Court Opinion

ID: 9651208
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:10:17.685932+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:31.106163
License: Public Domain

L. HAND, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The evidence of the accused’s guilt was so strong that I feel some compunction in voting to reverse, yet there are two errors which I think require the case to be retried. Pape retained Buckley as his own lawyer at the same time that he retained him for the woman. I agree that his retainer of an attorney for himself involved no privileged communication; I have nothing to add to, or subtract from, what my brothers say on that. Moreover, it goes without saying that Pape’s retainer of Buckley for the woman would not have been privileged, had he not retained him as his own attorney. On the other hand I attach no importance to the fact that he retained him in both capacities at the same time; the case stands as it would, if he had retained him for himself first. Yet if he had done that, when he told him to appear for her, I think it was a communication between attorney and client, a step in his own defence; it may have been also a step in hers but that, I submit, is irrelevant. That direction to his own attorney in his own interest was as much a privileged communication as any direction would have been, made in the course of preparing for a trial; as much, for example, as to tell one’s attorney to interview a witness. That it was an important step in connecting him *784with the woman’s prostitution, admits of no debate.
Moreover, I do not believe that the evidence justified a conviction on the alternative theory which the judge left to the jury. I do not of course mean that the jury was not free to find that Pape and the woman continued in Washington the same relations which had been going on in New York; but I do mean that that was not enough. Only the purpose for which he took her from New York to Washington, was relevant; and, while it is conceivable that the trip may have been in part actuated by the purpose of continuing to enjoy her as he had been doing, that seems to me too doubtful to justify a conviction — the merest speculation. To repeat: no doubt he expected that they would go on as they had, but unless that expectation was a part of his motive, it did not count. I should think it almost certain that it was not; almost certain that he would have taken her though he knew he was merely to drop her at the hotel and return to New York; I see no reasonable ground for supposing that he was led to bring her on except to live on her earnings. In a sense this really only serves to confirm his guilt, because it presupposes that the evidence of that purpose was so predominant as to exclude any other. Perhaps so, but if the charge was wrong, it was wrong in too substantial matter to be disregarded.