Court Opinion

ID: 9444601
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:05:53.958998+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:55.612421
License: Public Domain

FINNEGAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
Immediately preceding the government’s opening to the jury, sworn and waiting to try defendant on an indictment charging violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1341 and 15 U.S.C.A. § 77q(a), the District Judge addressed those jurors as follows:
“The Court: Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, we will have the opening statement by the Government. It just happens that counsel for the defendant has a severe condition of laryngitis, and I will not impose upon him to give his opening statement this afternoon. We will then adjourn until one o’clock Monday when we will resume and have his statement and proceed with the case, putting on evidence.
“I apologize for the delay today, but since you were here I tried a number of cases; one of them we just finished today, involving a complicated matter. It just happened it ran over and I couldn’t help it.
“I think in fairness to this defendant I should say something to you Ladies and Gentlemen before this case starts. I do not want you people to get the impression that I as a judge have any notion about what you should do as members of the jury, and I am going to try to give this defendant a fair trial and give the Government a fair trial.
“I have been practicing law and been a judge altogether over a period of upwards of twenty-seven years; about twenty-five of that was as a lawyer. I have disagreed with a few juries, and not too much. I never criticized but one jury in my life, as a practicing lawyer or as a judge. Most of the decisions that I have seen since I have been a judge were just about the same as I would have rendered. I did criticize one, and some of you may know about it, and I do not regret that I did. If I had it to do over I would again, because in that particular case we had a man who sat here on the witness stand who was charged with robbery and admitted when he took the stand —he did not have to take the stand, but he took the stand and admitted himself that he had been convicted of larceny, and then he admitted that he had pleaded guilty to robbery before, and the jury saw four deputies necessary, sitting around him during the whole time.
“When the evidence began to get pretty conclusive about the man at the bank who went to the back door and looked out and saw a car bearing license that was the same number as was on this man’s car, the same description of the car, and a man who resembled this man, was blond and gave a description, but too far away to identify him — when it began to get too warm he talked to his attorney and the attorney gets up and says: ‘Now, we’ll admit that the car in which the robbery was done belonged to us, that it belonged to my client, that he had it in his possession immediately before the robbery, about thirty minutes, and that he had it in his possession immediately after the robbery. The only thing of it is my client went over to get a haircut while it happened.’
“And then the testimony further showed that he left a place way up on the north side at three-thirty, on Bosworth Avenue, 1300 something, he took his sister-in-law to his mother’s — mind you, leaving at three-thirty — took his sister-in-law to her mother’s at her address; then he took his sister-in-law’s brother-in-law to this place where the haircut was to take place; then he took the car over to another place, turned it *10over to one of the two fellows who had testified that they were with him and held up the bank and used the guns, and that the ear and the guns were furnished by him, and who were not in any way impeached —two much younger fellows — all of that — and the robbery was done and completed and the police were there at five minutes after four, in a period of thirty-five minutes that he accomplished all of those many things.
“It sounded to me like you would have had to have Aladdin’s magic carpet to have moved around over the city of Chicago, because that was out on Harrison Street, around Harrison Street and Crawford, and then still the car had to get over to Cicero where the robbery occurred. It was so impossible and improbable.
“But I think in fairness to any defendant that I want you to know that I haven’t got any preconceived notions. But in a case like that, a man that confesses that he was guilty of robbery but he just didn’t do this one, and with such a flimsy excuse.
“I make that statement because I want this defendant and I want the Government both to have a fair trial, and I do not want you to have any idea that I participate in or have any notions or am in the habit of criticizing juries about their decisions.
“Counsel for the Government will proceed.”
Because these remarks created an unfit intellectual climate for adjudicating guilt or innocence I would reverse defendant’s conviction and judgment entered thereon. That pre-trial summation of judicial reaction to a previous jury’s verdict carries clear intimation and forebodings of potential criticism awaiting any jury whose decision failed to square with views harbored by the presiding judge. His remarks infected the trial environment by engendering fear in the jurors’ minds, of criticism. Once these are implanted it is psychologically futile to attempt eradication by .instructions or, even worse, for a reviewing tribunal to recline on the nearest convenient assumption that fundamental rights flourished unimpaired. Intimidation by fear of noncompliance and consequent loss of judicial approbation impaired impartiality.
