United States v. William A. Widgery, Sr.

778 F.2d 325, 1985 U.S. App. LEXIS 25276

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
• Decided: November 25, 1985
• Docket: 85-1068
• Status: Published

Opinions

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge.

William Widgery stands convicted of mail fraud and securities fraud. His trial lasted more than two weeks. The jury deliberated for one full day and parts of two others. During the deliberations the foreman of the jury sent the judge two notes. One accused another juror of intoxication; the other asked the judge “what we were to do if we couldn't reach a verdict or how long we were supposed to deliberate.” In response to the first note the judge told the bailiff to watch the juror in question closely; in response to the second he had the bailiff tell the foreman to “keep on trying.” Defense counsel did not learn about either note until the trial was over.

Both incidents were regrettable. Fed.R.Crim.P. 43(a) gives the defendant a right to be present at every stage of the trial, and this requires the court to share with defendant notes from the jury. Notes should be examined and answers given in open court. Rogers v. United States, 422 U.S. 35, 95 S.Ct. 2091, 45 L.Ed.2d 1 (1975); Shields v. United States, 273 U.S. 583, 47 S.Ct. 478, 71 L.Ed. 787 (1927); United States v. Clavey, 565 F.2d 111 (7th Cir. 1977), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 954, 99 S.Ct. 351, 58 L.Ed.2d 345 (1978). To answer a note without consulting counsel may spoil a perfectly good trial for several reasons— not only because it denies defendant a procedural right but also because consultation may help the court to cure a genuine problem in the deliberations before it is too late. A response arrived at after hearing from the parties is more likely to be accurate than one delivered on the spur of the moment. In October 1984, 746 F.2d 1482 (7th Cir.), this court remanded the case with instructions to hold an evidentiary hearing to develop the nature and consequences of the irregularities.

The district judge found that the foreman’s charge of a juror's drinking was unsupported. Seven other jurors testified that they had observed the juror in question throughout the trial; none detected an odor of alcohol on his breath or any signs of intoxication. The bailiff watched the juror and saw neither drinking at meals nor signs of drinking. The court found the foreman’s contrary assertion false. The district judge also found that the inquiry about deliberations was the foreman’s own doing. She did not discuss the note with the other jurors. The court characterized the note as “hypothetical,” a “what if ...” inquiry about a problem of deadlock that never developed.

Widgery contests both conclusions. He also says that the judge should have disqualified himself under 28 U.S.C. § 455, both under § 455(a) because his impartiality may reasonably be questioned and under § 455(b)(1) because he had knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts. Because Widgery never moved for disqualification in the district court, the argument under § 455(a) fails. Disqualification for the appearance of impropriety runs prospectively only; even a successful motion does not vitiate acts taken before the motion was filed. United States v. Murphy, 768 F.2d 1518, 1539-41 (7th Cir.1985). Disqualification under § 455(b) for an actual impropriety would indeed require a new hearing, but there is no basis for a § 455(b) motion here. Knowledge of disputed facts requires disqualification only if the knowledge has an extrajudicial source. United States v. Coven, 662 F.2d 162, 168 (2d Cir.1981), cert. denied, 456 U.S. 916, 102 S.Ct. 1771, 72 L.Ed.2d 176 (1982). Were it otherwise, no judge could rule on post-trial motions claiming error in the conduct of the trial. The judge’s knowledge of the facts here comes exclusively from the trial. Disqualification was unnecessary, and we turn to the merits.

The response to the foreman’s charge of another juror’s intoxication was appropriate, even though the judge should have consulted with both sides before acting. The bailiffs observations put the lie to the charge. There was no need for additional inquiry at the time; the hurling of accusations might have disrupted the deliberations to everyone’s detriment. The subsequent inquiry confirmed the bailiff’s observations. The judge’s error in not showing the note to counsel was harmless under any meaning of that term.

The response to the foreman’s note creates more substantial difficulties. The judge did not know at the time whether the jury was deadlocked. He did not know that the note was the foreman’s doing. And he should have known that there was a risk that the foreman would have interpreted his answer as a direction to keep deliberating come what may — an anticipatory “dynamite” charge without the required remainder that each juror must reach his own conclusion and not give in just to produce a verdict.

