Court Opinion

ID: 9475738
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:36:50.311601+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:54.171109
License: Public Domain

RYAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I write to dissent from the Court’s decision in this case, and to explain the basis for my disagreement with the Court’s reasoning.
While this is indeed a case taken to “reconsider the propriety of [United States v. ] Henderson [434 F.2d 84 (6th Cir.1970) ],” it most assuredly is not a case about “the standard of review for ‘on or about’ jury instructions when an alibi defense is presented.” The standard for review of such a case is very clear, and it is the same standard according to which we review the correctness of all jury instructions in criminal cases: whether the court has correctly stated the law in its charge to the jury and, if not, whether the error affected “substantial rights” of the defendant. Fed.R. Crim.P. 52(a).
It is very clear that the district court did not correctly state the law in its instructions to the jury because its “on or about” jury instruction, at the very least, did not address an issue which was supported by the evidence in the case and, at worst, effectively nullified the defendant’s alibi defense.
This is a case that asks the question whether in a prosecution, where all of the evidence of the commission of a crime is that it was committed on a single specific date, and the defendant produces evidence of an alibi for that specific date, it is error requiring reversal for the trial court to instruct the jury that it may convict if it finds “the” offense was committed “on or about” that date. It is reversible error, of course, and the authorities are legion. See, e.g., Spencer v. State, 24 Ala.App. 140, 131 So. 456 (1930); People v. Brown, 186 Cal.App.2d Supp. 889, 9 Cal.Rptr. 53 (1960); State v. Abbott, 65 Kan. 139, 69 P. 160 (Kan.1902); People v. Brocato, 17 Mich.App. 277, 169 N.W.2d 483 (1969); Love v. State, 142 Miss. 602, 107 So. 667 (1926); State v. Bowles, 360 S.W.2d 706 (Mo.1962); State v. Whittemore, 255 N.C. 583, 122 S.E.2d 396 (1961); State v. Waid, 92 Utah 297, 67 P.2d 647 (1937); State v. Brown, 35 Wash.2d 379, 213 P.2d 305 (1950); Esquibel v. State, 399 P.2d 395 (Wyo.1965). But see, e.g., Gravitt v. State, 220 Ga. 781, 141 S.E.2d 893 (1965); State v. Rosenberg, 84 Utah 402, 35 P.2d 1004 (1934); State v. Arnold, 130 Wash. 370, 227 P. 505 (1924).
These cases (as well as the instant case) must be distinguished from those involving, not a coincidence of indictment date, government’s proof date, and alibi date, but a variance between the indictment and the government’s proof. See, e.g., Caldwell v. State, 139 Ga.App. 279, 228 S.E.2d 219 (1976); Commonwealth v. Boyer, 216 Pa.Super. 286, 264 A.2d 173 (1970). Cf. United States v. Goodrich, 493 F.2d 390 (9th Cir.1974).
I
My disagreement with the Court’s opinion begins with its declared purpose of “limiting Henderson so that there should be no per se prohibition on ‘on or about’ jury instructions because an alibi defense is provided for a specific date.” Henderson did not state such a per se rule, and there is no occasion therefore to limit the holding in that case in the fashion the Court describes. The Henderson Court held that, on the facts of that case, essentially the
*344same “on or about” instruction as is challenged in this case was improper, because such an instruction was
“a correct statement of the rule that applies when there is a variance between an indictment’s charge and the evidence offered to prove it. Here there was no such variance and the Court’s charge, in effect, wiped out the probative value of the defendant’s clear evidence that the alleged crime could not have occurred on the date set out in the indictment and solely relied on in the proofs.”
434 F.2d at 89 (footnote omitted).
Aside from the fact that the holding of Henderson was tailored to the facts presented in that case, further indication that the Court was not laying down a per se rule, but one reached after a harmless error analysis, is the statement that appears in the penultimate paragraph of the opinion after a detailed recitation of the facts of the case:
“We regret the need to reverse but feel that the learned District Judge unwittingly gave an instruction that deprived the defendant of a fair trial. We are unable to say that the quoted instruction was harmless error.”
434 F.2d at 90.
Henderson, therefore, cannot be distinguished as a case laying down a “per se prohibition” against “on or about” jury instructions when an alibi defense is presented, and in which the court failed to conduct a harmless error analysis. The Henderson Court conducted a harmless error analysis and held that, on the facts there presented, the improper instruction could not be considered harmless.
Henderson was simply an enunciation in this circuit, for the first time, of the familiar general rule of law that where there is no variance between the indictment and the proofs, and the proofs demonstrate indisputably that the crime was committed, if at all, on a date certain, and the defendant introduces evidence of alibi for that date, it is improper for the court to instruct the jury that it is free to convict the defendant by finding that the offense was committed on some other date.
