Court Opinion

ID: 9483109
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:11:23.660795+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:25.794914
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
While I join the majority opinion, I find this case much closer than either the majority or the dissent acknowledges. On the one hand, Adams never entered a formal guilty plea. Majority at 839. On the other, Adams did just about everything else to assure his conviction. Dissent at 848. Should Adams have to go through the formality of a guilty plea in order to be entitled to the procedure specified in Boykin v. Alabama, 395 U.S. 238, 89 S.Ct. 1709, 23 L.Ed.2d 274 (1969)?
The answer to this question turns on whether one reads Boykin as embodying the requirements of due process or as merely announcing a prophylactic rule— one that can be violated without necessarily violating the Constitution. If Boykin embodies constitutional requirements, it cannot be circumvented by structuring a guilty plea so as to avoid using the phrase “I plead guilty”; if it is a prophylactic rule, however, procedural niceties can matter a great deal.
While the point certainly is debatable, I conclude that Boykin created a prophylactic rule. One indication of this comes from juxtaposing Boykin with Halliday v. United States, 394 U.S. 831, 89 S.Ct. 1498, 23 L.Ed.2d 16 (1969), decided less than a month earlier. See Boykin, 395 U.S. at 247-48, 89 S.Ct. at 1714-15 (Harlan, J., dissenting). Boykin drew support for its holding that a court must establish a defendant’s voluntary waiver of certain constitutional rights on the record before it can accept a guilty plea from McCarthy v. United States, 394 U.S. 459, 89 S.Ct. 1166, 22 L.Ed.2d 418 (1969). But in Halliday, the Court explained that the rule announced in McCarthy “was based solely upon the application of [former] Rule 11 and not upon constitutional grounds.” 394 U.S. at 832, 89 S.Ct. at 1499. Instead of reflecting due process norms, the McCarthy rule was “designed to facilitate the determination of ... voluntariness” and “a more expeditious disposition of a post-conviction attack on the plea.” Id.
*846The reasoning employed in Boykin also indicates that its rule is prophylactic. Like Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), and Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981), Boykin concentrates on providing additional, bright-line protection for enumerated constitutional guarantees — namely, the rights to trial by jury, to confront one’s accusers and to be free from compulsory self-incrimination — and thereby travels one step beyond the specific requirements of the Constitution. 395 U.S. at 243, 89 S.Ct. at 1712. Its emphasis is “on assuring that constitutional protections are honored, on assuring not just the vindication of constitutional rights but also the appearance of vindication.” Grano, Prophylactic Rules in Criminal Procedure: A Question of Article III Legitimacy, 80 Nw.U.L.Rev. 100, 105 (1985).
Finally, it is difficult to conclude that due process requires an on-the-record recitation of a defendant’s rights before his guilty plea can ever be accepted. If a defendant is in fact aware of his rights because they were explained to him by his attorney or by the judge off the record, or because he knew and understood them by virtue of his own legal training or experience, due process would seem to be satisfied.1 The on-the-record recitation serves only to avoid uncertainty regarding what the defendant knows so as to assist a reviewing court’s determination of whether his waiver was voluntary and intelligent. This is the quintessential rationale for a prophylactic rule.2
Having concluded that Boykin established a prophylactic rule, I concur in the majority’s conclusion that a formal guilty plea is necessary to trigger the rule’s protections. This is more a concession to reality than a statement about how crucial a particular event may be in the life of a criminal case. Criminal prosecutions put a variety of facts at issue, but quite often only a few are genuinely in dispute. Stipulating to any one of those facts — or agreeing to any procedural shortcut, for that matter — can fairly be characterized as giving up the defendant’s substantial rights, perhaps even as tantamount to a guilty plea.
With the benefit of hindsight, a tactical concession might well look like a major turning point in the case, one which made the outcome a foregone conclusion. Yet it would be entirely unworkable to demand a Boykin inquiry every time the defense and prosecution come to some arrangement— through stipulation, concession or whatever — that narrows the issues for trial. While the concession in Adams’s case was just about as broad as one could imagine, I find it impossible to draw a crisp line between Adams’s stipulation and a much narrower one that still gives up key facts. What, for example, if Adams had conceded the relevant physical facts, i.e., that he had intercourse with the victim, but had disputed intent? Or, conversely, what if he had conceded intent but challenged some of the physical facts?
Whether one or both of these concessions would be viewed as critical — as a “de fac-to” guilty plea — turns on what was genuinely in dispute in light of the evidence available to the prosecutor. Determining whether Boykin is implicated outside the safe confines of the express guilty plea would obligate federal courts to reverse-engineer every criminal case where the defense makes any sort of nontrivial concession. I seriously doubt that is a burden the Boykin Court meant to create or the result it had in mind.
Because prophylactic rules such as Boykin are intended “to minimize the sum of error costs and administrative costs” of *847criminal trials,3 applying Boykin to concessions that are less than formal pleas of guilt would, in my judgment, be counterproductive and eventually lead to abandonment of the rule. Requiring a formal guilty plea as the trigger for a Boykin inquiry gives the rule a workable scope and focuses the attention of the court, the counsel and the defendant on the most serious waiver of rights in a criminal trial: a defendant’s formal acceptance of guilt.
To say that Boykin’s prophylactic rule does not apply, of course, leaves unchanged the need for compliance with the basic requirement of due process, namely that Adams voluntarily and intelligently agree to the stipulation that formed the basis of his conviction.4 Because I agree with the majority that this requirement was satisfied, I join its opinion.

. See, for example, Marshall v. Lonberger, 459 U.S. 422, 436-37, 103 S.Ct. 843, 852, 74 L.Ed.2d 646 (1983), and Henderson v. Morgan, 426 U.S. 637, 647, 96 S.Ct. 2253, 2258-59, 49 L.Ed.2d 108 (1976), which hold that although due process dictates that a defendant know of the nature of the charges against him before he pleads guilty, this knowledge need not be exhaustively reflected in the record.

. Whether "[t]his faith in procedural choreography" is warranted is an open question. United States v. Balough, 820 F.2d 1485, 1491 (9th Cir.1987) (Kozinski, J., joined by Hall, J., concurring).

. Strauss, The Ubiquity of Prophylactic Rules, 55 U.Chi.L.Rev. 190, 193 (1988).

. Because Boykin does not apply, there is no need to address the proper standard of habeas review for claims based on prophylactic rules. See Williams v. Withrow, 944 F.2d 284, 291 (6th Cir.1991), cert. granted, - U.S. -, 112 S.Ct. 1664, 118 L.Ed.2d 386 (1992).