Court Opinion

ID: 9461157
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:07:27.3434+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:55.443615
License: Public Domain

CRAVEN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
This is not a bribery case. Whatever may be said of the decision of the Supreme Court of West Virginia indicating that a person in the position of John-koski could not have been bribed under the West Virginia statute, or put more accurately, could be “bribed” with impunity, I would assume that any public employee of West Virginia is capable of committing the offense of common law bribery, and that alone, it seems to me, is a sufficient rationale to sustain the judgment of conviction.
As to the theory of violating the statutory bribery laws of West Virginia, I agree with the district judge that the evidence is simply overwhelming that Sawyers received bribes, and it is undisputed that Sawyers qualified under the West Virginia bribery statute as a pubfic official. I also agree with the district judge that the jury could not have failed to believe that anyone who bribed John-koski also bribed his superior officer Sawyers and that cash bribes came to Sawyers through Johnkoski.
I would affirm for the reasons stated by the able and experienced district judge. If there was error in failing to more carefully separate the roles of Sawyers and Johnkoski the evidence of the former’s receipt of bribes is so overwhelming that I have no difficulty concluding that any such error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.1 To reverse and remand this case for a new trial invokes the equivalent of an automatic reversal rule incompatible with Rule 52(a) Fed.R.Cr.P., and does not really help the defendant except to postpone the inevitable day of an unimpeachable guilty verdict.

. Since the error, if any, is not of constitutional magnitude, it is not necessary to apply such an extreme test. If we believe, and I do, that it is highly probable that the error did not affect the verdict, i. e., that the jury woulcl almost surely have convicted anyway even if told to disregard bribes given to John-koski only, then the judgment should be affirmed. See Traynor, The Riddle of Harmless Error 34, 35 (1970).