If I accepted the government’s gloss it would simply mean turning my back on practicality and reality while gliding to an affirmance on the notion that those prefatory words were either dissipated by lapse of time or merely constituted an admonition concerning jury duty. Indeed, the impact of the District Judge’s words are stressed in this fashion by the government, in its brief:
“Whereupon the trial court, exercising a general duty to interest himself in the fair and impartial administration of justice, saw fit to comment in no uncertain terms on the whimsical, capricious or possibly the corrupt verdict of the jury. Who can deny the responsibility of the trial court in such a matter?” (Italics supplied.)
Responsibility for fair and impartial administration of justice rests upon the trial judge, but this is hardly accomplished by charging the atmosphere of a trial with “comments in no uncertain terms” about past verdicts. I think it time some breadth of vision be achieved in criminal cases.
Any cutting edge, seemingly possessed by Lehman v. District of Columbia, 1902, 19 App.D.C. 217, cited to us by the government as dispositive of the problem, is quickly dulled on close reading of that case. There a district judge received a verdict from jury A in the presence of jury B — then trying issues involving Lehman. That district judge directed some brief (Id., 227) and blunt remarks to the foreman of jury A, and, no doubt Lehman’s jurors overheard. At bar, the trial judge addressed only the Vasen jury, his captive audience. Furthermore, the Lehman judge specifically covered the episode by charging jury B (Lehman’s jurors) inter alia (Id., 228): “I do not want you to take to yourselves *11anything I said to them.” (referring to jury A). It cannot be logically said in one case jury instructions cure alleged errors and then here say the jury paid scant attention, or construed the quoted passage in non-prejudieial terms. I prefer to err, if indeed I do, on the side of one accused of crime. See e. g. Bollen-bach v. United States, 1946, 326 U.S. 607, 66 S.Ct. 402, 90 L.Ed. 350; United States v. Levi, 7 Cir., 1949, 177 F.2d 833. Defendants are unclassified when measuring rights accorded them, or to which they are entitled, during criminal trials. Before the bar, a man is neither tax-evader, murderer, nor petty thief prior to conviction by an impartial tribunal. Trite, distasteful and inconvenient as these elementary principles may appear, persons accused of crime remain entitled to a fair and impartial trial.
Mr. Chief Justice Hughes, delivering the majority opinion, in United States v. Wood, 1936, 299 U.S. 123, 145-146, 57 S.Ct. 177, 185, 81 L.Ed. 78 wrote this trenchant observation which well illustrates my point of concern:
“Impartiality is not a technical conception. It is a state of mind. For the ascertainment of this mental attitude of appropriate indifference, the Constitution lays down no particular tests and procedure is not chained to any ancient and artificial formula.”
Methodology utilized in selecting, or eliminating prospective jurors from the rolls, is, of course, not the sole criteria of impartiality. It is no idle gesture which finally forbade trial judges from directing, directly or indirectly, verdicts of guilty, or from trenching on the jury’s domain.
In these times, turbulent with conflicting and competing ideologies, democracy’s best credentials stem from how we actually administer justice. Laymen everywhere quickly discern differences between actions and words. Our theory of government and law will quickly rot and wither planted among shallow applications of basic tenets in empty ceremonies. Long ago tyranny and domination were pruned out of governmental theory leaving us freemen governing ourselves consonant with principles of liberty and individual freedom. No small part of this heritage is the organic law provision for fair and impartial trials. Better several scoundrels escape because we may strike down basically unjust and biased procedures, than one innocent person suffer an unfair forfeit. Fed.Rules Crim.Proc. rule 52(b), 18 U.S.C. A<1 hoc deviations, for expediency’s sake, tend to taint and corrode the entire administration of criminal law. I am well aware that ordering new trials casts a heavy burden upon both sides. Nor have I overlooked problems arising in connection with reassembling witnesses and proof; that both sides are now educated to one another’s case. Yet, in my opinion, these factors fail in counterbalancing the need for retrying Vasen’s case.