Harmless Error
2009-03-24 法律英语 来源：互联网 作者： ℃As the disagreement in Fulminante illustrates, the judgment that a given error was harmless is not always obvious. That fact in turn illustrates a deeper problem in the law： Principles developed for easy cases tend to get applied to borderline cases over time.
It seems plain enough that some trial court errors are so trivial that it would be grossly wasteful to require a new trial to remedy them. Yet once the law recognizes the possibility of holding a trivial error harmless, it is a relatively small step to say that even substantial errors that have a trivial impact on the outcome should be held harmless.
From there, docket pressure takes over. If an appellate court can avoid the waste associated with a new trial by finding an error harmless, the court will be tempted to conclude that a great many errors are harmless.
No doubt, in such cases, the appellate judges do sincerely believe that a new trial would come out the same way. But the basic principle of due process holds that people are entitled to their day in court even when we know——or think we know——what the outcome will be.
When a court finds an error harmless, it says, in effect, that the losing party's right to his day in court was satisfied by the flawed trial he was given because, after all, even a flawless trial would have produced the same outcome. If this principle is necessary to avoid having to retry every case endlessly, it is at best a necessary evil.
As in baseball, so in the law, often a “do-over” is so impractical that we must rely on a dispassionate arbiter's assessment of what would have happened had everything gone right in the first instance. If that's a bitter pill to swallow, at least A's fans can console themselves in the knowledge that any sense of injustice they feel pales in comparison to the sense of injustice felt by the thousands of litigants who have been told over th
e years that their flawed trials were all they were entitled to
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