Court Opinion

ID: 9456323
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:49:01.900907+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:55.961017
License: Public Domain

ELY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
I respectfully dissent. As I read the record, the prosecution evidence was insufficient to establish an essential element of the offenses charged in counts IV and V, namely, that Williams knew that the cocaine had been illegally imported. Long ago, our court held that it could not be presumed, from one’s possession of cocaine, that he knew that such drug, widely manufactured in our country, had been illegally imported. Erwing v. United States, 323 F.2d 674 (9th Cir. 1963). In our opinion in that case, written by Judge Jertherg, we correctly anticipated the Supreme Court’s later opinion in Turner v. United States, 396 U.S. 398, 90 S.Ct. 642, 24 L.Ed.2d 610 (1970).
What do we have here? A person named Wong, with whom Williams was not charged to have engaged in a conspiracy, made a hearsay statement to someone, outside the presence of Williams, that the drug came “from Mexico.” That is all. On the basis of that hearsay statement, the majority holds that Williams himself knew that the drug had been illegally imported from Mexico. In being able to jump this far, my good Brothers have found, I submit, a super judicial, if not supernatural, degree of agility.1

. My above observations have induced my Brothers to make additional comments, set forth in their footnote 7. It is said that I view the majority’s reasoning “as judicial sleight of hand that achieves an end run around Turner v. United States,” supra. While I have not expressed my views in precisely that way, my Brothers’ employment of the description “sleight of hand” is reasonably accurate. As one, however, who is as interested in football as my Brothers apparently are, I never viewed their exercise as “an end run.” The critical issue is whether the proof was sufficient to establish, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Williams knew that the cocaine was illegally imported. I cannot see that the evidence specified in items 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the majority’s footnote 7 is very directly related to the principal question. In me the majority’s new footnote arouses the image, not of an “end run,” but of the superb quarterback who, off the “I-Formation” or the “Wislibone-T,” for example, undertakes to divert the attention of the opposition to one part of the field while the man with the ball is in some other place.