Title: The People v. Simon Samandarov

State: new-york

Issuer: New York Appellate Court

Document:

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This opinion is uncorrected and subject to revision before
publication in the New York Reports.
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No. 164  
The People &c.,
            Respondent,
        v.
Simon Samandarov,
            Appellant.
Ronald L. Kuby, for appellant.
Laura T. Ross, for respondent.
SMITH, J.:
We hold that Supreme Court acted within its discretion
in denying without a hearing defendant's post-trial motions
alleging juror misconduct and a Rosario violation.
I
Defendant was convicted of attempted murder, second
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degree assault and weapons offenses based on the shooting of Alik
Pinhasov.  The key witnesses at trial were Pinhasov and Jose
Ramirez.  Pinhasov testified that defendant shot him.  Ramirez,
who lived across the street from the place where the shooting
occurred, testified that he heard gunshots, looked out his window
and saw a man on the ground and another man -- who, from
Ramirez's description, was apparently defendant -- holding a gun. 
The People also proved that the gun used to shoot Pinhasov was
recovered from defendant's pocket minutes after the shooting.  
Several weeks after the verdict, defendant moved to set
it aside pursuant to CPL 330.30 (2), on the ground of "improper
conduct on the part of a member of the jury."  Supreme Court
denied the motion without a hearing, and pronounced sentence. 
Six months later, defendant moved pursuant to CPL 440.10 to
vacate his conviction on the ground that the People had violated
their duty under People v Rosario (9 NY2d 286 [1961]) by failing
to turn over to defendant statements made by Ramirez to the
police before trial.  Supreme Court denied this motion too
without a hearing.  The Appellate Division affirmed defendant's
conviction and sentence, and the denial of his CPL 440 motion
(People v Samandarov 56 AD3d 575 [2008]).  A Judge of this court
granted leave to appeal.
We review the decisions to deny hearings on both the
CPL 330 and the CPL 440 motions for abuse of discretion (People v
Friedgood, 58 NY2d 467, 470 [1983]).  We conclude that discretion
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was not abused, and we affirm.
II
The basis for defendant's CPL 330 motion was an
affidavit of his counsel, which in turn relied on a newspaper
article and on information given to counsel by an unnamed
"neighbor" said to be a "coworker" of the foreperson of the jury. 
The newspaper article mentioned in the CPL 330 motion
appeared in the New York Daily News a few days after the verdict. 
It suggested that there was a connection between the shooting of
Pinhasov and the later murder of Pinhasov's cousin, Eduard
Nektalov, who was, according to the newspaper article, "executed
in broad daylight" eight months before defendant's trial. 
Defendant's appellate brief also relies on another newspaper
article, not cited in his CPL 330 motion, that appeared in the
New York Times during the trial; that article said the Pinhasov
shooting "has links" to the Nektalov murder.  The Times article
was not mentioned on the record at trial, but the judge may have
had some warning of it: on the day before the article appeared,
he said to the jurors, "I want to once again emphasize in the
strongest possible terms that you are not to read about the case
in tomorrow's newspapers."  There is no evidence that any juror
disobeyed that instruction.  Nektalov's name came up only once at
the trial, when a police officer testified that Nektalov served
as a translator at the officer's interview with Pinhasov.  
The Daily News article that appeared after the verdict
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reported that, though the Nektalov murder had not been mentioned
at trial, "jurors said they were aware there may have been a link
and that those involved . . . may have ties to mob activities." 
It quoted a juror as saying "Of course we were aware of it . . .
and worried about it . . . .  I was looking out [in the audience]
thinking 'Gee, they can see all of our faces.'"  According to
counsel's affidavit in support of the CPL 330 motion, counsel
"confirmed" with the Daily News reporter that the article was
accurate and that the juror quoted was the foreperson.  Counsel
also said his neighbor had told him that the jury foreperson "had
discussed her jury experience with her fellow employees and again
acknowledged that the jury talked about defendant's involvement
with the Russian Mob throughout the trial and that the jury was
preoccupied with this issue during the course of the trial."  No
affidavit was submitted from either the neighbor or the jury
foreperson.
Even putting aside the hearsay nature of this evidence,
Supreme Court was justified in ruling that defendant did not
submit enough proof of juror misconduct to warrant a hearing. 
