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Opinion of the Court
perjury the defendant might commit at the plea hearing, see Rule 11(c)(5).
Although the details newly required in Rule 11 colloquies did not necessarily equate to the importance of the overarching issues of knowledge and voluntariness already addressed in the earlier versions of the Rule, some Courts of Appeals felt bound to treat all Rule 11 lapses as equal and to read McCarthy as mandating automatic reversal for any one of them. See Advisory Committee's Notes on 1983 Amendments to Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 11, 18 U. S. C. App., p. 1568 (hereinafter Advisory Committee's Notes) (citing United States v. Boone, 543 F. 2d 1090 (CA4 1976); United States v. Journet, 544 F. 2d 633 (CA2 1976)). This approach imposed a cost on Rule 11 mistakes that McCarthy neither required nor justified, and by 1983 the practice of automatic reversal for error threatening little prejudice to a defendant or disgrace to the legal system prompted further revision of Rule 11. Advisory Committee's Notes 1568.
The Advisory Committee reasoned that, although a rule of per se reversal might have been justified at the time McCarthy was decided, "[a]n inevitable consequence of the 1975 amendments was some increase in the risk that a trial judge, in a particular case, might inadvertently deviate to some degree from the procedure which a very literal reading of Rule 11 would appear to require." Advisory Committee's Notes 1568. After the amendments, "it became more apparent than ever that Rule 11 should not be given such a crabbed interpretation that ceremony was exalted over substance." Ibid.
Vonn thinks the Advisory Committee's report also includes a signal that it meant to dispense with a silent defendant's plain-error burdens. He stresses that the report cited Courts of Appeals cases of "crabbed interpretation" that had given relief to nonobjecting defendants. By proposing only a harmless-error amendment to correct the mistakes made
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