United States v. Gaudin

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UNITED STATES, PETITIONER v. MICHAEL E. GAUDIN

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

515 U.S. 506 (1995)

JUSTICE SCALIA delivered the opinion of the Court.

[Respondent was charged with violating 18 U.S.C. § 1001 by making false statements on Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) loan documents. After instructing the jury that the Government had to prove, inter alia, that the alleged false statements were material to HUD's activities and decisions, the District Court added that the issue of materiality is a matter for the court to decide rather than the jury and that the statements in question were material. The jury convicted respondent, but the Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that taking the question of materiality from the jury violated the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.]

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees that no one will be deprived of liberty without "due process of law"; and the Sixth, that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury." We have held that these provisions require crimi-nal convictions to rest upon a jury determination that the defen-dant is guilty of every element of the crime with which he is charged, beyond a reasonable doubt. 1 Sullivan v. Louisiana, 508 U.S. 275, 277-278, 124 L. Ed. 2d 182, 113 S. Ct. 2078 (1993). The right to have a jury make the ultimate determination of guilt has an impressive pedigree. Blackstone described "trial by jury" as requiring that "the truth of every accusation, whether preferred in the shape of indictment, information, or appeal, should afterwards be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of [the defendant's] equals and neighbors . . . ." 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 343 (1769) (emphasis added). Justice Story wrote that the "trial by jury" guaranteed by the Constitution was "generally understood to mean . . . a trial by a jury of twelve men, impartially selected, who must unanimously concur in the guilt of the accused before a legal conviction can be had." 2 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States 541, n. 2 (4th ed. 1873) (emphasis added and deleted). 2 This right was designed "to guard against a spirit of oppression and tyranny on the part of rulers," and "was from very early times insisted on by our ancestors in the parent country, as the great bulwark of their civil and political liberties." Id., at 540-541. See also Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 151-154, 20 L. Ed. 2d 491, 88 S. Ct. 1444 (1968) (tracing the history of trial by jury).

III

Thus far, the resolution of the question before us seems simple. The Constitution gives a criminal defendant the right to demand that a jury find him guilty of all the elements of the crime with which he is charged; one of the elements in the present case is materiality; respondent therefore had a right to have the jury decide materiality. To escape the force of this logic, the Government offers essentially three arguments. Having conceded the minor premise--that materiality is an element of the offense--the Government argues first, that the major premise is flawed; second, that (essentially) a page of history is worth a volume of logic, and uniform practice simply excludes the element of materiality from the syllogism; and third, that stare decisis requires the judgment here to be reversed.

A

As to the first, the Government's position is that "materiality," whether as a matter of logic or history, is a "legal" question, and that although we have sometimes spoken of "requiring the jury to decide 'all the elements of a criminal offense,' e. g., Estelle v. McGuire, [502 U.S. 62, 69, 116 L. Ed. 2d 385, 112 S. Ct. 475] (1991); see Victor v. Nebraska, [511 U.S. 1, 5, 127 L. Ed. 2d 583, 114 S. Ct. 1239] (1994); Patterson v. New York, 432 U.S. 197, 210, 53 L. Ed. 2d 281, 97 S. Ct. 2319 (1977), the principle actually applies to only the factual components of the essential elements." Brief for United States 33. The Government claims that this understanding of the jury's role dates back to Sparf v. United States, 156 U.S. 51, 39 L. Ed. 343, 15 S. Ct. 273 (1895), and is reaffirmed by recent decisions of this Court. By limiting the jury's constitutionally prescribed role to "the factual components of the essential elements" the Government surely does not mean to concede that the jury must pass upon all elements that contain some factual component, for that test is amply met here. Deciding whether a statement is "material" requires the determination of at least two subsidiary questions of purely historical fact: (a) "what statement was made?" and (b) "what decision was the agency trying to make?" The ultimate question: (c) "whether the statement was material to the decision," requires applying the legal standard of materiality (quoted above) to these historical facts. What the Government apparently argues is that the Constitution requires only that (a) and (b) be determined by the jury, and that (c) may be determined by the judge. We see two difficulties with this. First, the application-of-legal-standard-to-fact sort of question posed by (c), commonly called a "mixed question of law and fact," has typically been resolved by juries. See J. Thayer, Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at Common Law 194, 249-250 (1898). ...

