United States v. Shippley , 690 F.3d 1192 ( 2012 )

FILED
United States Court of Appeals
Tenth Circuit
August 14, 2012
PUBLISH Elisabeth A. Shumaker
Clerk of Court
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
TENTH CIRCUIT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v. No. 11-1076
ANTHONY SHIPPLEY, a/k/a Buddy,
Defendant-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the District of Colorado
(D.C. No. 1:08-CR-00340-REB-3)
Todd E. Mair of Peters, Mair, and Wilcox, Denver, Colorado, for Defendant-
Appellant.
Sangita K. Rao, Attorney, Criminal Division, United States Department of
Justice, Washington, D.C. (John F. Walsh, United States Attorney, and Pegeen D.
Rhyne and Kasandra R. Carleton, Assistant United States Attorneys, District of
Colorado; and Lanny A. Breuer, Assistant Attorney General, Greg D. Andres,
Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and Daniel Steven Goodman,
Attorney, Criminal Division, United States Department of Justice, Washington,
D.C. on the brief) for Plaintiff-Appellee.
Before GORSUCH, ANDERSON, and MATHESON, Circuit Judges.
GORSUCH, Circuit Judge.
Anthony Shippley served as the “Sergeant at Arms” for a chapter of the
Mongols Motorcycle Club. And the title wasn’t ceremonial: his job was to
ensure members were armed and ready for confrontations with rival gangs. After
a massive nationwide investigation and “take down” of the club in 2008, Mr.
Shippley found himself facing a federal drug conspiracy charge. His chief
accuser, Benjamine Maestas — a former club president, longtime felon, and
sometimes federal informant — testified at trial that Mr. Shippley was responsible
for supplying considerable amounts of high quality cocaine for resale to retail
customers.
At the end of trial, though, something strange happened. The jury returned
a general verdict finding Mr. Shippley guilty of the conspiracy charge. But in
response to the court’s special interrogatories, the jury indicated that Mr.
Shippley had not conspired to distribute any of the drugs listed in the indictment.
In effect, the jury both convicted and acquitted Mr. Shippley of the charged
conspiracy.
What to do? In this appeal we wrestle with the question as the district
court did before us. For its part, the district court ordered the jury to deliberate
further — and those further deliberations quickly yielded an unambiguous guilty
verdict. For our part, we cannot say the district court’s chosen course was legally
impermissible, at least not for the reasons Mr. Shippley offers. In this appeal, we
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also address and ultimately reject Mr. Shippley’s challenges to a second and
separate drug conviction as well as to a sentencing enhancement.
I
But first things first. When instructing the jury on the conspiracy charge
(21 U.S.C. § 846), the court explained that it could convict only if it unanimously
agreed Mr. Shippley conspired to distribute at least 50 grams of
methamphetamine, 500 grams of cocaine, or any amount of ecstacy. The court
then gave the jury two documents to fill out: one, a general verdict form (asking
the jury to answer guilty or not guilty); the other, a set of special interrogatories
(asking which drug kinds and quantities were involved). Before us, no one seeks
to contest the propriety of the court’s initial instructions or verdict forms. But
ultimately those forms did prove a source of confusion: while the jury returned
with a guilty verdict on the general verdict form, it answered “no” to each of the
special interrogatories, indicating that Mr. Shippley conspired to distribute none
of the drugs at issue in the case.
Perplexed, the district court sought advice from counsel and then decided to
ask the jury to deliberate again. The court read a supplemental instruction,
explaining that “[y]our ostensible verdict of guilty as to the crime of conspiracy
as charged in Count One of the Indictment is inherently inconsistent with your
answers to the Special Questions.” ROA v.1 at 1092. The court indicated that, if
the jury wished to render a verdict of not guilty it should reconsider its answer in
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the general verdict form. It explained that if the jury wanted to render a guilty
verdict it should reconsider its answers to the special interrogatories. The court
also made clear that the jury could, if it chose, stand on its existing verdict; that
any changes must be unanimous; and that nothing the court said was meant to
“intimate or indicate what I think your verdicts or answers should be. Those
decisions are entirely up to you.” Id. Soon after all this, the jury returned with a
guilty verdict and an answer to a special interrogatory indicating that Mr.
Shippley had conspired to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine.
