Court Opinion

ID: 9495321
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:59:37.72427+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:56.531405
License: Public Domain

SHADUR, District Judge,
dissenting in part.
Because I read the record through a very different lens than do my colleagues, I respectfully dissent as to the affirmance of the conviction as discussed in Part IV of the per curiam opinion (Parts I through III accurately reflect my own views on the aspects of the case that are dealt with there). When the evidence and the prosecutor’s closing argument are placed alongside the charge in Count I — the only criminal charge of which Steven Chase (“Chase”) stands convicted — I believe that Chase received a profoundly unfair trial on that count.
Whenever a criminal defendant confronts multiple charges, just as whenever multiple defendants confront the same charge, a jury is asked to conduct what amounts to multiple simultaneous trials. In that respect the district judge here properly charged the jury with the standard instruction that is Ninth Circuit Model Instruction 3.12:
A separate crime is charged in each count. You must decide each count separately. Your verdict on one count should not control your verdict on any other count.
But unfortunately the vast bulk of the trial testimony and the overwhelming majority of the prosecutor’s closing argument were devoted to wrongs and acts other than the threat that was the gravamen of Count I — wrongs and acts that demonstrated Chase to be a thoroughly unpleasant man but did not qualify as proper Fed.R.Evid. (“Rule”) 404(b) evidence on that count. And although we always presume that juries heed and abide by cautionary instructions, what was totally absent here was any instruction that such evidence — carrying as it did the high potential for unfair prejudice, the potential for its being treated as “bad man” character evidence that Rule 404(b) is intended to keep out of a criminal case, lest a defendant be convicted for things that he or she has done other than the express charge at issue — should not be considered on the Count I charge.
It may be, as the majority opinion states, that the overwhelming mass of evi*1032dence of other threats and vengeful statements by Chase that were introduced by the government was admissible to show his motive for the Count II charge of retaliation against FBI agents. Indeed, what strikes me as extraordinary about the majority opinion is that its entire substantive discussion — the reference to “inextricably intertwined” evidence, the extended quotation from the prosecutor’s statement of his theory of prosecution and the equally extended quotation from the district judge’s pretrial conference statement — relates exclusively to Count II, not to Count I (which is the only charge before us). All that is said about Count I is this (after referring to the massive evidence of Chase’s other threats and statements, none of which he ever acted on):
This evidence was the very essence of the charge described in Count II, and it illuminates Chase’s intent with respect to Count I.
But significantly, the jury acquitted Chase on Count II even in the face of that “other acts” evidence — though what flaw the jury found in the government’s proof on that charge we cannot know, because jury deliberations are secret. And that made it all the more important that the jury be told properly of the limitations on the use of such evidence as between the two charges. On that score the district judge mistakenly held only that the evidence was admissible under Rule 404(b) as relevant to Chase’s intent, contrary to this Circuit’s teaching as to the only intent that is required to be shown when a defendant is charged under 18 U.S.C. § 115(a)(1) with making a threat (United States v. Orozco-Santillan, 903 F.2d 1262, 1265 n. 3 (9th Cir.1990) and cases cited there) — and, moreover, that ruling was made without the district judge’s having engaged in the required Rule 403 balancing analysis as to Count I.
It is really impossible to overstate the extent of the resulting imbalance as to Count I, which must be the focus of our present review. Most of the evidence at trial (and indeed the conduct by Chase that the prosecutor first mentioned in his opening statement, and to which he devoted the bulk of his closing argument even before he turned to the claimed threats against the officers on which the indictment was based) related not to Count I’s charged offense, but rather to the “other acts” category that looked to Rule 404(b) for admissibility as to Count II. Because that evidence has been set out at the end of Part I of the per curiam opinion, it suffices here simply to recite the parade of witnesses whose testimony was presented to the jury with no indication of its lack of relationship to Count I: Gupta, Myers, attorneys Dickman and Palmeri and two other attorneys, Stauss, Hodge, Kennedy and Beaudin. And as I have said earlier, that same imbalance marked the prosecutor’s closing argument, with the bulk of his emphasis being devoted to matters other than Count I’s actual charge of threats against the law enforcement people.
That being the case, the jury was bombarded with volumes of irrelevant evidence that painted a detailed picture of Chase as an individual who has a propensity to threaten others. No fewer than 14 of the government’s 22 witnesses testified about Chase’s threats other than the ones charged, and the prosecutor heavily emphasized that evidence in his opening statement and closing argument instead of focusing on the evidence directly relevant to the actual threats charged in the two counts. And the government left no doubt as to its reason for that emphasis — here is the prosecutor’s pretrial statement stressing the desire to prove why Chase had uttered (though he had never acted on) those other threats that were not a compo*1033nent of the charged offense (emphasis added):
We intend to establish why Mr. Chase intended to threaten and kill, first the Guptas, who he complained to the FBI about; then McHann, who he complained to the FBI about; then Kennedy, who he complained to the FBI about; and then Levine, who the FBI was already investigating in connection with Chase’s bankruptcy. And when nothing was done, in the view of Mr. Chase, to kill the FBI agents themselves who appear on the list.
All of that being so, I believe that the overwhelming amount of that propensity evidence more probably than not compromised the jury’s ability to assess reliably the one question that it needed to answer to decide whether Chase was guilty of the Count 1 charge: Would a reasonable person have foreseen that Chase’s October 28 telephone statement would be interpreted as a real threat (in Orozco-Santillan terms) by the person who heard it? And to me that propensity evidence cannot qualify as harmless error as to the only count at issue. “Harmless error” is a concept developed by appellate courts to embody and implement the truism that no litigant is assured of a perfect trial, but only a fair one (a doctrine applicable to criminal and civil trials alike—see, e.g., United States v. Hasting, 461 U.S. 499, 508-09, 103 S.Ct. 1974, 76 L.Ed.2d 96 (1983); McDonough Power Equip., Inc. v. Greenwood, 464 U.S. 548, 553, 104 S.Ct. 845, 78 L.Ed.2d 663 (1984) and cases cited there).
Harmless error analysis, when applied to the improper admission of evidence at trial, normally involves minor surgery— the figurative excision of such testimony by scalpel, followed by an examination of the remaining evidence to see whether the same result would assuredly follow. Here the figurative excision would extend to the elimination of the bulk of the corpus via meat cleaver, so that it is particularly appropriate for a jury and not a reviewing court to evaluate the remaining (and untainted) evidence.
Some errors will almost inevitably occur in the pressure cooker that typifies virtually every contested trial, and it would be impossible to administer a judicial system in which every trial court error, no matter how minor or how noncritical to the outcome, would automatically trigger a new trial (let alone a reversal). But what I believe plainly emerges from the transcript here is that the district judge’s improper admission of such a large body of “other acts” evidence coupled with the manner in which the prosecutor capitalized on that situation by focusing primary attention on how bad a person Chase was, rather than on the charged offense, rendered Chase’s trial on Count I fundamentally unfair for the reasons I have set out here. Essentially Chase was ultimately tried on, and his Count I conviction inexorably flowed from, actions and unconsummated threats other than those charged in the indictment. And that to me takes the harmless error doctrine out of play.
Hence I believe that Chase’s Count I conviction should be reversed and the case should be remanded for a new trial free of the taint described here. As stated earlier, I respectfully dissent on that ground.