As things turned out, none of this occurred. The jury was never deadlocked. The trial lasted 2lh weeks, and there were a total of 18 counts against two defendants. There were more than 150 exhibits. Deliberations began on April 27, 1983, at 1:05 p.m., and the jury separated at 9:00 p.m. The jurors went back to work at 10:00 a.m. the next day. The foreman sent the note to the court sometime that day. At 5:50 p.m. the court brought in the jury and asked whether it had reached any verdict. The foreman said no. The judge then asked whether the jurors thought they could reach a verdict if given additional time; all jurors nodded. On learning that the jury was not deadlocked, the judge allowed them to continue their work without further instructions. At 7:40 p.m. the jury returned four verdicts, convicting Widgery on two counts and acquitting the other defendant on two counts. The jury continued deliberating until 10:50 that evening. The next morning at 11:00 the jury convicted Widgery on the remaining 14 counts. It does not seem likely that the foreman’s note and the court’s answer had any influence on this.

Widgery asks us to bypass consideration of harmless error and reverse his conviction as an exercise of our “supervisory power.” We do not have the power Widgery attributes to us. “Supervisory power” has two meanings that must be kept separate. Supervisory power sometimes means the authority to announce new rules that promote the administration of justice, even though neither constitution nor statute requires such rules. Long before Congress began to regulate criminal trials by statute, or the Supreme Court found a code of criminal procedure in the great generalities of the bill of rights, courts were adopting rules to govern proceedings before them. “Supervisory power” is just a new title for a very old practice. This common law power is the “supervisory power” that the Supreme Court invoked in McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332, 63 S.Ct. 608, 87 L.Ed. 819 (1943), United States v. Hale, 422 U.S. 171, 95 , 45 L.Ed.2d 99 (1975), and similar cases, and that we invoked in United States v. Silvern, 484 F.2d 879 (7th Cir. 1973) (en banc), to formulate instructions to be given to deadlocked juries. See also United States v. Torres, 751 F.2d 875, 878-80 (7th Cir.1984).

The other possible meaning of “supervisory power” is the one Widgery presses on us — a power to reverse judgments without requiring a demonstration that the error in question affected the outcome. Reversals of this character, it is said, will reinforce the rule in question. If a judge knows that reversal is automatic, he will follow the rule; if he knows that reversal depends on a showing of prejudice, he will be less likely to honor the rule. Appellate courts once took this view, becoming “impregnable citadels of technicality.” Roger Trayner, The Riddle of Harmless Error 14 (1970). Congress enacted (or approved) harmless error rules to reverse that approach. Fed.R.Crim.P. 52(a) and 28 U.S.C. § 2111 require courts to disregard errors that do not affect “substantial rights.” The supervisory power is part of the common law, and no court has a common law power to disregard a rule or statute that .was within the authority of Congress to enact. The supervisory power permits a court to fill in interstices, not to “disregard the considered limitations of the law it is charged with enforcing.” United States v. Payner, 447 U.S. 727, 737, 100 S.Ct. 2439, 2447, 65 L.Ed.2d 468 (1980). It therefore does not authorize a court to disregard the harmless error rules. See United States v. Hasting, 461 U.S. 499, 505-07, 103 S.Ct. 1974, 1978-79, 76 L.Ed.2d 96 (1983).

Sometimes it is so difficult to tell whether the violation of a rule has injured the defendant, and so likely that the violation did, that the violation cannot be harmless error. Some deprivations of the right to counsel are in this category. Geders v. United States, 425 U.S. 80, 96 S.Ct. 1330, 47 L.Ed.2d 592 (1976). The right to see a note from the jurors and comment on the response is not. Rushen v. Spain, 464 U.S. 114, 104 S.Ct. 453, 78 L.Ed.2d 267 (1983). The lower courts in Rushen thought that the absence of a contemporaneous record made a harmless error inquiry impossible; the Supreme Court disagreed, holding that the prejudicial effect of a judge’s failure to discuss with counsel communications from and to the jury “can normally be determined by a post-trial hearing.” Id. at 119, 104 S.Ct. at 456. See also Smith v. Phillips, 455 U.S. 209, 102 S.Ct. 940, 71 L.Ed.2d 78 (1982). The communication in Rushen involved a juror’s knowledge of evidentiary facts; there is no reason to treat differently a juror’s hypothetical inquiry about deadlocks.

There remains the question whether the harmless error inquiry should be conducted under the statutory standard of effect on “substantial rights” or under the elevated standard that Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967), requires for deprivations of most constitutional rights. This court, like several others, has on occasion used the Chapman standard for a problem like the one we have here. Each time it has assumed without deciding that it is appropriate. E.g., Ware v. United States, 376 F.2d 717, 719 (7th Cir.1967). Cf. United States v. Silverstein, 732 F.2d 1338, 1348 (7th Cir.1984) (finding error harmless without specifying the standard of harmlessness). None of our cases has held, however, that a problem of this character violates the constitution. Both Rule 52(a) and § 2111 instruct courts what standard of harmless error to use, unless the constitution commands otherwise. Here it does not.

