Court Opinion

ID: 9473989
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:45:09.471312+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:50.948378
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent and rely on the careful panel opinion by Judge Gordon in this case, Phelps v. Duckworth, 757 F.2d 811 (7th Cir.1985), as well as my concurring opinion there, 757 F.2d at 824.
The majority here has undertaken a wholly unprecedented extension of the exception to Doyle v. Ohio which provides for impeachment of a defendant’s testimony through statements made by him after his receipt of Miranda warnings. Here there was no inconsistency or conflict between the brief remarks Phelps made after his arrest and what he testified to at trial. See Anderson v. Charles, 447 U.S. 404, 408, 100 S.Ct. 2180, 2182, 65 L.Ed.2d 222 (1980). Therefore, the purpose of the prosecutor’s question was not to impeach the latter with the former, but merely to draw an inadmissible inference from the defendant’s essential silence after having been given the warnings. Unfortunately, Doyle suffers major erosion from today’s decision.
The majority has labored mightily to show some sort of contradiction between a cursory denial of rape (and that is all the defendant ever denied) and detailed testimony at trial about consensual sexual intercourse. There is absolutely no basis for the majority’s claim that Phelps, before trial, “denied that he had been sexually involved with Mrs. Clem____”* At 1412. *1423See at 1420-21 n. 1 (Easterbrook, J. concurring) (setting forth what officer and Phelps testified Phelps said). Phelps denied that he raped Clem, which is an entirely different matter, and the majority cites nothing to support any claim broader than that. Since consent is a complete defense to a charge of rape, I do not understand on what basis there is any contradiction or inconsistency between a terse pre-trial denial of rape and trial testimony about consent. For consent is presumably the defense pursued in a great many — possibly most — rape cases. In addition, I am certain that most people, confronted with a denial of rape, would not take such a denial as a representation that sexual intercourse did not take place. Consensual sexual intercourse is not a lesser included offense of rape. For these reasons, the majority’s effort to find an exception to Doyle must fail.2
I am also intrigued by the ease with which my brethren find error here to be harmless. The credibility of two people is the essence of a great many rape cases, including this one, and I rely on Judge Gordon’s panel opinion, my concurrence there and on Judge Brooks, who heard the witnesses, for an analysis of the harmlessness point as it involves credibility.

. The majority says, "[Phelps] never claimed before trial that Mrs. Clem consented to intercourse.” At 1412. Of course, this failure to tell his story is the very silence which the prosecutor is seeking to use against Phelps. I do not under*1423stand the majority’s reasoning that because "[Phelps] never claimed that Mrs. Clem consented to intercourse____ [T]here was no post-arrest silence____" At 1412.

. Judge Flaum’s special concurrence, of course, clearly supports this view. Judge Easterbrook’s special concurrence, in which Judge Posner joins, is also essentially supportive.