Mr. Shippley argues this was error. More precisely, he argues that (a)
under the Supreme Court’s holdings in United States v. Powell, 469 U.S. 57(1984), and United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U.S. 277 (1943), the district court
should have entered a verdict of acquittal; and (b) the district court coerced the
jury, violating his Fifth Amendment right to due process and his Sixth
Amendment right to a jury trial. These, we pause to underscore, are the only
arguments he makes and the only ones we address in this opinion. Mr. Shippley
does not dispute that the jury’s initial verdict was inconsistent, or argue that any
provision of the Constitution compelled the district court as a matter of lenity to
interpret the initial verdict as an acquittal. Neither does he suggest the court’s
course in ordering additional deliberations violated the Double Jeopardy Clause
of the Fifth Amendment. With enough to do today to address the arguments he
does press, we do not pass on those, like these, he does not.
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A
Mr. Shippley first insists that Powell and Dotterweich required the district
court to enter an acquittal rather than order the jury to deliberate further. So we
must begin by trying to get our hands around those holdings.
In Powell, the jury acquitted the defendant of a felony but found him guilty
of using a telephone in the commission of that same felony. The district court
entered judgment just as the jury’s verdict indicated. But before the Supreme
Court, the defendant argued that as a matter of issue preclusion and logic the
guilty verdict shouldn’t be allowed to stand. After all, the defendant said, how
could it be that he didn’t commit the underlying felony but used a telephone to do
just that? The Supreme Court acknowledged that the jury’s verdicts were
logically at odds but explained that it was “unclear whose ox ha[d] been gored”:
while it was possible the verdict was a “windfall to the Government at the
defendant’s expense,” it was “equally possible” the jury’s inconsistent verdicts
benefitted the defendant as a result of mistake, compromise, or lenity. 469 U.S.
at 65. And given this, the Court held, the district court was within its rights to
allow the jury verdict to stand, inconsistent though it was. Id.Dotterweich isn’t much different. There, the defendant argued his guilty
verdict should be set aside because of an inconsistent verdict against his
corporation, even though the evidence against both was much the same. Again,
the Supreme Court held as a matter of federal common law that this logical
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inconsistency did not preclude the district court from entering the jury’s verdict
as issued. 320 U.S. at 279.
As comes apparent from stating their holdings, nothing in Powell or
Dotterweich speaks to the propriety of ordering further deliberations in the face of
inconsistent verdicts against the same defendant on the same count. In fact,
neither opinion speaks to the question of further deliberations at all. Both simply
hold the district court was allowed to enter a guilty verdict on one count despite a
logically inconsistent verdict on another. So how might the opinions help Mr.
Shippley in a case where the district court did order further deliberations?
Mr. Shippley invokes an inference. From the fact Powell and Dotterweich
allowed inconsistent verdicts to stand, Mr. Shippley thinks this means they
(implicitly) ruled out the possibility of further jury deliberations. Unfortunately,
however, neither opinion holds as much. And, unfortunately too, Mr. Shippley
doesn’t identify what rule of law he thinks might compel such an inference.
Maybe he thinks the Double Jeopardy Clause precludes compelling more
deliberations after an inconsistent verdict is rendered. Maybe he thinks some
other constitutional provision is in play, or perhaps just federal common law. But
he does not say.
The closest he comes to supplying an answer is when he points to the
Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. He acknowledges that federal courts in
civil cases are permitted by rule to order further deliberations to address an
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inconsistency between a general verdict and special interrogatories. See Fed. R.
Civ. P. 49(b)(3)(B). But, he points out, the criminal rules contain no
corresponding provision — and he argues this omission is suggestive —
suggestive that the procedure is disfavored in criminal cases. It might be, too,
except for the fact the criminal rules contain a catch-all provision in Fed. R.
Crim. P. 57(b) expressly addressing what to do when the rules fail to address a
question. And this catch-all provision explains that, in the absence of express
directions from the rules themselves, judges may “regulate practice in any manner
consistent with federal law.” So even after resort to the rules it remains
incumbent on Mr. Shippley as the appellant to explain why the district court’s
decision to order further deliberations was inconsistent with federal law, and this
he does not attempt to do. That alone is enough to undo his appeal.