The second difficulty with the Government's position is that it has absolutely no historical support. If it were true, the law books would be full of cases, regarding materiality and innumerable other "mixed-law-and-fact" issues, in which the criminal jury was required to come forth with "findings of fact" pertaining to each of the essential elements, leaving it to the judge to apply the law to those facts and render the ultimate verdict of "guilty" or "not guilty." We know of no such case. Juries at the time of the framing could not be forced to produce mere "factual findings," but were entitled to deliver a general verdict pronouncing the defendant's guilt or innocence. Morgan, A Brief History of Special Verdicts and Special Interrogatories, 32 Yale L. J. 575, 591 (1922). See also G. Clementson, Special Verdicts and Special Findings by Juries 49 (1905); Alschuler & Deiss, A Brief History of the Criminal Jury in the United States, 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 867, 912-913 (1994). Justice Chase's defense to one of the charges in his 1805 impeachment trial was that "he well knows, that it is the right of juries in criminal cases, to give a general verdict of acquittal, which cannot be set aside on account of its being contrary to law, and that hence results the power of juries, to decide on the law as well as on the facts, in all criminal cases. This power he holds to be a sacred part of our legal privileges . . . ." 1 S. Smith & T. Lloyd, Trial of Samuel Chase 34 (1805).

Sparf, supra, the case on which the Government relies, had nothing to do with the issue before us here. The question there was whether the jury could be deprived of the power to determine, not only historical facts, not only mixed questions of fact and law, but pure questions of law in a criminal case. As the foregoing quotation from Justice Chase suggests, many thought the jury had such power. See generally Alschuler & Deiss, supra, at 902-916. We decided that it did not. In criminal cases, as in civil, we held, the judge must be permitted to instruct the jury on the law and to insist that the jury follow his instructions. 156 U.S. at 105-106. But our decision in no way undermined the historical and constitutionally guaranteed right of criminal defendants to demand that the jury decide guilt or innocence on every issue, which includes application of the law to the facts. To the contrary, Justice Harlan, writing for the Court, explained the many judicial assertions of the jury's right to determine both law and fact as expressions of "the principle, that when the question is compounded of law and fact, a general verdict, ex necessitate, disposes of the case in hand, both as to law and fact." Id., at 90. He gave as an example the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr in which Chief Justice Marshall charged the jury that "'levying war is an act compounded of law and fact; of which the jury, aided by the court must judge. . . . [And] having now heard the opinion of the court on the law of the case[,] they will apply that law to the facts, and will find a verdict of guilty or not guilty as their own consciences may direct.'" Id., at 67 (quoting 2 Burr's Trial 548, 550 (D. Robertson ed. 1875)) (emphasis in original). Other expressions of the same principle abound. See United States v. Battiste, 2 Sumn. 240, 24 F. Cas. 1042, 1043 (No. 14,545) (CC Mass. 1835) (Story, J., sitting as Circuit Justice) (the jury's general verdict is "necessarily com-pounded of [both] law and fact"). As Thayer wrote at the end of the 19th century: "From the beginning . . . it was perceived that any general verdict, such as . . . not guilty, involved a conclusion of law, and that the jury did, in a sense, in such cases an-swer a question of law." Thayer, supra, at 253.

The more modern authorities the Government cites also do not support its concept of the criminal jury as mere factfinder. Although each contains language discussing the jury's role as fact-finder, see Sullivan v. Louisiana, 508 U.S. 275, 124 L. Ed. 2d 182, 113 S. Ct. 2078 (1993); Court of Ulster Cty. v. Allen, 442 U.S. 140, 156, 60 L. Ed. 2d 777, 99 S. Ct. 2213 (1979); Patterson v. New York, 432 U.S. 197, 206, 53 L. Ed. 2d 281, 97 S. Ct. 2319 (1977); In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 364, 25 L. Ed. 2d 368, 90 S. Ct. 1068 (1970), each also confirms that the jury's constitutional responsibility is not merely to determine the facts, but to apply the law to those facts and draw the ultimate conclusion of guilt or innocence. The point is put with unmistakable clarity in Allen, which involved the constitutionality of statutory inferences and presumptions. Such devices, Allen said, can help

"the trier of fact to determine the existence of an element of the crime--that is, an 'ultimate' or 'elemental' fact--from the existence of one or more 'evidentiary' or 'basic' facts . . . . Nonetheless, in criminal cases, the ultimate test of any device's constitutional validity in a given case remains constant: the device must not undermine the factfinder's responsibility at trial, based on evidence adduced by the State, to find the ultimate facts beyond a reasonable doubt." Allen, supra

See also Sullivan, supra, at 277 ("The right [to jury trial] includes, of course, as its most important element, the right to have the jury, rather than the judge, reach the requisite finding of 'guilty'"); Patterson, supra, at 204; Winship, supra, at 361, 363.