Court Opinion

ID: 9465491
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 00:47:48.385454+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:12.522527
License: Public Domain

TIMBERS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in Judge Feinberg’s opinion in its entirety, concurring in Judge Lumbard’s opinion in part, and disassociating himself from Judge Lumbard’s dissenting opinion with respect to the convictions of skyjackers Matanic and Pesut:
Terrorism, both domestic and international, is one of the gravest problems of our day. The skyjacking here involved was a heinous example of such terrorism. It resulted in the death of a New York City police officer and the maiming of other *38police officers. The lives of eighty-five passengers and seven members of the crew of the TWA plane were placed in jeopardy during the twenty-seven hour skyjacking which terminated when the plane, which took off from New York for Chicago and was not intended for trans-ocean flights, was forced by the skyjackers to fly across the Atlantic and to land at Paris, after refueling stops at Montreal, Newfoundland, Iceland and London.
Congress could hardly have been more emphatic in its recognition of the severity of precisely the offense here involved when it provided for the imposition of a mandatory sentence of death or life imprisonment —nothing less — upon anyone convicted of the offense of aircraft piracy resulting in the death of another person. 49 U.S.C. § 1472(i)(l)(B) (Supp. V 1975).
I join in today’s judgment which affirms the convictions and sentences of all appellants on all counts.
I concur in the entirety of Judge Feinberg’s opinion affirming the convictions and sentences of appellants Pesut and Matanic.
To the extent that Judge Lumbard’s opinion affirms the convictions and sentences of appellants Zvonko Busic and Julienne Busic, I concur.
To the extent, however, that Judge Lumbard’s opinion constitutes a dissenting opinion with respect to the convictions of appellants Pesut and Matanic,1 I not only concur in Judge Feinberg’s majority opinion affirming their convictions; I respectfully but emphatically disassociate myself from the entirety of Judge Lumbard’s dissenting opinion for the following reasons, briefly summarized:
(1) The dissent has ignored the context in which the interruptions occurred— during several hours of summations at the conclusion of a protracted six week trial in the course of which overwhelming evidence of the guilt of these appellants was adduced. The interruptions in large measure were triggered by provocative conduct on the part of defense counsel. The conscientious, experienced trial . judge,2 exercising the broad discretion which we uniformly have accorded to trial judges in the control of summations, acted with the utmost fairness and impartiality in handling defense counsel who repeatedly had demonstrated throughout the trial a propensity for inflammatory statements and prejudicial conduct in the presence of the jury. And — of critical significance here— no prejudice to Pesut or Matanic has been shown; indeed, the jury’s acquittal of them on the count which carried a mandatory penalty of death or life imprisonment, while convicting the two Busies on that count, strongly suggests that the jury was not prejudiced against Pesut or Matanic.
(2) The dissent, in concluding that the convictions of Pesut and Matanic should be reversed on the grounds that they were deprived of the effective assistance of counsel guaranteed them by the Sixth Amendment and that they were deprived of a fair *39trial solely because of interruptions during their counsel’s summations, has reached a conclusion contrary to the applicable law, as indicated by the following:
(a) The dissent’s conclusion is wholly unprecedented.
No court has ever held that a criminal conviction should be reversed solely because of interruptions by the court or prosecutor during summations by defense counsel.
(b) No such claim is made by counsel for these appellants.
Their claim, set forth in their brief on appeal, is that the trial judge’s bias and hostility permeated the trial “from start to finish”, of which the summations were but one facet. Appellants’ claims of an unfair trial in all other respects having been unanimously rejected, there remains only the asserted error limited to the conduct of the summations — an error which counsel have not claimed since there is no authority for it.
(c) The denial of effective assistance of counsel ground for reversal urged by the dissent, aside from being wholly without precedent, is at best a curious anomaly in view of the record in this ease. Whatever else may be said of defense counsel’s conduct during their summations, it most assuredly did not constitute — under the stringent standard of this Circuit or under any standard — a denial of effective assistance of counsel. In short, this simply is not a right-to-counsel case.
(d) The denial of a fair trial ground for reversal urged by the dissent, limited solely to the interruptions during defense counsel’s summations, ignores not only the record as a whole in this case, but the settled law that under the broad discretion conferred on the trial judge to control the summations, an appellate court will not set aside a conviction on that ground absent the clearest showing of abuse of discretion, and no appellate court has ever done so.
For these reasons, I concur in the entirety of Judge Feinberg’s succinct majority opinion with respect to the convictions of appellants Pesut and Matanic; and I regret that I must respectfully but emphatically disassociate myself from Judge Lumbard’s dissenting opinion with respect to these appellants.
I agree with the majority judgment which affirms the convictions and sentences of all appellants on all counts.

. Judge Lumbard’s dissenting opinion begins where he states, “Judge Lumbard dissents.” Ante at 27. It embraces his text, ante at 27-31; his footnotes, ante at 27-31; and his Appendix, ante at 31-34.

. Judge Lumbard’s partial majority — partial dissenting opinion fails to disclose, either in the headnote or in the text, the identity of the trial judge. I had thought such disclosure was a practice uniformly followed by our Court for many years.
In any event, I regard it important to know, in view of the grounds urged by the dissent for the reversal of the convictions of Pesut and Matanic, that the trial judge was Honorable John R. Bartels, Senior United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York. He has served with distinction as a federal trial judge for nearly two decades, preceded by service as a justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. He has been a member of the bar for more than half a century. He had extensive trial experience as a member of the bar. I take it to be common ground that Judge Bartels is generally regarded as one of the most conscientious and experienced federal trial judges in the United States.