But there’s another and even larger problem lurking in his logic. Even
accepting for argument’s sake Mr. Shippley’s premise that Powell and
Dotterweich implicitly require (rather than permit, as they hold) a district court to
accept a verdict logically inconsistent as between counts or defendants, that still
does not speak to our case. In our case, it wasn’t just logically incongruous to
enter the jury’s verdict, it was metaphysically impossible. Powell and Dotterwich
involved logical inconsistencies between counts and between defendants.
However illogical, the verdicts in those cases could be given full effect. This
case, by contrast, involves an inconsistency on the same count with the same
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defendant — an inconsistency that simply could not have been given full effect.
Something had to give in our case that didn’t have to give in these other cases.
To enter an acquittal, the district court would have needed to disregard the fact
that the jury expressly found Mr. Shippley guilty. To enter a guilty verdict, the
court would have needed to overlook the special verdict findings that Mr.
Shippley did not conspire to distribute any of the drugs at issue in the case. And
nothing in Powell or Dotterwich speaks either explicitly or implicitly about what
a court’s to do in these circumstances, let alone suggests the district court
committed an error of constitutional magnitude (or otherwise) in proceeding as it
did in this case.
If anything, Powell might even suggest the opposite conclusion. The Court
in Powell refused to undo the defendant’s conviction on a compound offense
despite his acquittal on the underlying felony because it was “unclear whose ox
ha[d] been gored”: the jury’s inconsistent verdict may have favored the
government, but it was equally possible it benefitted the defendant. 469 U.S. at
65. That same sort of problem exists here. To enter any verdict when the jury
first returned, the district court would have had to choose to “gore” one side or
the other — just what Powell suggests courts should not do.
In reply to all this, Mr. Shippley directs our attention to a line of circuit
court cases, which he regards as an extension of Powell. When a defendant is
indicted for participating in a conspiracy to distribute several different drugs and
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the jury’s guilty verdict fails to indicate which particular drugs the defendant
conspired to distribute, these cases hold a sentencing court must base its sentence
on the statutory maximum for the drug bearing the least severe punishment. See,
e.g., Morales v. United States, 635 F.3d 39, 46 (2d Cir. 2011); United States v.
Arnold, 416 F.3d 349, 357 n.8 (5th Cir. 2005); see also United States v.
McCalister, 165 F. App’x 599, 606-07 (10th Cir. 2006) (unpublished). Given all
this, Mr. Shippley reasons, the district court was required to enter a judgment of
acquittal in his case because the jury’s initial special verdict form indicated that
he had not conspired to distribute any amount of drugs.
But this line of reasoning suffers at least one flaw, as well. None of the
decisions Mr. Shippley cites addresses whether a district court may ask a jury to
deliberate further when the jury’s drug quantity findings are unclear or
inconsistent. All they hold is that when a jury verdict is ambiguous, the district
court cannot later interpret this ambiguity against a defendant at sentencing.
They say nothing about what, if anything, a district court can do to clarify an
ambiguous initial verdict at trial, long before any sentencing occurs.
To be very clear, our rejection of Mr. Shippley’s appeal is limited to his
effort to analogize to Powell, Dotterwich, and their putative progeny. We do not
purport to address other arguments, possibly emanating from the Double Jeopardy
Clause or otherwise, he doesn’t raise. Likewise, our holding is limited to the
situation before us, where a jury returns a guilty verdict but indicates in its
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answers to special interrogatories that the defendant is innocent. We do not
hazard a guess what should happen in the opposite situation — when a jury
returns a verdict of not guilty but answers special verdict questions indicating that
the government has met its burden of proof. In that situation, we can imagine that
a defendant might try to argue the jury’s verdict could be given full effect,
reasoning that though the government proved the defendant’s guilt, the jury found
the defendant not guilty as a matter of lenity. But however that argument might
fare, it isn’t available here because it’s difficult to see how a jury might have
been lenient to the defendant by finding Mr. Shippley guilty despite its conclusion
that the government had failed to prove the facts necessary to support such a
verdict. Neither, in any event, does Mr. Shippley attempt to try to argue
otherwise.
