Court Opinion

ID: 9420786
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:55:58.105337+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:27.036476
License: Public Domain

Judge Frank
in dissent took this view of the question:
"On the second day of trial, the prosecutor held a 'press conference’ after court. He told the newspaper reporters of matters which (so he later advised the court) they promised not to print. In the next morning’s New York Times, there appeared a story, told with typical journalistic vigor, about ‘export racketeers’ who ‘poured $500,000 of commodities into European and South African black markets.’ The significance of the newspaper story was this: It professed to recount the testimony of a witness that Levitón, over the phone, had offered him a $200 bribe to withdraw from customs files a fraudulent declara*948tion. The article detailed the attempted bribe, the meeting place for its completion and the substitution of a $44 gift of shirts for the originally-offered $200. This most damaging story of the $200 bribe is wholly unsupported by the evidence. Accordingly, had the prosecutor written letters to the jurors retelling this story, of course we would reverse. He did the equivalent. For it is outrightly conceded that the Times reporter learned this tale from the prosecutor, and that four copies of the newspaper article were found in the jury-room on the third day of the trial.
“My colleagues admit that 'trial by newspaper’ is unfortunate. But they dismiss it as an unavoidable curse of metropolitan living (like, I suppose, crowded subways). They rely on the old 'ritualistic admonition’ to purge the record. The futility of that sort of exorcism is notorious. As I have elsewhere observed, it is like the Mark Twain story of the little boy who was told to stand in a corner and not to think of a white elephant. Justice Jackson, in his concurring opinion in Krulewitch v. United States, 336 U.S. 440, 453, 69 S.Ct. 716, 723, 93 L.Ed. 790, said that, 'The naive assumption that prejudicial effects can be overcome by instructions to the jury * * * all practicing lawyers know to be unmitigated fiction. See Skidmore v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 2 Cir., 167 F.2d 54. Cf. People v. Carborano, 301 N.Y. 39, 42-43, 92 N.E.2d 871; People v. Robinson, 273 N.Y. 438, 445-446, 8 N.E. 2d 25.
“I think the technique particularly objectionable and ineffective here for two reasons. (1) The story was a direct result of confidential disclosures by a government officer, the prosecutor, of not-in-the-record matters, and was not merely the accidental garbling of a confused reporter. (2) The article was no statement of opinion or editorial, but a professed account of court-room evidence *949calculated to confuse and mislead juror-readers. In such cases, courts recognize that, for all practical purposes, defendants are deprived of their constitutional rights to confront witnesses, cross-examine and contradict them, and object to evidence as irrelevant or incompetent — in short all the elements of a fair trial. Last year, two Supreme Court Justices advocated in a concurring opinion the reversal of a conviction upon the ground that an officer of the court had released to the local press information about confessions of the defendants never introduced at the trial. Shepherd v. Florida, 341 U.S. 50, 71 S.Ct. 549, 95 L.Ed. 740.
“I cannot see the relevance here of cases, to which my colleagues refer, applying the 'clear and present danger’ test to contempts by newspapers for articles relative to pending trials (incidentally, all non-jury trials). That test has been employed only when the newspaper itself was threatened with criminal punishment for the publication. It certainly should not be carried over to a case like this one where convicted defendants may well have been prejudiced by a newspaper article. In such a case, the 'clear and present danger’ test would bar reversals for all but the most flagrantly scurrilous or deceptive newspaper attacks. Courts, in reversing convictions for trial-by-newspaper, have always recognized that printed matter may be prejudicial enough to require a new trial without evidencing so depraved an attitude of the publisher as to support a contempt citation. United States v. Ogden, D.C.E.D. Pa., 105 F. 371, 374.
“In the instant case, the newspaper and reporter, if cited for contempt, would doubtless urge as a defense that the story came from the prosecutor, an 'officer of the court.’ That very fact, however, underscores the gravity of the error here.” Id., at 865-866.