Gary Leroy Douglas v. Hoyt C. Cupp, Superintendent, Oregon State Penitentiary

578 F.2d 266, 1978 U.S. App. LEXIS 10186

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Decided: July 13, 1978
• Docket: 77-1265
• Status: Published

Opinions

J. JOSEPH SMITH, Circuit Judge:

Gary Leroy Douglas appeals from a judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon (Otto R. Skopil, Jr., Chief Judge), dismissing his petition for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254. Following a jury trial held in the circuit court for Coos County, Oregon, Douglas was convicted of burglary in the first degree. He was awarded an indeterminate sentence, the maximum term not to exceed fifteen years.

The Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed this conviction without opinion, 23 Or.App. 221, 541 P.2d 833 (1975), and the petitioner did not seek review of the case in the Oregon Supreme Court.¹ Subsequently, petitioner sought, and was denied, federal ha-beas corpus relief. He presently appeals that judgment of the district court.

Petitioner Douglas presents us with a single issue on this appeal. At trial, the state prosecutor called Douglas’ arresting officer as a state witness. After substantial questioning, Trial Tr. at 154-159, the following colloquy took place between the prosecutor and the arresting officer.

Q. Who arrested Mr. Douglas?

A. I did.

Q. Did he make any statements to you? A. No.

Prosecutor: That’s all the questions I have.

[Trial Tr. at 158-159.]

Douglas argues here that his constitutional rights were violated when the prosecutor introduced evidence concerning the petitioner’s exercise of his fifth amendment right to remain silent.

In Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), the United States Supreme Court indicated that “[t]he prosecution may not . . . use at trial the fact that [a defendant] stood mute or claimed his privilege in the face of accusation.” 384 U.S. at 468 n. 37, 86 S.Ct. at 1625. More recently, that Court has held that the use for impeachment purposes of a defendant’s silence at the time of arrest and after the receipt of Miranda warnings is impermissible. Writing for the Court, Justice Powell noted that:

[W]hile it is true that the Miranda warnings contain no express assurance that silence will carry no penalty, such assurance is implicit to any person who receives the warnings. In such circumstances, it would be fundamentally unfair and a deprivation of due process to allow the arrested person’s silence to be used to impeach an explanation subsequently offered at trial. [Doyle v. Ohio, 426 U.S. 610 at 618, 96 S.Ct. 2240 at 2245, 49 L.Ed.2d 91 (1976)].

See also United States v. Hale, 422 U.S. 171, 95 S.Ct. 2133, 45 L.Ed.2d 99 (1975). The Court felt that such silence was necessarily “insolubly ambiguous,” and therefore — apart from any possible constitutional infirmities — was of dubious probative value.

In the instant case, the state prosecutor elicited just that kind of testimony forbidden by the Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona and Doyle v. Ohio. While there was no reference to Miranda warnings, there was purposefully elicited the fact of silence in the face of arrest. The introduction of such testimony acted as an impermissible penalty on the exercise of the petitioner’s right to remain silent.

While perhaps inadvertent, the placement of the suspect question at the end of the arresting officer’s testimony gave it a prominence which it would not have had, had it simply been recounted as part of a description of the events culminating in the petitioner’s arrest. Thus it is plausible to suppose that a juror might have inferred from the offending testimony that the petitioner was guilty of the crime charged, and that his alibi was a later fabrication and without foundation. Given the equivocal nature of much of the evidence presented at trial, and the rather unusual, perhaps even bizarre, events recounted by both the prosecution and the petitioner, we cannot say, as a matter of law, that the prosecutor's question was harmless, beyond a reasonable doubt. Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967).

Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the district court, and remand the case for issue of the writ.

1 . The state acknowledges that all state remedies have been exhausted, and we have been directed to nothing in the record which would indicate that the deliberate bypass doctrine is relevant in this case.