Defendant submitted nothing to show that jurors had received from
outside the courtroom any information about the Nektalov murder
or any other alleged "Russian Mob" activities.  The evidence
showed at best that jurors had speculated among themselves that
the case had "Russian Mob" connections -- and the nature of the
case almost invited that sort of speculation.  Indeed, the danger
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was so obvious that defendant chose to bring it up in voir dire,
mentioning a possible "perception" that "if you are a member of
this group you must be involved in some sort of illegal activity"
and asking if anyone had "problems or preconceived stereotypes in
their minds concerning Russian-Americans."  Defense counsel
returned to the theme during trial, asking Pinhasov if he had any
history of "loan sharking" or "money laundering."  Thus, if the
jurors in this case did converse among themselves about the
"Russian Mob," there is no reason to think that anything outside
the courtroom prompted that conversation.  Absent some "outside
influence" on the jurors, this record provides no ground for
impeaching their verdict (see Alford v Sventek, 53 NY2d 743, 744
[1981]).  
III
Ramirez, whose testimony placed a gun in defendant's
hand immediately after the shooting, was asked on cross
examination if anyone had interviewed him before trial.  He
replied: "Just the officers that came up that night [i.e. the
night of the shooting] and the district attorney that came to see
me."  Notes of the police interview on the night of the crime
were turned over to the defense as Rosario material.  In support
of his CPL 440 motion, defendant tried to show that police
officers had also taken part in one or two later interviews, and
that a police officer had taken notes at those interviews that
had not been turned over.
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In support of his motion, defendant submitted an
affidavit from Ramirez.  The affidavit was typed, but contained
handwritten insertions made by an investigator employed by
defense counsel.  The affidavit as typed says that "uniformed New
York City Police Officers and two Detectives came to my apartment
on two separate times and dates to conduct interviews."  The
handwritten insertions add the information that the police
officers came "along with the District Attorney, Queens County"
and say, at one point, that they came "a third time" (thus
creating an apparent inconsistency in the affidavit).  Typed
language not changed in handwriting says that, on each of two
occasions, a "Detective made handwritten entries into a spiral
note pad."
In opposition to defendant's motion, the People
submitted a second affidavit from Ramirez, retracting some of the
statements made in the first one.  The second Ramirez affidavit
says that an interview by police officers, in which an officer
wrote on a pad, occurred only on the night of the shooting. 
There were, according to the second Ramirez affidavit, two later
visits from the Assistant District Attorney (ADA) responsible for
the case, and on at least one of those occasions the ADA was
accompanied "by two blond ladies from the District Attorney's
Office."  At those later meetings, according to Ramirez's second
affidavit, no police officers were present and no one took notes. 
In explanation of his previous affidavit, Ramirez testified that
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defense counsel's investigator had brought him the typed version
of the affidavit; that Ramirez told him it was "not correct" and
that its deficiencies included "the fact that he did not mention
the Assistant District Attorney's visits"; that the investigator
then "wrote something on the papers about the District Attorney
and . . . pressured me to sign them . . . .  I signed the papers
so that he would leave me alone."
Along with Ramirez's second affidavit, the People
submitted several others, among them one from the ADA and one
each from the "two blond ladies" -- a Detective Investigator and
a paralegal, both employed by the District Attorney's office. 
These three witnesses confirmed Ramirez's second account: they
testified that all three of them had attended one interview with
Ramirez, and that the ADA and the Detective Investigator had
attended another.  The People submitted copies of datebook
entries and time sheets confirming the ADA's and the Detective
Investigator's attendance at the interviews.  The ADA, the
Detective Investigator and the paralegal all said that no police
officer was present with them at the interviews and that no one
took notes.  The Detective Investigator and the paralegal
testified that they had nothing with them to write on when they
attended the meetings, and the ADA said she did not possess, and
never used, a spiral pad.  The ADA's affidavit also explained
that no police detective would have been assigned to investigate
this case after the date of the incident, because, from a police
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department point of view, the case had been closed by arrest on
the same day.  To confirm this, the ADA attached a police
department form, dated the date of the crime, bearing the
notation: "CASE CLOSED."  
Defendant argues that the material submitted on the CPL
440 motion, taken as a whole, was enough to require an
evidentiary hearing on the question of whether Rosario material -
- specifically, police notes of interviews with Ramirez --
existed that was not turned over to the defense.  We assume that 
defendant would be correct if the first Ramirez affidavit had
stood uncontradicted, or if only the two contradictory Ramirez
affidavits were in the record.  But that is not the case.  The
People submitted detailed proof that Ramirez was simply mistaken
the first time, and the Supreme Court reasonably found that proof
strong enough to make a hearing unnecessary.
