Court Opinion

ID: 9468530
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:16:55.447479+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:54.459164
License: Public Domain

FLOYD R. GIBSON,
Senior Circuit Judge, dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. I do not think this record merits vacation of the judgment against Bruscino and Kell and remand for a new trial. It is my opinion that the district court did not abuse its discretion when it ruled that no reasonable possibility exists that the two items of extraneous material discussed in Part II, ante, affected the jury’s verdict to the prejudice of appellants.
The first item viewed as requiring remand because of its exposure to the jury is Bruscino’s Trial Exhibit 1. The majority points out that the jury’s verdict in this case depended largely on the credibility of witnesses. It then goes on to state that *464Trial Exhibit 1 “could easily have biased the jury against Bruscino’s credibility.” Ante at p. 458. However, the document at issue did not impair Bruscino’s credibility. If anything, it enhanced it. The document exonerated Bruscino from the suspicion that he was a member of the “Mexican Mafia.”
I also do not agree with the majority’s finding that Trial Exhibit 1 “could also have supplied the jurors with a more credible motive for the murder * * Ante at p. 459. In my opinion, any motive which could have been inferred from the document would have been no more plausible than that supplied by the government.
Furthermore, it was. Bruscino’s attorney who precipitated the jury’s exposure to the document. Bruscino’s attorney brought Exhibit 1 to the courtroom, used it to cross-examine a witness, and then placed the document on the court’s exhibit table. Bruscino’s attorney was asked specifically at that time by the Assistant United States Attorney whether the defense wished to admit the document. Bruscino’s attorney responded, “Not at this time.” However, Bruscino’s attorney failed to remove the document from the exhibit table. The defense engineered this scenario and it should not now be allowed to have a second bite at the apple because of its own negligence or design.
The second item viewed as requiring remand because of its exposure to jurors is a newspaper article which was brought to the courtroom by one of the jurors. Again, I do not believe that the district court abused its discretion in ruling that the presence of this article in the jury room did not create a reasonable possibility that the appellants were prejudiced thereby.
Firstly, as discussed ante p. 457, there is no evidence that any of the jurors besides the juror who brought the article to the courtroom even saw the extraneous material. The few jurors who remembered some discussion of the article remembered it only in connection with trying to figure out names. It hardly seems likely that such discussion “might have operated to the substantial injury of the defendant[s].” United States v. Thomas, 463 F.2d 1061, 1065 (7th Cir. 1972), citing United States v. Grady, 185 F.2d 273, 275 (7th Cir. 1950).
Jurors cannot be expected to operate in a total vacuum. The issue of whether a defendant has been denied a fair trial by juror prejudice from exposure to extraneous material must turn on the particular circumstances of such exposure, viewed in the context of the trial as a whole. “The severity of the threat depends upon both the nature of the information so publicized and the degree of juror exposure to it.” United States v. Thomas, 463 F.2d at 1063. In my opinion, the threat of significant prejudice in this case is not clear enough to warrant a finding that the district court abused its discretion in ruling that a new trial was not called for under these circumstances. I would affirm the convictions.