Court Opinion

ID: 9478055
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:38:54.490025+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:12.771104
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join the majority opinion but write separately to comment on a statement in it that may puzzle some readers: “An attempt to define reasonable doubt presents a risk without any real benefit.”
This court has long “advise[d] against defining ‘reasonable doubt’ because often the definition engenders more confusion than does the term itself.” United States v. Martin-Trigona, 684 F.2d 485, 493 (7th Cir.1982); see also Federal Criminal Jury Instructions of the Seventh Circuit 18 (1980) (instruction 2.07); Murphy v. Holland, 776 F.2d 470, 475 (3d Cir.1985), vacated on other grounds, 475 U.S. 1138 (1986) (per curiam). At times the court has seemed to go beyond advice, to something close to command (perhaps inadvisedly, for reasons suggested in United States v. Sblendorio, 830 F.2d 1382, 1388 (7th Cir.1987), commenting on our attempt in United States v. Silvern, 484 F.2d 879 (7th Cir.1973), to establish a uniform instruction on another issue). United States v. Glass, 846 F.2d 386, 387 (7th Cir.1988), said that it is “inappropriate for judges to give an instruction defining ‘reasonable doubt.’ ” The court relied in part on the statement in Holland v. United States, 348 U.S. 121, 140, 75 S.Ct. 127, 137-38, 99 L.Ed. 150 (1954), that “attempts to explain the term ‘reasonable doubt’ do not usually result in making it any clearer in the minds of the jury”; but that is different from saying the judge should never make the attempt; far from saying any such thing, the Court in Holland, commenting on the instruction the judge had given, remarked that “this section of the charge should have been in terms of the kind of doubt that would make a person hesitate to act, rather than the kind on which he would be willing to act.” Id. at 140, 75 S.Ct. at 138 (citation omitted). Glass also relied on instruction 2.07 of our pattern instructions, but said that the instruction “forbids” attempts to explain reasonable doubt to the jury; the actual word in the instruction, however, is not “forbids” but “recommends.” Finally, Glass cited United States v. Dominguez, 835 F.2d 694, 701 (7th Cir.1987), which contains a dictum similar to that in Glass and supports it by reference to the pattern instruction (again substituting “forbids” for “recommends”) and by citation to United States v. Kramer, 711 F.2d 789, 794-95 (7th Cir.1983), which cautioned against such instructions but did not forbid them.
The question whether the prosecution has proved the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt is central to every criminal trial. Can it be that the term should never be defined? Is it a mystical term, a talisman, somehow tarnished by attempts at definition? Is a refusal to define key terms consistent with the search for truth? Recently a committee of the Federal Judicial Center that included our chief judge recommended the following instruction on reasonable doubt:
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you firmly convinced of the defendant’s guilt. There are very few things in this world that we know with absolute certainty, and in criminal cases the law does not require proof that overcomes every possible doubt. If, based on your consideration of the evidence, you are firmly convinced that the defendant is guilty of the crime charged, *1044you must find him guilty. If on the other hand, you think there is a real possibility that he is not guilty, you must give him the benefit of the doubt and find him not guilty.
Federal Judicial Center, Pattern Criminal Jury Instructions 28 (1987) (Instruction 21). This is surely harmless, and if perhaps no more than slightly helpful, still a district judge who on the basis of his experience with juries and his observation of the particular jury thinks that such an instruction would help the jurors in their deliberations should be allowed to give it, especially if the jury requests further instruction on reasonable doubt. Cf. United States v. Littlefield, 840 F.2d 143, 146-47 (1st Cir.1988).
But ordinarily the district judge will be well advised to attempt no definition of reasonable doubt, (The contrary position is strongly argued in Judge Torruella’s concurring opinion in Littlefield. See id. at 151-52.) This advice reflects experience (almost uniformly negative) with attempts to define the term rather than a dogmatic insistence on its resistance to definition or its self-evident quality. The verbal elaborations that have been tried appear to add little if any substance to the meaning conveyed by the term itself; deeply entrenched in the popular culture as it is, the term “beyond a reasonable doubt” may be the single legal term that jurors understand best. Definitions that translate the term into a probabilistic measure, while they may add content, are apt to mislead the jurors.
Undefined and unelaborated, the expression “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” requires, and is (I believe) understood to require, that the jury be certain of the defendants’ guilt, with this proviso: complete certainty — the certainty of such propositions as that cats do not grow on trees and that I have never set foot on Mars — is never attainable with respect to the question whether a criminal defendant is guilty of the crime for which he is being tried, and the jury should set aside doubts that it would be unreasonable to entertain given the practical limitations on attaining certainty in the trial setting. When, however, judges and juries are asked to translate the requisite confidence into percentage terms or betting odds, they sometimes come up with ridiculously low figures — in one survey, as low as 76 percent, see United States v. Fatico, 458 F.Supp. 388, 410 (E.D.N.Y.1978); in another, as low as 50 percent, see McCauliff, Burdens of Proof: Degrees of Belief, Quanta of Evidence, or Constitutional Guarantees?, 35 Vand.L. Rev. 1293, 1325 (1982) (tab. 2). The higher of these two figures implies that, in the absence of screening by the prosecutor’s office, of every 100 defendants who were convicted 24 (on average) might well be innocent. The assumption of no screening is important. See Branion v. Gramly, 855 F.2d 1256, 1263 n. 5 (7th Cir.1988). If the prosecutor screened so meticulously that no innocent person was ever prosecuted, then no innocent persons would be convicted no matter how low the standard of proof. The principal significance of the requirement of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt comes in cases where, because the screening has been careless or the prosecutor is improperly motivated, an innocent person has been indicted (the grand jury is no real screen). Unfortunately there are such cases — and we don’t want a quarter of them to end in conviction.
Numerical estimates of probability are helpful in investments, gambling, scientific research, and many other activities but are not likely to be helpful in the setting of jury deliberations. No objective probability of a defendant’s guilt can be estimated other than in the rare case that turns entirely on evidence whose accuracy can be rigorously expressed in statistical terms (e.g., fingerprints and paternity tests). In other cases the jury’s subjective estimate would float free of check and context. It is one thing to tell jurors to set aside unreasonable doubts, another to tell them to determine whether the probability that the defendant is guilty is more than 75, or 95, or 99 percent.
If judges are not going to tell juries to attach a percentage figure to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and if attempts at ver*1045bal elaboration of reasonable doubt are likely to yield barren tautologies, it makes practical sense not to instruct the jury at all on the meaning of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I therefore agree with Judge Kanne’s admonition to the district judges.