II
In my judgment, the Court misconceives the nature of the district court’s instructional error and the reason the instruction was unfair; it then compounds its error by employing a wholly unsound harmless error analysis.
While the indictment alleged that the offense was committed “on or about” August 14, 1983, the whole of the government’s proofs were that the offense was committed, if at all, only on August 14, 1983. Similarly, the defendant’s alibi evidence was that he was elsewhere on August 14 and could not have committed the only offense for which the government offered any proof.
Until hearing the court’s instruction that is challenged here, the jury was forced, as in Henderson, to choose between the prosecution’s evidence that the defendant had delivered the drugs on August 14, and the defendant’s alibi to the effect that he could not have delivered the drugs, because at no time on August 14 was he at the place where the government claimed he personally made the delivery; in fact, he was at another place all day in the company of his wife.
If the jury believed the government’s evidence, it must necessarily have rejected the alibi evidence. If it did that, it was free to convict. If, however, it believed the alibi evidence, or even if Neuroth raised a reasonable doubt whether he was at Ba-lough’s trailer on August 14, the jury could not have found the government’s case to have been proved and was obligated to acquit. And, if it could not make up its mind whom to believe, the jury was obligated to announce its hopeless disagreement and the court would be duty bound to declare a mistrial.
Instead, the district court, in utter disregard of the evidence, told the jurors, in effect, that they were free to convict the defendant, even if they believed his alibi *345defense and thus disbelieved the government’s evidence, because they were free to “find” that the defendant had delivered the drugs on some date other than August 14, despite the complete absence of proof of any such delivery. That is the only possible purpose for the instruction and the only possible use to which it could have been put by the jury. The instruction was improper for two obvious reasons:
1) It did not address any issue reasonably raised by the evidence in the case because there was no evidence of a delivery on any date other than August 14, and
2) It completely destroyed the defendant’s defense. It did not merely denigrate it; it “wiped it out” as the Henderson Court put it in that case.
Rather than squarely facing the question whether a conviction may stand that is obtained following an instruction which authorizes the jury to convict the defendant of an offense for which no proof was introduced, this Court tacks away from the issue, holding, in effect, that it does not matter whether the instruction was improper because the jurors paid no attention to the instruction — never used it for its intended purpose — because they did not believe the defendant’s alibi evidence, and understandably so, since it was not very believable anyway:
“Significantly, defendant’s alibi defense was not likely to persuade the jury. It was merely the word of a highly partial witness; defendant’s wife.”
That remarkable observation illuminates the essential flaw in the Court’s reasoning in this case.
The Court’s position evidently is that the testimony of the defendant’s wife was not credible. That, understandably, is a very difficult position for the Court to articulate because the credibility of witnesses is a matter exclusively for the jury. But that is indeed the predicate for the Court’s analysis, viz: the trial judge’s erroneous instruction was harmless because the jurors must certainly have totally disregarded it since they did not believe the defendant’s defense anyway.
The difficulty with this analysis is that no one, other than the jurors in this case, and least of all the members of this Court, can know whether the jury believed the defendant’s alibi witness. More importantly, the Court’s analysis does not address the very real possibility that the jurors eagerly obeyed the trial court’s erroneous instruction and utilized it for the very purpose for which it was intended — to authorize conviction even if the jurors believed the defendant’s alibi witness. That is precisely why the Henderson Court held that a harmless error analysis could not save the conviction in that legally indistinguishable case.
Quite aside from the analytical and legal unsoundness of this Court determining whether instructional error is harmless by evaluating the credibility of the witnesses, the Court’s analysis is flawed in another respect.
The defendant offered an alibi defense that met directly and' narrowly the case presented by the prosecution. One of the reasons, completely overlooked by the Court today, that the challenged instruction was unfair, is that it “sandbagged” the defendant. Having observed that the government’s proofs were that he committed the crime at approximately 1:30 p.m. on August 14 at Lori Balough’s trailer and at no other time, date, or place, the defendant introduced evidence that he was not at Balough’s trailer at any time on that date and therefore could not have committed the crime the government “proved.” The trial court then instructed the jury, in effect, and over defendant’s objection, that it was quite alright to convict the defendant if it found that he delivered the drugs on some nearby date (“on or about”) other than August 14.
This Court’s analysis overlooks the fact that, had the defendant known that the trial court was going to authorize his conviction for delivering the drugs on August 12 or 13, or August 15 or 16, despite a complete absence of proof, he might have presented an even more persuasive alibi *346defense for those dates. As things stood, even if the defendant had the prescience to know that the court was going to nullify his August 14 alibi defense, evidence of an alibi for August 12, 13, 15, or 16 would have been inadmissible because it would have been immaterial to rebut the government’s proofs of the “August 14 or not at all” crime.