B
Beyond analogizing to Powell and Dotterwich, Mr. Shippley suggests the
district court’s order requiring further deliberations unlawfully coerced the jury in
violation of his Fifth Amendment right to due process of law and his Sixth
Amendment right to trial by jury. In support, he directs our attention to Jenkins
v. United States, 380 U.S. 445 (1965) (per curiam), where the Supreme Court held
that a judge unconstitutionally coerced a jury by telling it “You have got to reach
a decision in this case.” Id. at 446.
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The trouble is, the district court’s supplemental instruction here can’t be
fairly compared to a Jenkins charge. While it’s true the district court told the jury
that its “ostensible verdict” of guilty was “inherently inconsistent” with the
special verdict findings, and while one can argue whether the jury might have
taken this language in isolation as a criticism and perhaps even coercive, the court
didn’t stop there. It proceeded to emphasize that the jury was free to retain its
existing verdicts if it wished. ROA v.1 at 1092. And the district court expressly
added that it did not intend to “intimate or indicate what I think your verdicts or
answers should be. Those decisions are entirely up to you.” Id. Viewed in
whole, this instruction was nothing like a Jenkins charge and Mr. Shippley
identifies no authority holding instructions comparable to those issued in this case
unconstitutionally coercive.
Now, Mr. Shippley’s brief might be read as making a different but related
argument. It might be read as suggesting that the mere act of asking the jury to
deliberate further, however nicely put, is inherently coercive after the jury has
reached a definitive if inconsistent verdict. But Mr. Shippley cites no authorities
and supplies no reasoning to support such an argument. And certainly his bare
assertion of a constitutional violation, without authorities or developed argument,
is insufficient to warrant reversal of his conviction. See Fed. R. App. P.
28(a)(9)(A) (the appellant’s brief must contain “appellant’s contentions and the
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reasons for them, with citations to [ ] authorities” (emphasis added)); United
States v. Fishman, 645 F.3d 1175, 1194 (10th Cir. 2011).
II
Beyond the larger drug conspiracy charge, Mr. Shippley was indicted for
and convicted of a second crime — using a “communication facility” (a
telephone) to facilitate an illegal sale of Percocet pills to Mr. Maestas for his
personal use. See 21 U.S.C. § 843(b). On appeal, Mr. Shippley contests one of
the district court’s evidentiary rulings related to this charge: in his view, it was
error to allow Mr. Maestas to testify that Mr. Shippley sold him Percocet pills on
at least twenty prior occasions separate and apart from the sale charged in the
indictment. The district court allowed this testimony as both “intrinsic” to the
charged offense, and as admissible prior act evidence under Fed. R. Evid. 404(b).
Before us, Mr. Shippley and the government fiercely debate both theories of
admissibility, as well as whether the evidence’s admission was harmless under
Fed. R. Crim. P. 52. In our view, the government is correct on at least one of
these scores — the district court did not commit reversible error in allowing Mr.
Maestas’s testimony under Rule 404(b).
“To determine if the admission of Rule 404(b) evidence was proper, we
apply a four-part test which requires that: (1) the evidence was offered for a
proper purpose under Fed. R. Evid. 404(b); (2) the evidence was relevant under
Fed. R. Evid. 401; (3) the probative value of the evidence was not substantially
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outweighed by its potential for unfair prejudice under Fed. R. Evid. 403; and (4)
the district court, upon request, instructed the jury to consider the evidence only
for the purpose for which it was admitted.” United States v. Wilson, 107 F.3d
774, 782 (10th Cir. 1997) (citing Huddleston v. United States, 485 U.S. 681, 691-
92 (1988)). We review the district court’s application of this test for an abuse of
discretion and will not reverse unless its ruling falls outside “the bounds of
permissible choice in the circumstances.” United States v. Mares, 441 F.3d 1152,
1156 (10th Cir. 2006) (quotation omitted).
On the first prong, the district court correctly observed that Mr. Maestas’s
testimony wasn’t offered to show Mr. Shippley’s propensity to commit a crime
but instead to explain the meaning of a phrase used by Mr. Shippley. Fed. R.
Evid. 404(b). As evidence that Mr. Shippley used a “communication facility” or
telephone to facilitate illegal sales of Percocet to Mr. Maestas, the government
played audio tapes of telephone calls between the pair. In one call, Mr. Shippley
told Mr. Maestas “that girl called me for them things that you get all the time,”
and the two men then discussed the quantity and price of the “things.” ROA v.3
at 437. Mr. Maestas’s testimony that Mr. Shippley sold him Percocet on twenty
prior occasions was offered to show simply that during the call at issue in the case
the phrase “them things that you get all the time” referred to drugs, not something
else.
