Court Opinion

ID: 9444427
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:00:48.076995+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:52.183340
License: Public Domain

JAMES ALGER FEE, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
The above opinion presents a reasonable approach. When a defendant has been convicted by a jury in a criminal case, public interest outweighs all other considerations. The presumption of innocence has vanished. Just criticism is directed at the judicial system if a convicted defendant is allowed at large for long periods of time, even if eventually conviction is affirmed. Bail should not be allowed therefore unless reversal is fairly certain. Furthermore, the time of briefs and final hearing should be made positive whenever bail is granted by an appellate judge.
STEPHENS, Circuit Judge (concurring in the result, but dissenting from the views of his associates as to the consideration of petitions for bail).
I concur in the denial of the petition for bail in this case but respectfully and *580emphatically disagree with Judge Goodman’s statement and Judge Fee’s addendum thereto.
In the instant case we tested the merits of the petition for bail on the legal question: Has petitioner-appellant shown us that his case involves a substantial question which should be determined by the appellate court ? And we all agreed that he had not done so. Judge Goodman’s statement is not an opinion as to issues in the matter before us, but at once is an expression of a policy which he deems to be the correct one and a protest against this court’s practice as it sees its duty. I think the statistics he cites, like most statistics in their bare bones, do not reveal the verity and the beauty of truth that is theirs when shown in the living flesh of circumstance. Certainly, they grievously mislead in the matter at hand if they even slightly appear to indicate that this court has ever had in mind that Rule 46(a) (2) is a mandate for the general allowance of bail on appeal. The judges of this court, I think, have ever had in mind and have ever put to practice the fundamental concept that the law is over judges as well as over all others and that the law as to bail prescribes that certain offenses are bailable both before and after trial and conviction. Our judicial discretion, in the consideration of a petition for bail, is not at large either to grant or deny bail freely but it is circumscribed by statutory law. We have no right whatever to erect barriers to its ' reasonable application. To adopt the general rule that the whole record should be filed with us before we will consider a petition for bail would be to emasculate the provided humanitarian law as it exists.
True, the public does have an interest in all criminal proceedings, but delay in their finality is not generally due to the bail system. Appellate procedure is too cumbersome but the remedy is not in cutting into human rights. After all is said and done, the unjust deprivation, for a single hour of one man’s liberty, creates a debt that can never be repaid.