Court Opinion

ID: 9474998
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:14:22.691373+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:26.831178
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
With what Judge Phillips has written in the majority opinion I have in general no disagreement. Indeed, except, for its final paragraph, allowing the Government to convert the decision into an advisory opinion, the consequences of which it can entirely escape, now that the opinion has proven unfavorable to the Government, my instinct is to applaud. However, I feel constrained to express my doubts that there was jurisdiction for the Fourth Circuit to express itself at all.
The effort of the Government was to manufacture grounds for an immediate review of an order which properly it could appeal from only by suffering dismissal of the proceeding. The suppression of the co-conspirator statements which might be imputed to the defendants, Roberts and *589Lloyd, was done to permit a contrived appeal and thrust this Court into a situation where, to fall in with the Government’s stratagems, we have had to countenance a piece-meal appeal. “Apparently in order to press for an absolute rule against any pretrial disclosure, the Government declined to seek in the district court a protective order, as it might have under Fed.R.Crim.P. 16(d)(1).” Slip opinion at 14.
18 U.S.C. § 3731, which limits the Government’s right to appeal in criminal cases, specifies, in part, that “[a]n appeal by the United States shall lie to a court of appeals from a decision or order of a district court suppressing or excluding evidence ...” It is undoubtedly “axiomatic,” as the Court stated in Carroll v. United States, 354 U.S. 394, 399, 77 S.Ct. 1332, 1336, 1 L.Ed.2d 1442 (1957), that “the existence of appellate jurisdiction in a specific federal court over a given type of case is dependent upon authority expressly conferred by statute.” This proposition, for reasons not only related to general jurisdictional considerations, but also double jeopardy and speedy trial principles, applies to our jurisdiction to hear appeals by the United States in criminal cases. United States v. Kane, 646 F.2d 4, 5 (1st Cir.1981); United States v. Apex Distributing Co., 270 F.2d 747, 749 (9th Cir.1959).
18 U.S.C. § 1371 was amended in both 1968 and 1971. The 1968 amendment allowed appeals from decisions sustaining motions to suppress, but the legislative history, as reviewed by the First Circuit in United States v. Kane, 646 F.2d at 6 n.l, does not “contemplate review of discovery orders ... through appeal of the orders themselves,” but rather “Congress expressed the intention of allowing appeals of dismissals based on noncompliance with discovery orders with review of the underlying discovery orders in the context of such appeals.”
In Kane, the district court’s order did “not purport to suppress or exclude evidence. Rather it merely requires the disclosure of certain information.” Id. at 5. Here the situation is similar to that in Kane. The district court ordered compliance with a magistrate’s discovery order. There is no indication it, in the normal course, had any intention of suppressing or excluding evidence. In order “to obtain immediate review of that Order, Government counsel informed the court that the Government would not comply with the order and invited the imposition of sanctions. Majority opinion, p. 583. This procedure contravenes 18 U.S.C. § 1371. As the court in United States v. Stipe, 653 F.2d 446, 447 (10th Cir.1981), observed when it found that a similar stratagem deprived it of jurisdiction, “the government sought to have what might be called a dry run prior to trial, together with appeal of rulings which it considered to be unfavorable with respect to the order of proof in a conspiracy case and the meaning of ‘independent evidence,’ together with admissibility of post conspiracy statements of [a] defendant ...” Here, the Government’s “dry run” was related to the co-conspirator statements.
The proper course here would have been for the Government, in due course, to have refused to disclose and have appealed after dismissal of the indictment by the district court. See United States v. Jackson, 508 F.2d 1001, 1005 (7th Cir.1975). The Government was apparently unwilling to pursue such a course, though other parties, in general, have no other course if they wish to appeal in the middle of a case. Given the limitations on our jurisdiction, I believe we should not countenance the Government’s attempt to make an end run around orderly procedures of appeal and I would have found we were without jurisdiction to hear the appeal.