Court Opinion

ID: 9471351
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:30:06.772322+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:22.133853
License: Public Domain

NORRIS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part from the judgment.
Although I agree that Judge Real’s dismissal of the Sears indictment ■ should be reversed, I write separately because I would, unlike the majority, expressly leave open on remand the question whether the district court may exercise its discretion to dismiss the indictment on supervisory power grounds. I believe the majority’s willingness to rely solely on a constitutional rationale in reviewing the dismissal of the indictment obscures the crucial analytical distinction between that rationale and an alternate ground for dismissing an indictment: a court’s exercise of its inherent supervisory power.
That distinction has been recognized in the case law, see, e.g., United States v. Chanen, 549 F.2d 1306, 1309 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 825, 98 S.Ct. 72, 54 L.Ed.2d 83 (1977) (“these dismissals have been based either on constitutional grounds or on the court’s inherent supervisory power”), but it has never, to my mind, been satisfactorily explained. In my view, while a constitutional analysis focuses on preserving fairness for the individual defendant and remedying any harm that has been done to his basic rights, the exercise of a court’s inherent supervisory power serves two institutional purposes: deterring governmental misconduct and protecting the integrity of the judicial process. See, e.g., United States v. Payner, 447 U.S. 727, 736 n. 8, 100 S.Ct. 2439, 2446 n. 8, 65 L.Ed.2d 468 (1980) (“the supervisory power serves the ‘twofold’ purpose of deterring illegality and protecting judicial integrity,” although it did not justify excluding tainted evidence when “the illegal conduct did not violate the respondent’s [constitutional] rights”); United States v. Loud Hawk, 628 F.2d 1139, 1158 (9th Cir.1979) (Hufstedler, J., dissenting) (in determining whether government’s destruction of evidence required dismissal of indiet*1395ment, court pursued “separate and distinctive interests ..deterring governmental misconduct, protecting a defendant’s right to a fair trial; and preserving the integrity of the judicial process”). The individual defendant thus serves only as a conduit for vindication of the public interest. As with application of the exclusionary rule, the benefit to the defendant when a court exercises its supervisory power to dismiss an indictment is incidental to the primary goal — protection of systemic values by deterring official misconduct and preserving the appearance of fairness.
Because constitutional and supervisory power analyses serve fundamentally different purposes, application of either dictates that different factors be weighed in determining whether dismissal of an indictment is warranted. As noted in the first portion of my opinion, the dismissal of an indictment on constitutional grounds requires a finding that the prosecutor’s misconduct biased the grand jury. See supra pp. 1391-1392. Dismissal on supervisory power grounds, on the other hand, is based on a combination of different factors: the egregiousness of the prosecutor’s misconduct, the need to discipline the particular prosecutor in light of any past misconduct, and the effectiveness of any available sanctions that are less drastic than dismissal of the indictment.
Although the Supreme Court has recently indicated that prejudice to an accused resulting from prosecutorial misconduct at trial should also be considered as part of a supervisory power analysis, United States v. Hasting, - U.S. -, 103 S.Ct. 1974, 76 L.Ed.2d 96 (1983) (court of appeals could not reverse conviction by exercise of supervisory power without considering whether prosecutor’s error was harmless), I do not read Hasting as establishing a per se rule against the exercise of supervisory power in the absence of prejudice to the defendant. Hasting, - U.S. at -, 103 S.Ct. at 1986 (Brennan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). No case has held, furthermore, that a defendant must show that a grand jury is biased before an indictment may be dismissed pretrial on supervisory power grounds.1 In fact, this court has dismissed an indictment based on its concern for the administrative manageability of a trial without making any reference at all to the interests of the accused. United States v. Gonsalves, 691 F.2d 1310 (9th Cir. 1982) (complex RICO indictment dismissed because trial based on it would have been administratively unmanageable).
For these reasons, I would remand the case to the district court without prejudice to Sears’ right to renew its motion to dismiss the indictment on supervisory power grounds.2

. Because Hasting involved a reversal of a conviction after a jury trial, the Court was concerned about reversing the conviction as a sanction for prosecutorial misconduct which the Court found to be harmless when to do so would put everyone involved, especially the victims, through the ordeal of retrial. That is not a concern when, as here, the trial has not yet occurred.

. Because the exercise of supervisory power involves a large measure of discretion, the decision to invoke it should be made in the first instance by the trial judge and reviewed on appeal only for abuse of discretion. See, e.g., Sigliano v. Mendoza, 642 F.2d 309, 310 (9th Cir. 1981); cf. United States v. Rodgers, - U.S. -, -, 103 S.Ct. 2132, 2152, 76 L.Ed.2d 236 (1983) (“the task of exercising equitable discretion should be left to the district court in the first instance”).