Court Opinion

ID: 9456107
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:42:09.884548+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:50.997332
License: Public Domain

ROBB, Circuit Judge
(concurring in part and dissenting in part):
I agree with the majority that this case should not be reversed because of the trial judge’s use of the “Allen charge”. However, I do not agree that the evidence was sufficient to sustain appellant’s conviction; in my opinion the trial judge should have granted the motion for judgment of acquittal.
I
The case for the prosecution was circumstantial. Taking the circumstances in chronological order we begin with the testimony of a police officer that at about 1:00 o’clock on the afternoon of November 4, 1968, he and another policeman observed an automobile driven by the appellant Johnson “driving very slowly across the driveway * * * in front of the window of the Safeway store” at 17th and I Streets, N.E. There were five other men in the ear with Johnson, and all of the men seemed to be looking at “what was going on in the store”. The officer volunteered the conclusion that the men “appeared to be casing the Safeway store”. He said that “upon seeing us they took off at a high rate of speed” and disappeared in heavy traffic. He testified that the officers took the tag number of the car and “as a result of getting the tag registration” learned the name and address of the appellant. Except for an inference from this testimony there was no evidence that the car was registered in the appellant’s name. The officer did not testify as to the make, model or color of the car.
Next we have testimony that at about 3 o’clock on the afternoon of November 4, 1968, the Safeway store at 6501 Georgia Avenue, N.W. was held up and robbed by five men; $2,226.22 was taken. This store is in a different section of the city and some five or six miles from the store at 17th and I Streets, N. E. There was testimony that when the five robbers left the store they escaped in a “white Corvair sedan” the model being “approximately ’60, ’61”. Witnesses testified that the “car took off before they finished getting the doors closed”, leading the assistant manager of the store to conclude that there was a driver waiting in the car while the holdup took place. However, no one saw the driver and since the five men could not have entered the car simultaneously one of them might well have got behind the wheel and quickly put the car in motion while the others were closing the doors. No one identified the appellant as one of the five men who robbed the store and left in the getaway car.
Concluding its case, the government proved that having heard a radio complaint of the robbery of the Safeway store at 6501 Georgia Avenue, N.W., the officers who two hours before had seen the appellant and his companions at 17th and I Streets, N.E., went to the vicinity of the appellant’s house at 1521 A Street, N.E. This location was some five or six miles from the scene of the holdup. At about half past three the appellant, who was then alone, drove up and was arrested. He had a loaded pistol on the floor of the car and $292.00 in assorted bills, and $3.00 in quarters, in his pocket — substantially less than a one-sixth share of the proceeds of the robbery. The government introduced no evidence to show the amount of money *635taken from each individual cash register at the Safeway store; such evidence might have suggested that the $292.00 in bills and $3.00 in quarters had some rational relationship to the specific robbery with which appellant was charged.
The police officer who arrested the appellant and who previously saw him driving the car was not asked to describe the car and did not do so, and the record is silent as to what the tag number was. The only evidence as to the make, model and color of the' car was that it was “of the same description” as the car mentioned in the radio complaint. The contents of the radio complaint were not disclosed by the evidence so that we have only a questionable inference that the car was a white Corvair. One of the witnesses to the holdup testified that “later on in the day” of the robbery he went to a police station and saw “a 4-door Corvair sedan” which looked like the same automobile used in the getaway. There was no evidence that the car at the police station was the car that the appellant had been driving or that the appellant was in any way connected with it.
This was the government’s entire case. In my judgment this evidence, although it may have generated a suspicion that appellant had participated in the robbery, fell far short of the proof that would justify a jury in finding guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; in other words, it failed to meet the standard under which a trial judge is permitted to allow a criminal case to go to the jury. See Crawford v. United States, 126 U.S.App.D.C. 156, 375 F.2d 332 (1967); Cooper v. United States, 94 U.S.App.D.C. 343, 218 F.2d 39 (1954); Curley v. United States, 81 U.S.App.D.C. 389, 160 F.2d 229, cert. den., 331 U.S. 837, 67 S.Ct. 1511, 91 L.Ed. 1850 (1947). In a case such as this, “in which the evidence relied upon to establish guilt is entirely circumstantial, the trial judge may not deny a motion for judgment of acquittal and send the case to the jury unless taking the view most favorable to the Government, there is sufficient evidence to support a verdict of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”. Battles v. United States, 388 F.2d 799, 801-802 (5th Cir. 1968). That standard not having been met, in my opinion, and there being “no evidence upon which a reasonable mind might fairly conclude guilt beyond reasonable doubt” the motion for judgment of acquittal should have been granted. Curley v. United States, 81 U.S.App.D.C. 389, 392-393, 160 F.2d 229, 232-233, cert. den., 331 U.S. 837, 67 S.Ct. 1511 (1947). For it is the function of a judgment of acquittal to protect against a decision by the jury based on speculation, surmise, bias or prejudice without evidence adequate in law to support a finding of guilt, Cooper v. United States, 94 U.S.App.D.C. 343, 345, 218 F.2d 39, 41 (1954); Hunt v. United States, 115 U.S.App.D.C. 1, 316 F.2d 652 (1963); Sleight v. United States, 65 App.D.C. 203, 205, 82 F.2d 459, 461 (1936); and in passing upon a motion for judgment of acquittal, particularly in a case depending upon circumstantial evidence, the trial judge must be careful to differentiate “between pure speculation and legitimate inference from proven facts”. Curley v. United States, 81 U.S.App.D.C. 389, 393, 160 F.2d 229, 232 cert. den., 331 U.S. 837, 67 S.Ct. 1511 (1947).
