Court Opinion

ID: 9557887
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 16:59:27.69658+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:07:39.410498
License: Public Domain

GOULD, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I join the per curiam opinion in full. Given the other evidence of Soto’s guilt on the possession offense, and the fact that he was acquitted on the distribution offense, the error caused by the judge’s refusal to instruct the jury as Soto had requested regarding Soto’s failure to testify was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. I write separately, however, to state my view that the refusal of the district court to give such an instruction when requested *936at trial was error, and that our precedent of United States v. Castaneda, 94 F.3d 592 (9th Cir.1996) which seems to reach a contrary conclusion,1 was wrongly decided and, at an appropriate opportunity, should be revisited through our en banc process.
The Supreme Court has stated in no uncertain terms that judges presiding over jury trials have a “constitutional obligation ... to minimize the danger that the jury will give evidentiary weight to a defendant’s failure to testify” and that they are to discharge this obligation by instructing the jury, when a defendant properly requests such an instruction, that the jury may draw no adverse inference from the defendant’s decision not to take the stand. See Carter v. Kentucky, 450 U.S. 288, 305, 101 S.Ct. 1112, 67 L.Ed.2d 241 (1981); see also James v. Kentucky, 466 U.S. 341, 342, 104 S.Ct. 1830, 80 L.Ed.2d 346 (1984) (reaffirming the Carter rule). While purporting to acknowledge this Supreme Court authority, our opinion in Castaneda effectively ignored it by holding that a model Ninth Circuit jury instruction regarding the presumption of innocence and the government’s burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt “sufficiently covered the substance of Castaneda’s proposed instruction: the defendant’s failure to testify does not lessen the government’s burden to prove its case.” Castaneda, 94 F.3d at 596.
In deciding Carter, however, the Supreme Court dismissed an almost identical “presumption of innocence” jury instruction as “no substitute for the explicit instruction that the petitioner’s lawyer requested.” Carter, 450 U.S. at 304, 101 S.Ct. 1112. The Court reasoned that while “the Fifth Amendment privilege and the presumption of innocence are closely aligned[,] ... these principles serve different functions,” and so the explicit “no adverse inference” instruction, when requested by a defendant, is still required by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. See id. at 304-05, 101 S.Ct. 1112. Thus, Castaneda represents a mistake waiting to be corrected.
I hope that when a proper occasion arises, a larger complement of our court’s judges will remedy the confusion caused by Castaneda and bring this circuit’s jury instruction jurisprudence into complete harmony with the Supreme Court’s mandate in Carter. Following the Supreme Court’s advice in Carter will ensure fairness to those accused of crimes and help to attain a superior criminal procedure.

. It is unclear whether Castaneda held that the failure to give a “no adverse inference” instruction was not error at all because the substance of that proposed instruction was adequately covered by other instructions that the jury was given, or whether the Castaneda court concluded that there was error under Carter but that the error was harmless because the judge made remarks during voir dire about the defendant’s right not to testify and cautioned that "if he exercises that right, you cannot allow that to affect your determination of the issues.” See Castaneda, 94 F.3d at 596. In my view, this confusion about the proposition for which Castaneda actually stands is one of the chief problems with the opinion, but I believe that either interpretation is inconsistent with the Supreme Court's guidance in Carter and James. Nothing in the Supreme Court's precedents on this issue suggests that the judge's "constitutional obligation” to warn the jury not to give evidentiary weight to the defendant's failure to testify can be met through statements made during voir dire rather than a formal jury instruction, when requested, at the close of trial.