Court Opinion

ID: 9488509
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:47:36.191763+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:55.985559
License: Public Domain

RYAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Because what I thought was clear from Júdge Jones’s opinion apparently is not, I write separately to emphasize the basis for my concurrence in what he has written.
I take the rule of this case to be that a trial judge may not, in a criminal case, when an essential element of the crime charge is stipulated, instruct a jury that it “will find that the government has established [the stipulated] element of the offense.” (Emphasis added.) The error, indeed, the constitutional error in such an instruction, is in telling the jury what it “will find”; it is not in telling the jury that the stipulated fact is “proved.” The difference is subtle, but significant. Juries, in the exercise of their power of nullification, are free to ignore or reject facts that are “proved”; whether proved by the introduction of evidence or by stipulation. When the parties in a criminal case stipulate that an essential fact is “proved,” and the trial judge instructs the jury that the stipulated fact is proved, there has been no interference with the jury’s prerogative to decide what it will find has been proved.
However, it is an altogether different matter for the trial judge to tell the jury, not merely that a fact is “proved,” but that, in addition, the jury “will find” that it is proved. It is in commanding the jury what it must “find” that the trial court usurps the jury’s prerogative and effectively denies the defendant the right to have the jurors, and the jurors alone, find the facts in the case. See United States v. Hayward, 420 F.2d 142, 143—44 (D.C.Cir.1969); Schwachter v. United States, 237 F.2d 640, 644 (6th Cir.1956). There is no new law in any of this. And there is no cause for any alarm that because of what we have said here, prosecutors or defendants will be disinclined to enter stipulations that certain facts are “proved.”
We do no more today than reiterate the long-standing rule that while the trial court, in a criminal case, may in appropriate circumstances tell a jury what has been “proved,” the court may not instruct the jury as to what it “will find.”