Court Opinion

ID: 9740308
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:32:17.475004+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:17.397792
License: Public Domain

V. J. Brennan, J.
(concurring). I agree with the majority that the defendant’s conviction should be reversed and the case remanded to the court below for a new trial. However, I reach that conclusion by a different route. Their position may be summarized as follows: First, the defendant’s argument that the trial court erred by not sua sponte giving an instruction on the credibility of an accomplice was not preserved below; second, a manifest injus*279tice occurred at trial in that (1) the jury did not hear a police officer’s testimony regarding codefen-dant Henry’s prior statements to police and (2) the prosecutor managed to achieve the best of both worlds by first destroying the codefendant’s testimony on cross-examination during his defense and second by presenting that same testimony when his case in chief was reopened; third, the majority concludes that on this basis the court should have given the requested instruction.
I disagree with that rationale. To hold that the trial court should have, sua sponte, given an instruction on an accomplice’s credibility is, in effect, a holding that such a charge could have cured or at least ameliorated the manifest injustice. With such a holding, I cannot agree. The injustice herein is that the jury, which had to make an evaluation of the credibility of the codefendant, did not have all of the known and available facts on which to form an opinion of his credibility. We can conceive of no reason based on trial tactics for defendant’s counsel’s failure to call detective Johnston to the stand so that he could impeach Henry’s testimony before the jury. Given the close nature of the case against this defendant, a new trial at which this error is not repeated could well produce a different result. People v Degraffenreid, 19 Mich App 702 (1969).