Tags
A. Howard Matz, Central District of California, Elena J. Duarte, Fraud on the court, Judge A. Howard Matz, Selective Prosecution, Speech, usa vs steven william sutcliffe
Okay. Well, I already told you, as you acknowledged earlier today, Mr. Sutcliffe, that any individual who chooses to proceed on his own was taking enormous risks and subjecting himself to a considerable disadvantage. I’ve already found that you know the nature of the charges. That’s been implicit and explicit in the evaluation of you by Dr. Patenaude. But you will have to do your best to understand the range of the penalties, the fines, whether there’s supervised release, what it is, any risks of restitution, license loss, any effect on any sentencing of you in the event that the jury convicts you.
You will have to learn and comply with the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure; the Federal Rules of Evidence; The local rules of the court; the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, if it gets down to that stage; the Federal Rules of Appeals. You need to understand that a lawyer who would otherwise have been available — and we tried to have four –would understand all of those rules, would understand how to impanel a jury and the tactics of picking a jury, how to conduct voir dire on a jury, how to assist the court in its conduct of voir dire.
You will have to comply with all rules from here on in relating to the form and the content of motions, any discovery you seek to undertake, any other kind of motions you want. There are going to be limitations imposed upon you on how you ask questions, how you voice objections, how you deal with experts, what is permissible and not permissible in opening statements and closing arguments. You will be at a considerable disadvantage because, to the extent you wish to testify, you will have to determine an effective and appropriate way to ask questions of yourself that you can answer.
By assuming such a paramount role at the trial, your personality is going to be a bigger impact on the jurors than ordinarily is the case with the defendant. Maybe that will help you; maybe it won’t. I’m not making any findings in that regard. But if experience is correct, and the personality of lawyers and of the judge and of witnesses and of parties, all the personalities that jurors perceive, have a likely impact on their evaluation of the evidence and on their verdict. So you need to be aware of that .
