Court Opinion

ID: 9473988
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:45:09.468786+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:50.946262
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge, with whom POSNER, Circuit Judge, joins,
concurring.
I join Part II of the majority’s opinion and the judgment. Part I resolves a close and difficult issue that I think the court need not confront.
Under Doyle v. Ohio, 426 U.S. 610, 96 S.Ct. 2240, 49 L.Ed.2d 91 (1976), and Anderson v. Charles, 447 U.S. 404, 100 S.Ct. 2180, 65 L.Ed.2d 222 (1980), a prosecutor may not impeach a defendant by showing that his testimony at trial is inconsistent with his silence at the time of arrest after the defendant received Miranda warnings. Charles also holds however, that when a defendant speaks after being arrested, the prosecutor may impeach the defendant by pointing out the difference between the story he told to the police and the story he tells to the jury. Like the state courts, I assume that the police gave Phelps the warnings required by Miranda. The central question the majority resolves in Part I therefore is whether the prosecutor tried to impeach Phelps with prior inconsistent statements (permissible) or prior silence (impermissible).
The Supreme Court of Indiana concluded that the prosecutor was trying to impeach Phelps by pointing to his silence. Phelps v. State, 266 Ind. 66, 360 N.E.2d 191, 193-94 (1977). There is much support for that conclusion. Phelps said a few things after his arrest. He denied responsibility, he asked for protection from attack, and he volunteered to take a lie detector test. But he said nothing about the details of the offense.* After the colloquy set out in the footnote, the prosecutor asked: “Well, do you think it might have been in your best interests to have told the police and the *1421Prosecutor’s Office this story you’re telling this jury?” Counsel for Phelps objected, and the trial judge brought the inquiry to a halt.
It is difficult to understand the prosecutor’s question as an effort to impeach Phelps by pointing to an earlier, inconsistent version of events. Phelps’s defense was consensual intercourse, and he testified at trial that someone had yanked Clem from the car while things were in progress. If that someone was her husband, known from other testimony to be violent, Phelps easily could have been afraid. He could have asked for protective custody and a lie detector test. The prosecutor’s question seems to impeach Phelps by asking why he did not tell more than he did to the police.
Certainly there is a fine line between impeachment by showing a curious incompleteness in a suspect’s story and impeachment from silence. Doyle, for example, treats “what’s this all about?” — the equivalent of “I didn’t do it” — as silence rather than a prior inconsistent story. See 426 U.S. at 614-15 n. 5, 96 S.Ct. at 2243 n. 5. That is why this is a difficult case on the merits. If the prosecutor had been permitted to continue, he might have established some inconsistency between what Phelps told the police and what he said at trial. If Phelps wanted protective custody, why did he not give the police the reason he offered at trial? As an original matter of constitutional interpretation it is difficult to see why the information that Phelps told an incomplete story to the police is not a legitimate ground for an inference. But given Doyle we cannot easily answer the question posed here.
I therefore prefer the conclusion in Part II, which holds that even if the prosecutor’s question was impermissible, the events were harmless. The trial court cut the prosecutor short. The judge did not permit Phelps to answer, and twice he told the jury that Phelps “had no obligation to say anything.” There was no judicial error in this case. There was at most a brief, and quickly aborted, episode of misconduct by the prosecutor. The objection was sustained. It is highly unlikely that the single brief question, followed by prompt and accurate advice from the judge that Phelps “had no obligation to say anything,” affected the outcome of this trial. Cf. Donnelly v. DeChristoforo, 416 U.S. 637, 94 S.Ct. 1868, 40 L.Ed.2d 431 (1974). Remedies short of the declaration of a mistrial are sufficient to handle episodes of this sort. Part II of the majority’s opinion therefore establishes “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the prosecutor’s question did not affect the outcome in this case. The misconduct was harmless under the most stringent test for harmless error.
Part II properly reserves the question whether the “reasonable doubt” standard of Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824,17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967), necessarily applies to a case such as this. Every court that has applied a harmless error test to a Doyle problem has assumed that Chapman supplies the appropriate standard. Not one case discusses why. I believe the appropriate standard to be an open question and explain why the common assumption is not the only tenable analysis.