The requirement that guilt must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt is not a dry legal formula or a routine incantation ; it is the standard which for centuries has been used, understood and applied by lawyers, judges and jurors, the standard which for centuries has shielded the innocent man from “dubious and unjust convictions” by whimsical juries, “with resulting forfeitures of life, liberty and property.” Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160, 174, 69 S.Ct. 1302, 1310, 93 L.Ed. 1879 (1949). It has been “a prime instrument for reducing the risk of convictions resting on factual error,” a doctrine designed to give every individual “confidence that his government cannot adjudge him guilty of a criminal offense without convincing a proper factfinder of his guilt with ut*636most certainty.” In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 363-364, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 1073, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970). See also Egan v. United States, 52 App.D.C. 384, 393, 287 F. 958, 967 (1923); Billeci v. United States, 87 U.S.App.D.C. 274, 283, 184 F.2d 394, 403 (1950).
The majority reasons that the conviction in this case should be sustained because “the flow of events emerging from the testimony * * * creates that aura of probability which warrants committing the matter to the good sense of the jurors,” a probability said to be reinforced by “their instinct for recognizing that point beyond which the odds of a miscarriage of justice become too great for the individual conscience to bear.” I cannot agree that a criminal conviction can rest on an “aura of probability” and “instinct”. A probability of guilt is not enough; guilt, according to the basic principles of our jurisprudence, must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. Instinctive action imports action without thought and is the very antithesis of the careful consideration and reasoned decision that should be required of jurors.
The majority finds here a “combination of elements which a reasonable jury could conclude comports with the essence of the reasonable doubt standard.” One such element which it apparently finds persuasive is the “alertness” of the police in coping with “hit- and-run crime made possible by the combination of disoriented youths, easy access to guns, and the seemingly unrestricted availability of credit to buy automobiles, so prevalent in the contemporary urban scene.” I, too, commend the alertness of the police and condemn the shocking rise of crime in our community. But I find these factors irrelevant to the question of whether the government at trial met its burden of introducing evidence sufficient to prove this appellant’s guilt beyond, a reasonable doubt. See Stevens v. United States, 115 U.S.App.D.C. 332, 334, 319 F.2d 733, 735 (1963). Granting that Washington is crime-ridden, the remedy is not the lowering or abandonment of a time-honored shield in favor of a standard which permits convictions upon proof of a probability of guilt to the satisfaction of the jurors’ instincts. The prevalence of crime should not justify jury verdicts by guesswork. The fact that there are disoriented youths, easy access to guns and easy credit is also irrelevant to the issue of this appellant’s guilt or innocence. Permitting these considerations to enter a jury’s deliberations is to allow it to act “on what would necessarily be only surmise and conjecture, without evidence.” Cooper v. United States, 94 U.S.App.D.C. 343, 346, 218 F.2d 39, 42 (1954). By giving weight to such matters the majority in my judgment has condoned an impermissible method of decision-making by a jury and has lowered the traditional safeguard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
II
I agree with the majority that there was not plain error in the use of the “Allen charge” by the trial judge; indeed I would find no error even had the matter been properly raised in the District Court. And I fully agree with the majority that any alteration of the standard “Allen charge”, approved by this court in Fulwood v. United States, 125 U.S.App.D.C. 183, 369 F.2d 960 (1966), cert. den., 387 U.S. 934, 87 S.Ct. 2058, 18 L.Ed.2d 996 (1967) should be promulgated, if at all, only by the court en banc. However, I do not concur in the discussion in which the majority expresses its view about the “Allen charge”. Although that discussion is largely unnecessary to the decision I think it appropriate to suggest briefly some points of my disagreement.
The “Allen charge” given by the district judge was in the form approved by the Supreme Court in Allen v. United States, 164 U.S. 492, 17 S.Ct. 154, 41 L.Ed. 528 (1896). As the Supreme Court noted, the charge was taken literally from a charge approved by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in Common*637wealth v. Tuey, 8 Cush. 1 (1851). On that court sat Mr. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, one of the great judges this country has produced. The charge was again approved by the Supreme Court in Kawakita v. United States, 343 U.S. 717, 72 S.Ct. 950, 96 L.Ed. 1249 (1952), affirming 190 F.2d 506, a capital case. As recently as 1966 it was approved by a panel of this court in Fulwood v. United States, 125 U.S.App.D.C. 183, 369 F.2d 960 (1966), cert. den., 387 U.S. 934, 87 S.Ct. 2058 (1967). The opinion in that case was written by Circuit Judge Burger, now Chief Justice of the United States. A petition for rehearing en banc was denied.
I see no reason to abandon or substantially revise the “Allen charge”. As Judge Burger wrote in Fulwood v. United States, 125 U.S.App.D.C. 183, 185, 369 F.2d 960, 962 (1966), cert. den., 387 U.S. 934, 87 S.Ct. 2058 (1967):
“The Allen charge is a carefully balanced method of reminding jurors of their elementary obligations, which they can lose sight of during protracted deliberations. It is perfectly valid to remind them that they should give some thought to the views of others and should reconsider their position in light of those views. The charge as given here did not require the jury to reach a verdict but only reminded them of their duty to attempt an accommodation. While it suggests to the minority that they reconsider their position in light of a majority having a different view, it reminds them that they should not acquiesce in a verdict which does not represent their own convictions.”
Any group of men and women sitting around a conference table to decide a question of fact, whether in or out of a jury room, could with profit listen to the sensible advice of the “Allen charge”. On the other hand the diluted version of the charge proposed by the American Bar Association is in my opinion an invitation to a stubborn or recalcitrant juror to persist in a blind determination that his views shall control, thereby producing a hung jury.