Court Opinion

ID: 9475825
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:39:23.800903+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:57.683377
License: Public Domain

JAMES DICKSON PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent for the reasons explained in the vacated panel opinion. 793 F.2d 580 (4th Cir.1986).
In particular, contrary to the majority’s assertion, the Jencks Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3500, simply does not “govern” the pre-trial discovery of co-conspirator statements when, as, here, the co-conspirator is not a prospective witness.
No one attempting fairly to divine the proper application to co-conspirator statements of Fed.R.Crim.P. 16(a)(1)(A) (pre-trial discovery of “defendant statements”); Fed. R.Evid. 801(d)(2)(E) (co-conspirator “hearsay” declarations admissible as admissions of a defendant); and Fed.R.Crim.P. 26.2 (Jencks Act bar to pre-trial disclosure of prospective witness statements) could fail to appreciate that the three rules in combination do not yield a “literal” answer.
For the panel opinion’s reasonable and just accommodation of the conflicting interests of prosecution and accused well within the spirit of the most pertinent rules the en banc majority has substituted a woodenly rigid approach plainly violative of the manifest spirit of the rules in combination. Instead of leaving the question of disclosure in particular cases to the circumscribed discretion of district judges, the majority, claiming a “literalist” approach to rule interpretation, has left disclosure entirely to the discretion of government prosecutors, adopting the government’s extreme litigation position here lock-stock-and-barrel.
The practical result is that while an accused may protect himself against the risk of being surprised at trial by his own falsely reported statements, he may not protect himself against the much more treacherous risk of surprise by falsely attributed or reported hearsay statements of a “co-conspirator” admitted against him by the “fiction” that they are his own. It can only be hoped that if this is what the rules “literally” prescribe, the rules-makers will give renewed attention to a problem that has already occupied them considerably in recent years.
I am authorized to say that Chief Judge WINTER, Judge ERVIN, and Senior Judge BUTZNER join in this opinion.