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State v. Longe9/24/1999
In Gaudin, 515 U.S. at 511-15, the U.S. Supreme Court held that in a perjury prosecution where criminal liability depended on the materiality of the alleged falsehood, due process required that the issue of materiality be submitted to the jury. The Court held that the materiality of a falsehood turned on a "mixed question of law and fact [which] has typically been resolved by juries." Id. at 512. The element in this case, by contrast -- the reason for defendant's license suspension -- involved purely historical fact. The trier of fact should therefore have resolved it.
Nor was the error harmless. In Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 21-22 (1967), the Court held that errors of constitutional dimension do not automatically require reversal of criminal convictions. Only such constitutional errors as "necessarily render a trial fundamentally unfair" require reversal without regard to the evidence in the particular case. Rose v. Clark, 478 U.S. 570, 577 (1986). These errors include the introduction of a coerced confession, the complete denial of a defendant's right to counsel, adjudication by a biased Judge, and the direction of a verdict for the prosecution in a criminal jury trial. See id. at 577-78. The harmless error doctrine does not apply to such errors. Because the error committed in this case is akin to the direction of a verdict for the prosecution on an element of the offense charged, it is a constitutional error requiring reversal without regard to the weight of the evidence. See Johnson, 460 U.S. at 84.
The Majority relies in part on the United States Supreme Court's decision in Old Chief v. United States, 519 U.S. 172 (1997) for the proposition that § 1209a properly served as a surrogate for § 1201. In Old Chief, the defendant was charged with a violation 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), which makes it unlawful for anyone who has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year to possess a firearm. A crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year is defined in 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(20). () The Court held that the district court abused its discretion when it spurned the defendant's offer to admit the fact of the prior conviction element of the offense charged and instead admitted the full record of prior judgment of conviction when name or nature of prior offense created a risk of a verdict tainted by improper consideration. See Old Chief, 519 U.S. at 178-92.
The difference between Old Chief and the case at bar is obvious. In Old Chief the defendant offered to stipulate to an instruction to the jury that he had been convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment exceeding one year. In the present case defendant did not offer to stipulate that his suspension had been for violation of § 1201. There are other distinctions as well. In Old Chief the defendant moved for an order prohibiting the government from offering evidence or soliciting testimony regarding the prior criminal convictions, arguing that evidence of the name and nature of the prior assault conviction would unfairly tax the jury's capacity to hold the Government to its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt on current charges. See id. at 175. In other words, the defendant argued that by offering to stipulate, evidence of the name and nature of the predicate offense would be inadmissible under Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, the danger being that unfair prejudice from that evidence would substantially outweigh its probative value.
Missing from the case at bar are any legal arguments on whether mention of either "DUI" or § 1201 was admissible. Missing too is any balancing by the court of competing interests under Vermont Ru
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