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In response, Mr. Shippley cites United States v. Edwards, 540 F.3d 1156(10th Cir. 2008), where we held evidence of prior drug possession inadmissible
under Rule 404(b) because the defendant “never asserted that he was unaware of
the nature of the substances at issue but simply argued that he was not personally
involved in the distribution or possession for distribution of these substances.”
Id. at 1163. The upshot of all this, Mr. Shippley says, is that Rule 404(b) permits
evidence of prior drug offenses only when a defendant claims he is unaware of
the nature of a substance.
This overreads Edwards. The passage on which Mr. Shippley relies only
seeks to explain why lack of mistake was not an issue in that particular case, not
to set down an unyielding rule about Rule 404(b) evidence for all drug cases, no
matter their variation. Besides, the nature of the substance Mr. Shippley spoke of
when referring to “them things that you get all the time” was an issue in this case.
By arguing he did not use a telephone to facilitate a drug sale, Mr. Shippley
necessarily contested the government’s argument that he was referring to Percocet
pills when he used this phrase. Accordingly, evidence about the nature of the
“things” Mr. Maestas purchased all the time was at issue and thus permissible
even under Mr. Shippley’s reading of Edwards.
Moving to step two of the analysis, the district court correctly determined
that Mr. Maestas’s testimony was relevant under Rule 401. By supporting the
government’s theory that Mr. Shippley was referring to Percocet pills during a
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phone call at issue in the indictment, Mr. Maestas’s testimony about prior drug
sales helped to prove that Mr. Shippley used a telephone to facilitate drug
trafficking. Mr. Shippley disputes this, arguing that drug activity on an isolated
basis long in the past is categorically irrelevant to the current charges. See
Wilson, 107 F.3d at 785 (“[P]rior narcotics involvement is relevant when that
conduct is close in time, highly probative, and similar to the activity with which
the defendant is charged.” (quotation omitted)). But whatever other problems
may exist with this argument, there’s simply no indication in this record that the
parties’ drug exchanges were isolated and long ago. To the contrary, Mr. Maestas
spoke of at least twenty different sales. And Mr. Maestas testified he was only
addicted to Percocet in the five years prior to his arrest in connection with the
2008 “take down” of the motorcycle gang, so the sales must have occurred during
this time. ROA v.3 at 434. In these circumstances, we cannot say the district
court’s relevancy determination amounts to an abuse of discretion.
Neither, at the third step of the analysis, do we see any reversible error in
the district court’s Rule 403 assessment. While Mr. Shippley is certainly correct
that Mr. Maestas’s testimony about the twenty prior Percocet sales was
prejudicial, the district court concluded that the risk of unfair prejudice did not
“substantially outweigh[]” the probative value of the testimony. Fed. R. Evid.
403. We agree. The jury had already heard testimony that Mr. Shippley was
involved in other drug-trafficking activities, so Mr. Maestas’s testimony was not
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as prejudicial as it might have been if offered against a defendant with no other
drug involvement. And the testimony was highly probative — it went to the heart
of the government’s case, showing that Mr. Shippley used a “communications
facility” to facilitate a drug transaction when he called Mr. Maestas and offered to
sell “them things that you get all the time.”
Finally, the district court expressly indicated that it was willing to give a
limiting instruction upon request. ROA v.3 at 302. Although no instruction was
given in the end, this is only because Mr. Shippley never requested one. And “it
is not error for a trial court to fail to [issue a limiting instruction] in the absence
of a proper request by counsel.” United States v. Record, 873 F.2d 1363, 1376
(10th Cir. 1989).
In light of all these factors, we conclude that the district court did not abuse
its discretion in allowing Mr. Maestas’s testimony under Rule 404(b) and so we
need not (and do not) address the government’s other arguments for affirming the
district court.
III
Mr. Shippley’s final argument concerns the application of a sentencing
enhancement. At sentencing, the district court cited and relied on U.S.S.G.
§ 2D1.1(b)(1), an enhancement applicable to defendants who possess a dangerous
weapon during a drug trafficking offense. Mr. Shippley argues that this was
error.