Indeed, it is hard to see how Ramirez could have been
correct when he said, in his first affidavit, that police
officers visited him on one or two occasions in addition to their
visit on the day of the crime; a contemporaneous record shows
that the police closed the case that day.  And the courts below
reasonably discounted Ramirez's original recollection that a
"Detective" took notes on a "spiral pad" at each interview, for
that was contradicted not only by Ramirez's second affidavit but
by the detailed accounts of the meetings by the ADA and her two
colleagues, all of whom swore that no police officer was present,
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and that they had no spiral pads and took no notes.  The
likelihood is overwhelming that Ramirez, in his first affidavit,
simply erred in thinking that the police detective and the spiral
pad that he saw on the day of the crime were also present at the
later interviews.
It is, no doubt, theoretically possible that a hearing
could show otherwise -- could show the existence of suppressed
Rosario material, in the form of handwritten notes that everyone
present at the interviews says never existed.  Supreme Court,
however, did not abuse its discretion in finding this possibility
too slim to justify the burden and expense of a hearing.
IV
Accordingly, the order of the Appellate Division should
be affirmed.        
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People v Samandarov
No. 164 
LIPPMAN, Chief Judge(dissenting in part):
In far from lucid trial testimony, the shooting victim,
Alik Pinhasov, stated that on the evening of December 16, 2003 he
went out in the company of three fellow members of the insular
Bukharan community.  As is here relevant, the group included
Pinhasov, his cousin Boris and defendant.  There was testimony
that Boris owed Pinhasov $1200 and that the debt had been a
source of bad feeling.  According to Pinhasov, the four men drank
heavily, each having purchased at the excursion's outset a liter
of vodka and of cognac, and as the night progressed there were
flashes of temper and occasional episodes of violence.   Pinhasov
testified that the evening's entertainment, such as it was, came
to an end when defendant took out a gun and fired it twice, the
first shot just missing Pinhasov's back and the second hitting
him in the buttocks.  The shots were heard by Jose Ramirez, who,
according to his trial testimony, immediately went to a window of
his fifth story apartment and observed, from a distance of some
50 feet, a person lying in the street being lifted by two other
people.  About eight feet away from this group, Ramirez observed
another person in a long black coat and pants with a white stripe
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running down the side of each leg, yelling and waving his hands
in the air.  Ramirez thought he saw a gun in one of that person's
hands.  Ramirez's wife called 911 and the police responded.  At
the time of his closely ensuing apprehension, defendant was
described by the arresting officers as having been clad in a
leather jacket and sweat pants.  A .22 caliber pistol was
recovered from his person, and a firearms expert testified that
the bullet removed from Pinhasov had been fired from that weapon. 
Ramirez was interviewed by the police after the arrest, but the
extent of the People's pretrial disclosure with respect to
Ramirez was a memo book entry containing Ramirez's name and
pedigree information.  Specific inquiry was made of Ramirez on
cross-examination whether he had been asked by the investigating
detective or the Assistant District Attorney for a statement, and
he replied that no such request had been made.
The defense at trial was that Boris, and not defendant,
had shot Pinhasov and that the gun had been handed to or picked
up by defendant in the interval between the shooting and his
arrest.  Pinhasov, defendant urged, had accused defendant to
protect his cousin who, for a period of weeks, had been held in
connection with the shooting.
Shortly after the trial an article appearing in the New
York Daily News reported that jurors had been aware of possible
"link[s]" between the matter being tried and the murder of one
Eduard Nektalov, and that one juror had stated that there was
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concern within the jury over the possibility of Russian mob
involvement in one or both crimes. 
Relying on this newspaper account, defendant moved
pursuant to CPL 330.30 to set aside the verdict.  He argued that
the jury had been impermissibly influenced by external sources. 
The People responded that the motion was based on mere hearsay
and that there was no indication that external influences had
affected the jury's deliberative process.  Rather, the People
urged that the verdict turned on the properly admitted proof
tending to show that defendant, and not Boris, shot Pinhasov.  
