Court Opinion

ID: 9463237
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:01:27.472418+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:59.841697
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge
(specially concurring):
I concur in the result reached by the majority, since it seems to me that evidence exists in the record to support a finding by the trial court that the postal inspectors delayed informing Herman that they had no authority to plea-bargain with him until after he had made the incriminating admissions. Therefore, the admissions were properly suppressed under Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(e)(6) or Fed.R.Evid. 410 — which in identical language exclude any statement made “in connection with, and relevant to” a plea bargain. Herman’s admissions were both. With entire deference and respect, I observe that the majority opinion decides many points of law not presented by the case in hand and some of them most dubiously, in my view. Being dicta, these expressions will doubtless work little harm, but I cannot join in them. A few illustrations will suffice.
In the text, at note call 6, the majority so entirely reads the congressional language “and relevant to” out of both rules as to omit it from the quotation. The reasons for this presumably appear in footnote 7, where by reference to the legislative history the majority concludes that the phrase is meaningless since Congress did not give reasons there for putting it in. I am not accustomed to treating clear congressional expressions so lightly nor, as I have noted earlier, is there any occasion to do so here, the excluded statements meeting the category on both qualifications. Nor do I agree that, by adding the phrase “and relevant *800to” the plea bargain, the Congress expanded rather than restricted the category of excludible statements. One might as well say that the phrase “two-legged creatures” is expanded, not restricted, by the additional qualifying phrase “with feathers.” Congress may well have envisioned the possibility of admission of a crime or crimes other than that being plea bargained about, like the two irrelevant robberies and four murders in Townsend v. Sain, 372 U.S. 293, 83 S.Ct. 745, 9 L.Ed.2d 770 (1963); and I would not rush to attempt, by dicta, to foreclose this reasonable construction of its language.
I also find dubious the court’s sweeping observation that, “Statements are inadmissible if made at any point during a discussion in which the defendant seeks to obtain concessions from the government in return for a plea.” The effect of this exceedingly hospitable reading of the rule is that any and all admissions can be effectively sanitized and retracted by injecting an irrelevant plea demand later in the discussion and after the horse is out of the barn. Thus, we set the stage for such spectacles as prosecutors or investigators decamping after obtaining just enough of an admission to be of use, perhaps pursued by a shouted offer to plead. It is entirely possible that avoiding such ludicrous scenes was another congressional purpose in appending the “and relevant to” qualification to the exclusionary rules’ language. Such unqualified and sweeping black-letter generalizations are not necessary to decision of this cause, and I, with all deference, decline to join in them.