Weaver v. Massachusetts (16-240)

argument 16-240

Weaver v. Massachusetts

Supreme Court of the United States 59 min 6 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 5 days ago official recording ↗

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What is the Supreme Court’s primary argument regarding structural errors in Weaver v. Massachusetts?

John G. Roberts 0:00

Your argument next in Case 16-240, Weaver v. Massachusetts. Mr.

Unknown 0:05

Kimberly. Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court. The upshot in practice of the Commonwealth's proposed rule in this case is that when a criminal defendant like Petitioner demonstrates that his trial counsel failed to preserve the fundamental fairness of the criminal proceeding by failing to object and therefore allowing to stand a structural error, the gravest kind of constitutional error there can be in the course of a criminal trial. It will be impossible for the defendant to obtain relief under Strickland v. Washington for ineffective assistance of counsel. And that's because the Commonwealth says that all such defendants must prove actual prejudice resulting from their attorney's deficiency.

Unknown 0:48

But the problem is that when an attorney deficiency results in a structural error, it will be practically impossible to demonstrate what the practical effects of — The problem is the structural errors, I think when we put it this way, come in all sizes and shapes. So here we have not an exclusion of the public from the trial itself. It's only from the jury selection. But I take it your view is it doesn't matter if it had been the first day of the jury selection, everything else is open. or if the entire proceedings are closed. Structural error, we go from structural error directly to new trial. Do you make any distinctions between kinds of errors that we have called structural? The short answer, Your Honor, is no.

Unknown 1:44

There are distinctions to be made, and in the context of the public trial, right, for example, those distinctions play out at the threshold question whether the public trial right, in fact, has been violated. But certainly what this Court suggested in Waller, where the courtroom closure was for a suppression hearing at the outset of the trial and not the entire trial, that when the public trial right is deemed to have been violated, it is itself structural. That doesn't mean, as Justice Stevens recognized in footnote 23 of his concurrence in Reporters Committee, that doesn't mean that every single closure of the courtroom necessarily implicates the public trial right as the framers of the Sixth Amendment would have understood it.

Unknown 2:31

For instance, sidebars and, in some instances, chambers, conferences, and certainly any circumstance in which the State is able to pass the strict scrutiny test established by Waller. Those sorts of closures, although closures in the technical sense would not be closures in the constitutional sense.

John G. Roberts 2:52

This may not be directly pertinent, but why was the courtroom considered closed? I mean, it was filled with members of the public. Now, they were there as part of the jury pool, but, of course, they weren't all chosen. I mean, what was the — did the judge have to set aside how many seats for people who weren't actually being called for jury duty before you would conclude that the courtroom was not closed?

Unknown 3:20

Well, I would have thought that the courtroom — so the —

John G. Roberts 3:24

Not — I mean, it's a limited space. There's only so many spaces, and it's, you know, he's got to get the jury pool in there, and, you know, they took up all the space. So you must — your position must be on the error itself that the judge should have kept aside certain seats for people who weren't being called for jury duty. I'm just curious how many that is.

Unknown 3:48

So there are two elements to that question. I'll take them each in turn. The first is we know that the courtroom was closed because members of the public and, indeed, every member of the public who expressed an interest in attending the proceeding who was not a member of the jury veneer was turned away, actively turned away. Well, but

John G. Roberts 4:05

presumably, I guess, the argument in the other side, well, they were turned away because there was no room. And there was no room because the courtroom was full of members of the public who were called for jury duty.

Unknown 4:17

So, and that leads to the second answer. And that is, as this Court held in Presley, first of all, courtroom crowding is not a sufficient answer for turning away, a sufficient justification for turning away other members of the interested public.