The decisive evidence, claimed the People, was the testimony of
Ramirez, the one witness whose motives were not shrouded by the
impenetrable-seeming web of personal, business and familial
relationships within the Bukharan community.  In their opposition
papers, the People prominently recounted that immediately after
the trial and in the presence of the trial court:
"the jury was asked, in sum and substance, by
the attorney's [sic] what evidence caused
them to convict the . . . defendant of the
shooting.  Several jurors replied, and the
others nodded in acknowledgment, that it was
the testimony of the independent eyewitness
Jose Ramirez . . . which ultimately was found
to be most compelling." 
Some six months after the judgment of conviction had
been rendered, Ramirez was visited by an investigator hired by
defendant.  At the investigator's request, Ramirez, after having
had handwritten changes inserted, executed an affidavit stating
in substance that he had on three occasions been interviewed by
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detectives and the Assistant District Attorney and that on each
occasion "a Detective made hand written entries into a spiral
note pad after each question."  Based on this affidavit,
defendant brought a CPL 440.10 motion to vacate the judgment of
conviction.  It was argued that the non-disclosure of the
interview notes referred to in the Ramirez affidavit constituted
a Rosario violation, and that, inasmuch as defendant was thereby
prevented from effectively cross-examining a crucial prosecution
witness, he had been deprived of a fair trial.
The People responded by obtaining their own affidavit
from Ramirez.  In this affidavit, Ramirez stated that no notes
had been taken on the two occasions subsequent to the night of
the crime that he had been visited by Assistant District Attorney
Kane and "two blond ladies from the District Attorney's Office." 
He explained that he had only signed the prior affidavit because
he was badgered into doing so by defendant's investigator.  The
People's response also included affidavits by Assistant District
Attorney Kane, and, presumably, the "the two blond ladies"
mentioned for the first time in Ramirez's second affidavit,
Detective Investigator Elizabeth Curcio and a paralegal in the
District Attorney's office named Joanna Fiorentini.  All stated
that they had participated in interviews with Ramirez but that no
notes had been taken.
The motion court found that, in light of Ramirez's
recantation and what the court referred to as "the People's
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"substantial evidentiary showing" of what had occurred during the
investigatory interviews of Ramirez, no issue of fact had been
raised as to the existence of undisclosed Rosario material by the
initial Ramirez affidavit.  The court also was of the view that,
even if there had been a Rosario violation, there was no
reasonable possibility that it affected the outcome of the trial. 
The Appellate Division affirmed in a brief decision and order (53
AD3d 575 [2nd Dept 2008]).
While I am in agreement with the majority that
defendant's CPL 330.30 motion was correctly denied, since there
was no showing that the verdict was attributable to any outside
influence, I part with the majority respecting the propriety of
the summary denial of defendant's CPL 440.10 motion.  
Ordinarily, when there are conflicting affidavits on a
material matter a triable issue turning on credibility
inappropriate for summary resolution is raised.  This case
presents no occasion to depart from this basic rule of
proceeding.  Indeed, the governing statute, CPL 440.30,
specifically requires an evidentiary hearing where, as here,
defendant's allegations are not insufficient as a matter of law
to establish the alleged violation (see CPL 440.30 [4] [a], [b]);
are not "conclusively refuted by unquestionable documentary
proof" (CPL 440.30 [4] [c]) or “contradicted by a court record or
other official document," or "made solely by the defendant and .
. . [without support] by any other affidavit or evidence” (CPL
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440.30 [4] [d] [i]); and there are no other grounds to conclude
that "there is no reasonable possibility that [defendant's
allegation of a Rosario violation] is true" (CPL 440.30 [4] [d]
[ii]) (see People v Baxley, 84 NY2d 208, 214 [1994]).   
While the majority, presumably in an attempt to satisfy
the last of these dispensational factors (the others plainly
being unavailable), labor to show that Ramirez's first affidavit
must have been a mistake, the proposition is difficult to embrace
on this record, much less as a matter of "overwhelming"
likelihood (see majority opn at 9).  Before us are two affidavits
by the same affiant evidently contradictory in a crucial respect
-- in one, which the affiant apparently took care to read and
correct where he thought emendation was necessary, the affiant
purports to recollect with a fair degree of specificity that his
statements were recorded by a detective on three occasions in a
spiral notebook; in the other, he states that none of this
happened.   All that would appear "overwhelmingly" likely on this
record is that these affidavits are inconsistent.  There appears
no ground upon which one deliberately prepared and executed sworn
statement might be dismissed as "mistaken" and the other embraced
as true.
