Court Opinion

ID: 9635207
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 13:41:41.621976+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:21.505238
License: Public Domain

*421MOYLAN, Judge,
concurring:
I join in both the judgment and the opinion of the Court. I concur separately only to note an irrepressible observation about the universality of great literature. This case is E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India all over again. Something happened up there at the Marabar Caves. Was it an attempted rape? Was it some form of hysteria triggered by strongly ambivalent emotions imploding violently in a dark and isolated catacomb? Or was it some unmappable combination of the two as moods and signals shifted diametrically in mid-passage? The outside world will never know.
I stray from the opinion of the Court only insofar as it characterizes the cross-examination as “somewhat tedious and repetitive.” Strangely, I did not find it, on line-by-line examination, to be so, although ordinarily I would be the first to do so. I heard echoes from Marc Anthony’s Funeral Oration in the rhythmic and ironic repetition of the theme of the business card. “And Brutus was an honorable man;” “And all of this for a business card?” Had I been conducting the cross-examination, I would like to think I might have handled it the same way. Does one plausibly journey by train and by elephant-back all the way to the Marabar Caves to get a business card?
The issue at stake, moreover, was not another of today’s endless constitutional sideshows. It dealt refreshingly with the merits of guilt or innocence, the determination of which should remain the primary mission of the criminal trial. To disdain the former, one must in fairness encourage the latter.
I continue to believe that one of the virtues of practice in the state courts is expedition and speed. I continue to share the impatience of state judges when defense attorneys try “to make a federal case” out of straightforward events. An entitlement to one’s day in court is not necessarily an entitlement to a week in court, lest four others, in a world of finite resources, be thereby denied their days in court. A case needs to be made for distributive due pro*422cess. There is always, however, the exception to prove the rule. Sometimes circling the prey is preferable to going in immediately for the kill. Lieutenant Greenwald’s devastating cross-examination of Captain Queeg would never have worked had it gone straight for the jugular. It depended on peripheral things like yellow stains and strawberries. Despite an unabashedly strong and continuing predisposition to the contrary, I concur in the opinion of the Court in this case without reservation.