of the criminal process over the prosecutor’s objection, is the prosecutor arguably guilty of unconstitutional vindictive conduct, which “chills” the exercise of the legal right asserted, each time the prosecutor thereafter takes a position contrary to the interests of the defendant? If not, why not, and what is the standard of measurement? What difference does it make that the prosecutor’s conduct took place after rather than before the defendant asserted the right? The “exercise” of a legal right can be more effectively “chilled” before it is asserted than after. What difference should it make that the defendant was unsuccessful rather than successful in asserting the legal right? On the facts of this case, would it make any difference that the defendant lost his motion for bail rather than won it? If we are talking about the “exercise” of a legal right, should it make a difference that its exercise happened to be unsuccessful in the particular case?
Here retaliatory motives, conscious or unconscious, probably played a part in the prosecutor’s decision. If the defendant had consented to stay in jail, the prosecutor might not have added a conspiracy count. But the prosecutor believed that the defendants had threatened to harm a government witness. The prosecutor retaliated by opposing bail. Having lost on that issue, the prosecutor probably added the conspir*460acy count for reasons similar to those that led the government to put the witness under the Federal Protection Act-in order to show the defendants that the government intended to fight harder to protect its witness and get a conviction now that the defendants were back on the street. The fact that the prosecutor may have retaliated in this situation only indicates to me diligence in the performance of the prosecu-torial role.
Many constitutional, common law and ev-identiary principles protect the accused and should be given an expansive meaning. But to require, as a general principle, the general absence of “prosecutorial vindictiveness” in the heat of battle is an unworkable goal in our adversary system. It seems impossible to isolate and eliminate motives of prosecutorial retribution in a process that is itself based, in part, on a theory of retribution.
For these reasons I would hold that the doctrine of prosecutorial vindictiveness announced in the Pearce and Perry cases, and rejected in Bordenkircher, is limited to pros-ecutorial behavior after the first trial is over. That means that in the instant case the doctrine is inapplicable, and I would therefore reverse the judgment of the District Court.