Court Opinion

ID: 9491971
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:29:01.179176+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:02.465012
License: Public Domain

HEANEY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I would affirm the district court’s grant of habeas relief. In my view, the trial court deprived appellee of her constitutional right to a jury trial. This denial in and of itself is a sufficient reason to grant appellee’s petition for habeas relief. The record shows that appellee initially consented to a bench trial. On the day that the case was set for trial, January 16, 1992, appellee asked for a jury trial. The trial court promptly denied the request saying, “You are trying to avoid going to trial, so we are going to trial today.” This action, of course, did not constitute an abuse of discretion; but immediately thereafter the state asked for a continuance saying that it did not have the physical evidence to go to trial that day. Suddenly the need for a prompt trial vanished, and the court set a trial date for March 13, 1992 to permit the state to obtain the physical evidence it needed. Again, I do not quarrel with the court’s decision, but it clearly then had a duty to grant the appellee’s motion for a jury trial as any reason for not doing so had vanished. Moreover, the appellee was under no obligation to renew her motion, which had been made minutes before.
An additional basis for granting the writ is the one given by the trial court that appellee was actually innocent of the offense. In my view, the district court’s opinion more than adequately sets forth the reasons leading to its decision. There is an additional reason, which I believe is persuasive. The arresting undercover officer testified that he put the $10 rock of crack that he said he purchased from appellee in a plastic bag and sent it to the state crime lab. The problem is that the bag that the state lab received did not contain a $10 rock of crack (about 1 gram), but *820rather only .048 grams of crack, an amount not only at odds with the amount testified to by the buyer but an amount so insignificant as to lead to the conclusion that no sale had, in fact, taken place. At least the evidence to support a sale had not been presented. If the only confusion was whether the crack was in a zip-lock bag or a heat-sealed bag, then I would agree that the confusion would not be sufficient to weaken the prosecution’s ease to the point that habeas relief should be granted. But here, taking the evidence in the light most favorable to the state, there is a total lack of evidence to support the state’s claim that one of its agents bought a one-gram rock of cocaine base from appellee and that she should be sentenced to 25 years for having made the sale.
Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.