Court Opinion

ID: 9836580
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-02 03:14:23.27437+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:45:18.136129
License: Public Domain

SULLIVAN, Senior Judge
(concurring):
I concur with the majority opinion on its overall legal analysis and write only to disassoeiate myself from its citation to United States v. Powell, 49 MJ 460 (1998). In Powell, the plain error rule is defined as follows:
Under a plain error analysis, appellant had the burden of persuading the court below that there was plain error. Only after appellant met his burden of persuasion did the burden shift to the Government to show that the error was not prejudicial.[*]
Id. at 464-65 (emphasis added).
This rule of Powell is flawed, as I explained in United States v. Wilson, 54 MJ 57, 60 (2000) (Sullivan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). There should be no burden on the Government in plain error cases to show that the error was harmless in view of the outcome of the case. That teaching in Powell should be expressly overruled because it established the most liberal plain-error rule in our country, although, since then our Court has apparently moved away from this unacceptable portion of Powell, sub silewtio. United States v. Tanksley, 54 MJ 169, 173 (2000). See United States v. Kho, 54 MJ 63, 65 (2000) (Sullivan, J., concurring).

* It is significant that the majority opinion omits any discussion of this "burden shifting” aspect of the plain error rule delineated in Powell. Even though as recently as September 19, 2001, at the 2001 William S. Fulton, Jr., Appellate Military Judges' Conference and Training Seminar in Washington, D.C., Powell, with its unusual shifting of burden to the Government to show prejudice, was cited as one of the leading cases of the plain error doctrine {see conference handout materials, Standard of Review at 15).
One is reminded of a similar incident of omission in the Sherlock Holmes story of “Silver Blaze,” where a local police inspector was trying to get Sherlock Holmes’s view of the evidence at the scene of a larceny:
"Is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention?”
[Holmes replied] “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
[Police Inspector] "The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
"That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales — The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle 131-32 (1999).