Instead of addressing these difficult ramifications of the court’s erroneous instruction, the Court holds that the instructional error is of no moment because the jurors probably had not believed the alibi and therefore paid no attention to the instruction. That, of course, the judges of this Court simply cannot know.
Ill
I cannot share the Court’s confidence that the error in this case was harmless. “Harmless-error analysis addresses [the] question: what is to be done about a trial error that, in theory, may have altered the basis on which the jury decided the case, but in practice clearly had no effect on the outcome?” Rose v. Clark, 106 S.Ct. 3101, 3108 n. 11, 92 L.Ed.2d 460, 473 n. 11 (1986). The “crucial assumption” underlying the system of trial by jury is “that juries will follow the instructions given them by the trial judge.” Parker v. Randolph, 442 U.S. 62, 73 (1979) (plurality opinion).
Henderson does not preclude a finding of harmless error in a case where an alibi defense was presented and an “on or about” instruction was given. If the government’s proofs were not clearly directed to a single day, the instruction would not necessarily be error. See United States v. Goodrich, 493 F.2d 390 (9th Cir.1974). If the defendant’s alibi extended to all days “on or about” the date named in the indictment, the instruction would presumably be harmless. See State v. Sills, 311 N.C. 370, 317 S.E.2d 379 (1984); State v. Correia, 106 R.I. 655, 262 A.2d 619 (1970).
In this ease, however, the government’s proofs were clearly directed to a particular day and time, so the giving of the instruction was, as the Court apparently recognizes, error. In view of the fact that the defendant provided an alibi for that same day, an issue of fact is raised by this record. In the words of Rose v. Clark, any instruction that could have been employed by the jury to reach a verdict without resolving this central factual dispute is one which, “in theory, may have altered the basis on which the jury decided the case.” 92 L.Ed.2d at 473 n. 11.
To hold that this error, in practice, “clearly had no effect on the outcome,” id., the Court must conclude either that there was, in effect, no factual dispute — the alibi was so weak as to be incredible as a matter of law — or that the jury must have discarded or ignored the instruction. I am unwilling to assume that the jury did not follow the instructions in this case. It would “transfer to the jury the judge’s function in giving the law” to say “that the lay jury will know enough to disregard the judge’s bad law if in fact he misguides them.” Bollenbach v. United States, 326 U.S. 607, 613-14 (1946). In my judgment, the Court’s conclusion that the instructional error was harmless because the jury must have disbelieved the defendant’s alibi is unjustified.
That is not a harmless error analysis; it is an appellate guess that the jury must have disbelieved defendant’s alibi witness because she was defendant’s wife, and that, therefore, nobody on the jury paid any attention to the trial court’s invitation to the jurors to convict the defendant of a crime not proved.
This Court, amassed en banc, surely has the power to make that guess. I think it does not have the authority to do so.
In truth, the Court cannot say, indeed no one can say, whether the jurors convicted the defendant despite believing that he committed no crime whatever on August 14, and despite the absence of any evidence of his guilt of any crime on any other date, simply because the trial court invited them to do so.
*347IV
Finally, I must disassociate myself from the Court’s denigration of the defendant’s alibi defense for another reason. Quite aside from the impropriety of deciding whom the jurors probably believed and whom they did not believe in this criminal case, it strikes me as extraordinary for the Court, having nevertheless undertaken this guesswork, to state that the defendant’s alibi defense “was not likely to persuade the jury. It was merely the word of a highly partial witness; defendant’s wife.” I would not like to be associated with the implicit appellate conclusion that the defendant’s wife in this case probably committed perjury or that, in general, in a criminal case, a defendant’s spouse, whose evidence is contradicted by prosecution witnesses, is not very worthy of belief. That sort of reasoning strikes me as the residue of the spousal disqualification rule that was abolished in federal courts long ago. I know of no rule of law that declares that testimony of a spouse in support of a defense advanced by a defendant in a criminal case is, as a matter of law, unworthy of belief, even when the prosecution’s “evidence pointing to defendant’s guilt [is] strong if not overwhelming.” That, of course, is precisely why the matter of the credibility of witnesses is left for the fact-finder, in this ease a jury, to be enhanced or impeached by the introduction of evidence at trial, and not for appellate second-guessing.
The long range harm in today’s decision is not that it “encourage[s] a jury to speculate wildly as to the commission of a crime on a date not covered by the proof”; it is that it authorizes trial courts and subsequent panels of this Court to speculate that when a defendant’s alibi was provided by his or her spouse, or perhaps a near relative, it very likely was not believed by the jury hearing the case, and therefore an instruction like the one given in this case that destroys the defendant’s defense did no damage because the jurors did not believe the defense anyway.
Because I cannot know whether the jury believed or disbelieved the defendant’s alibi and therefore cannot know whether the court’s erroneous instruction was taken by the jury as license to convict the defendant for a crime for which no proof was offered, I would set aside the verdict and remand the case for a new trial.