Ramirez may well have wished to be rid of defendant's
investigator, but that motive, without more, does not adequately
explain his execution of an affidavit seemingly at odds with his
trial testimony that no statement had been taken from him.  Nor
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are the circumstances of his recantation of the affidavit, nearly
a year after signing it, set forth.  The record does not
disclose, for example, whether, as would seem likely, the
detective from the District Attorney's office who obtained the
recanting affidavit, explained to Ramirez that his original
affidavit, if not recanted, raised, at the very least, the
possibility of a new trial at which he would be called upon to
testify all over again and at which he would be impeached on the
basis of his affidavit and prior testimony.  Indeed, there is no
reason to suppose that Ramirez was not at least as eager to be
rid of the District Attorney's minion as he had been to be rid of
the defendant's.  In addition, while there were affidavits before
the motion court affirming that the trial assistant, Ms. Kane,
and two associates from the District Attorney's office, had not
during their interviews of Ramirez, taken a single note, these
submissions, even if accepted at face value, do not exclude the
possibility of undisclosed recorded statements from Ramirez
since, as defendant points out, Ms. Kane entered the prosecution
late, succeeding the originally assigned ADA after an earlier
Rosario violation, and investigators other than the affiants had
been involved in the development of the prosecution's case. 
For the foregoing reasons, the motion court's
conclusion that no triable issue had been raised as to whether
there were undisclosed prior statements by Ramirez bearing upon
the subject matter of his testimony, appears to have been
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*Pinhasov evidently did not implicate defendant when the
police arrived immediately after the shooting and the issue,
despite the "Case Closed" notation upon which the majority places
such emphasis, was sufficiently unclear that Boris was held for
weeks in connection with the shooting.
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unwarranted.  Even more unwarranted, was the motion court's view
that, even if such statements existed, there was no reasonable
possibility that they could have affected the trial's result. 
Without knowing the content of any such statements, it is
manifestly impossible to say whether they could have been used by
the defense to raise a reasonable doubt as to defendant's
commission of the shooting.  It is true that the sufficiency of
the People's case did not depend on Ramirez's testimony.  But the
strength of the case, as distinguished from its sufficiency,
concededly did.  Pinhasov's account of the shooting and the
antecedent events was, to say the least, not a model of clarity,
and a significant issue evidently remained after his delayed
accusation,* and after his testimony, as to whether his shooting
had not actually been the drunken work of his debtor cousin
Boris, with whom Pinhasov was "very close," but who, according to
Pinhasov, immediately after the shooting stood over Pinhasov
enraged, screaming that Pinhasov was "vomit" and "garbage."  It
was Ramirez's testimony that seemed to crystalize the situation
for the jury, and resolve doubts naturally remaining in the wake
of Pinhasov's account, in favor of convicting defendant.  In view
of the pivotal importance of Ramirez's testimony -- a
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circumstance the majority completely elides -- it does not seem
possible to say that nothing he could have said during the
shooting's investigation as to what he saw, or thought he saw, or
did not see from his fifth story window in the small hours of the
morning of December 17, 2003, could possibly have been used by
defense counsel to alter the trial's course in defendant’s favor.
Where "a defendant can articulate a factual basis for
the assertion that a prosecutor is improperly denying the
existence of [Rosario material]," the court is bound to determine
whether such material exists (see People v Poole, 48 NY2d 144,
149 [1979]).  Here, such a factual basis was presented and it
does not appear that its truth can be tested except by an
evidentiary hearing.  It is, of course, perfectly accurate to say
as the majority does that it is "theoretically possible that a
hearing could show . . . the existence of suppressed Rosario
material" (majority opn at 9).  But this is not a rationale for
dispensing with a hearing; it is precisely because the
possibility of suppressed Rosario material has been shown to
exist that a hearing must be had (see CPL 440.30 [5]).  The
possibility of suppressed Rosario material is only theoretical
because it has not been tested. 
Accordingly, I would reverse the order denying the
440.10 motion and grant the motion to the extent of directing a
hearing to determine whether there exists or existed undisclosed
Rosario material pertinent to Mr. Ramirez's trial testimony and,
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if so, whether the nature of any such material raises a
reasonable possibility that its nondisclosure materially affected
the trial's outcome (see CPL 240.75; and see People v Baxley, 84
NY2d 208). 
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Order affirmed.  Opinion by Judge Smith.  Judges Ciparick,
Graffeo, Read and Jones concur.  Chief Judge Lippman dissents in
part in an opinion in which Judge Pigott concurs.
Decided November 24, 2009