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The difficulty is, Leonard Martinez, the secretary and treasurer of the
motorcycle club and a co-conspirator in the drug trafficking operations, testified
at trial that Mr. Shippley gave him a chrome pistol for his protection. ROA v.3 at
859. And the district court found this happened during the course of the
conspiracy. Supp. ROA v.5 at 37-38. If that finding stands, it is legally
sufficient to sustain the enhancement. It is because the government’s initial
burden in seeking a § 2D1.1(b)(1) enhancement is simply to prove, by a
preponderance of the evidence, that the gun in question was “present” or
“possessed” either during the charged offense or during other drug trafficking
activity that was “part of the same course of conduct or common scheme or plan
as the offense of conviction.” See United States v. Foy, 641 F.3d 455, 470 (10th
Cir. 2011) (quotation omitted); United States v. Roederer, 11 F.3d 973, 982 (10th
Cir. 1993) (discussing U.S.S.G. § 1B1.3’s definition of relevant conduct). Once
the government proves that much, the burden shifts to the defendant to show that
it is “clearly improbable that the weapon was connected with the offense.” Foy,
641 F.3d at 470. And in his appeal Mr. Shippley doesn’t even attempt to carry
this burden.
Because the district court’s factual finding is itself legally sufficient to
support a § 2D1.1(b)(1) enhancement in this case, we may reverse only if the
finding is itself clearly erroneous. See United States v. Beltran, 571 F.3d 1013,
1020 (10th Cir. 2009). And that’s a high standard to meet. A finding is clearly
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erroneous “only if [it] is without factual support in the record or if, after
reviewing all the evidence, we are left with a definite and firm conviction that a
mistake has been made.” United States v. Mullins, 613 F.3d 1273, 1292 (10th
Cir. 2010) (quotation omitted). It is not enough that the finding is “possibly or
even probably wrong; the error must be pellucid to any objective observer.” Id.(quotation omitted).
Neither can we say that much in this case. Mr. Maestas testified that Mr.
Shippley’s duties as “Sergeant at Arms” included providing guns and ammunition
for club members, most if not all of whom were involved in the drug conspiracy.
ROA v.3 at 527. For his part, Mr. Martinez testified that he received a gun from
Mr. Shippley, whom he met only after joining the Mongols Motorcycle Club
sometime in 2003. ROA v.3 at 848. We know too that Mr. Martinez was taken
into custody in May of 2008, id. at 846, so Mr. Shippley must have given Mr.
Martinez the gun sometime in this approximately five year period. Mr. Shippley
objects that the charged conspiracy only lasted from August 2006 to October
2008, so it is just as (if not more) likely that the gun transfer occurred sometime
before this. But the district court’s finding that Mr. Shippley gave Mr. Martinez a
gun during the drug trafficking conspiracy wasn’t limited to the charged
conspiracy: the court was free to find that the drug trafficking conspiracy began
well before August 2006. See Roederer, 11 F.3d at 982 (a § 2D1.1(b)(1)
enhancement applies if a dangerous weapon was present or possessed during
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uncharged drug trafficking activity that constitutes relevant conduct under
§ 1B1.3); see also United States v. Rodriguez-Felix, 450 F.3d 1117, 1131 (10th
Cir. 2006) (United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), does not prohibit
sentencing courts from considering uncharged relevant conduct in calculating a
defendant’s sentencing guidelines range). And evidence at trial suggested as
much. Mr. Maestas testified that he had been receiving drugs from California
members of the motorcycle club for several years before 2006. ROA v.3 at 539.
And Mr. Martinez testified that by the time the charged conspiracy began in
August 2006, he was already spending 70 percent of his free time, about 4 hours a
day, working for Mr. Maestas’s drug operations. ROA v.3 at 839.
Assembled together, these facts are enough to permit a rational person to
conclude, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the gun Mr. Shippley gave to
Mr. Martinez was present or possessed during the drug trafficking conspiracy.
The conclusion may not be unavoidable. It may not be the same conclusion
another factfinder would reach on the same record. But it is not clearly wrong.
And in our legal order where so much deference is due the factfinder who sees
and hears the witnesses, that is the only question we as appellate judges, with but
a written record in hand, are authorized to ask and answer.
Affirmed.
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