Prosecutorial misconduct that is thwarted by a court usually is addressed under the standard of Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 765, 66 S.Ct. 1239, 1248, 90 L.Ed. 1557 (1946) — whether the improper behavior “had substantial influence” on the course of the trial. Cf. United States v. Young, — U.S. -, 105 S.Ct. 1038, 1046-49, 84 L.Ed.2d 1 (1985). The Chapman standard is designed for constitutional errors that could affect the *1422process of determining guilt or innocence. Oversteps and missteps by the prosecutor do not require such close scrutiny. The question then becomes whether an unsuccessful attempt to violate the rule of Doyle is closer to ordinary prosecutorial error or is itself a “constitutional” error within the meaning of Chapman.
What happened in this case did not threaten the conviction of an innocent person or directly violate any constitutional right. Some language in Doyle suggests that prior silence is too ambiguous to support impeachment, and therefore that impeachment from silence undermines the truth-finding function of the trial. More recent cases, however, imply that this concern is not a part of the foundation of the rule of Doyle. Jenkins v. Anderson, 447 U.S. 231, 100 S.Ct. 2124, 65 L.Ed.2d 86 (1980); Fletcher v. Weir, 455 U.S. 603, 102 S.Ct. 1309, 71 L.Ed.2d 490 (1982). These cases conclude that once a defendant takes the stand, the prosecutor may use the defendant’s silence at the time of arrest as a basis of impeachment. Impeachment by prior silence is an established, permissible technique that increases the probability that the judgment in the case will be accurate. Raffel v. United States, 271 U.S. 494, 46 S.Ct. 566, 70 L.Ed. 1054 (1926). According to Jenkins and Fletcher, the rule of Doyle applies only if the defendant was given Miranda warnings, and then only for silence after the warnings inform him implicitly that silence will not be used against him. Unless the defendant receives this assurance, the ordinary rule permitting impeachment by silence prevails.
The rule of Doyle therefore now rests not on any difficulties with impeachment on the basis of prior silence but on a belief that defendants ought not to be bush-wacked if they rely on the advice implicit in Miranda warnings that exercise of the right to remain silent will not come back to haunt them. Miranda warnings themselves are not direct commands of the Constitution but a set of rules designed to reduce the likelihood of subtle coercion of someone in custody. Oregon v. Elstad, — U.S. -, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 1291-93, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985); Michigan v. Tucker, 417 U.S. 433, 442-46, 94 S.Ct. 2357, 2363-65, 41 L.Ed.2d 182 (1974). Doyle is therefore a prophylactic rule designed to increase the efficacy of another prophylactic rule, and a prosecutor’s thwarted effort to violate Doyle is removed three times from the constitutional prohibition of compulsory self-incrimination. We need not resolve today whether a federal court should apply Chapman to misconduct so far removed from the core of the constitutional rule. It is enough for now to observe that there is a strong argument that it need not.

 Phelps and the arresting officer told slightly different versions of what Phelps said. According to the officer, Clem pointed to Phelps in the bar and accused Phelps of raping her. The officer testified that Phelps "stated I didn’t do it.” The officer did not recount anything else Phelps may have said. Phelps himself testified that his statements were made at the station-house rather than the bar and were more extensive:
Q. You told them you didn't do it?
A. That’s right.
Q. Is that all you told them?
A. I said I’d like to talk to somebody because I was afraid I was going to get killed.
Q. By whom?
A. Her husband.
Q. Think that her husband might have been angry about that?
A. I thought maybe that was who it was.
Q. And did you tell anybody else about the rape?
A. Pardon, sir?
Q. Did you tell the policemen about the rape?
A. About the rape?
Q. Did you say anything except I didn’t do it?
A. I just asked to talk to someone for some protective custody, what I wanted.
Q. I want to get this very clear, Mr. Phelps. Is the only thing you said to the police, I didn’t do it, and I need protective custody because I think her husband might kill me?
A. They took me down ... then took me down there and put me in a room where they take all your belongings and everything. I sat there on a bench, and I was supposed to be sitting there waiting for Detective Hollis, and then I went downstairs to a lab where they gave me some tests. I came back up there and the policeman ... I was talking to the policeman that was up here yesterday, the last one that testified, and he got his gun out showing me his gun; and I asked him, I said, well, I think I *1421better talk to someone because I’m scared. I said I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t want to be released tonight, I didn’t know
what they was going to do____
Q. Now, I want you to be very sure about this. Is that all you said?
[Objection made and overruled.]
A. I did say I would submit to a polygraph test if they wanted to give me one.
[Some extraneous questions omitted.]
Q. Well, then, am I to assume, Mr. Phelps, that that is all you said to the police?
A. Other than, you know, just normal conversation.
Q. But nothing about the crime?
A. No, sir. We talked about a wreck that I had, and that’s about it.