Court Opinion

ID: 9450187
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:37:49.383432+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:11.193066
License: Public Domain

HAMLEY, Circuit Judge
(concurring) .
Had the information which came to the three jurors in the previous Wilson trial, to the effect that appellant Alcie Fletcher “ * * * is a narcotics peddler. * * come from a witness who did not subsequently testify to the same effect in the Fletcher trial, I would feel that the failure of counsel for Fletcher to be advised of this occurrence deprived him, in the Fletcher trial, of the opportunity to exercise, effectively and intelligently, the peremptory challenges available to him under Rule 24(b), Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. This in turn, in my view, would have constituted a denial of a fair trial, and hence a deprivation of due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.
My view, under that hypothesis, would be unaffected by the fact that the voir dire examination was adequate in view of the facts then known; that the jurors answered truthfully to the questions on voir dire, none being of a kind which would necessarily call for a disclosure of the incident in the Wilson case; that no misconduct on the part of the Govern*589ment was shown; that no actual prejudice on the part of the three jurors was shown; or that counsel for Fletcher used only eight of his ten peremptory challenges.
But here the witness, Caron B. Durel, a federal narcotics agent, who testified in the Wilson case that Fletcher is a narcotics peddler, testified to similar effect in the Fletcher trial. Moreover, In the Fletcher trial Durel supported his appraisal of Fletcher with his eyewitness account of the actual narcotics transaction, involving a sale by Fletcher to one James Steward, upon which the prosecution of Fletcher was based.
In the light of this circumstance, I do not see how it can be said that the denial of Fletcher’s right to remove the three jurors by peremptory challenge brought about by the undisclosed incident of the Wilson trial, affected the fairness of the Fletcher trial. Those three jurors who heard Durel make this statement in the Wilson trial twenty days previously, or any jurors who would have replaced them, heard or would have heard the same statement from the same witness at the Fletcher trial.