A judge’s failure to show jurors’ notes to counsel and allow them to comment before responding violates Fed.R.Crim.P. 43(a), not the constitution. Krische v. Smith, 662 F.2d 177, 178-79 (2d Cir.1981). Perhaps the exclusion of counsel from the process of answering the jury’s note could be characterized as a deprivation of counsel for that incident or a violation of the sixth amendment’s right to a public trial, but it would take argument to show why the sixth amendment requires this incident to be public. The argument from the right to counsel is circular — there is a right to counsel at the reading and answering of the note only because Rule 43 requires the reading and answering to be done in an adversarial fashion, and if the court neglects to read the note to them, there is no proceeding at which counsel could appear.

The court’s error does not violate the due process clause, either. The constitution does not require faultless adherence to rules that are not themselves part of the constitution. Unless a command may be found in the constitution — and Rule 43 is a more recent development than that — the due process clause requires “only the most basic procedural safeguards.” Patterson v. New York, 432 U.S. 197, 210, 97 S.Ct. 2319, 2327, 53 L.Ed.2d 281 (1977). The question therefore is what the constitution would have required were there no Rule 43. Only a trial fundamentally unfair in light of the entire proceedings violates the open-ended aspect of the constitutional protection. Donnelly v. DeChristoforo, 416 U.S. 637, 94 S.Ct. 1868, 40 L.Ed.2d 431 (1974). Widgery’s trial was generally conducted according to the rules, and a single glitch in a lengthy trial does not create constitutional error. It may be that inquiry postponed is less likely to be accurate, but that is not the sort of defect that undermines the reliability of the entire trial. Smith v. Phillips, Rushen v. Spain, and United States v. Gagnon, — U.S.-, 105 S.Ct. 1482, 84 L.Ed.2d 486 (1985), all hold that subsequent inquiries are constitutionally sufficient to assess events that occurred in the absence of defendant or his counsel or that affected the impartiality of the jury. Cf. Ponte v. Real, — U.S.-, 105 S.Ct. 2192, 85 L.Ed.2d 553 (1985) (a subsequent statement of reasons for not calling a witness is sufficient under the due process clause).

We think the correct characterization of the defendant’s interest is the one offered by Justice Stevens in Rushen, supra, 464 U.S. at 126-27, 104 S.Ct. at 460 (concurring opinion): whether the defendant is entitled to see and comment on notes and answers contemporaneously or only at some later time. The defendant has the right under Rule 43 to know the contents of the note and protest the judge’s answer, but if the dispute is about the timing of the protest it is not one about fundamental constitutional rights. The majority found it unnecessary to- consider Justice Stevens’s conclusion (see 464 U.S. at 117-18 n. 2, 104 S.Ct. at 455 n. 2). More recently the Court held that a hearing with a juror in a judge’s chambers from which all defendants and some counsel were excluded did not violate the constitution. United States v. Gagnon, supra, 105 S.Ct. at 1484-85. The constitutional right to be present (which carries with it the right to counsel) is designed to implement the right to confront adverse witnesses. Gagnon concluded that judges may conduct at least some non-testimonial proceedings outside the defendant’s presence. The Court quoted with approval (105 S.Ct. at 1484) the gist of Justice Stevens’s conclusion in Rushen.

In light of Gagnon and Rushen, we ask whether the delay in inquiring into the foreman’s note and the court’s answer affected Widgery’s substantial rights. The answer is no. The district judge found that the jury was never deadlocked, a finding supported by the jurors’ reactions in open court. The jury therefore would not have interpreted the court’s response to the note as an instruction to keep going despite a deadlock, or as ordering any juror to abandon a position conscientiously held. The jurors took their time and came to verdicts when they were ready. We cannot even be sure that the members of the jury other than the foreman learned of the note and answer. Although the foreman testified that she discussed the court’s answer with the other jurors, the district judge evidently did not believe this. Five times within his short opinion, the judge refers to the foreman’s testimony as “incredible,” “erroneous,” or “lackpng] credibility.” The judge did not reject this bit of testimony in so many words, but his conclusion that the jury was never deadlocked and that the note was the foreman’s own act reflect a general disbelief of her testimony. The incident, regrettable though it was, did not affect Widgery’s substantial rights.

Affirmed.