18-336 

United States v. Herring 

 

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 

FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT 

SUMMARY ORDER 

RULINGS BY SUMMARY ORDER DO NOT HAVE PRECEDENTIAL EFFECT. CITATION TO A 

SUMMARY ORDER FILED ON OR AFTER JANUARY 1, 2007, IS PERMITTED AND IS GOVERNED 

BY FEDERAL RULE OF APPELLATE PROCEDURE 32.1 AND THIS COURT’S LOCAL RULE 32.1.1. 

WHEN CITING A SUMMARY ORDER IN A DOCUMENT FILED WITH THIS COURT, A PARTY 

MUST CITE EITHER THE FEDERAL APPENDIX OR AN ELECTRONIC DATABASE (WITH THE 

NOTATION “SUMMARY ORDER”). A PARTY CITING A SUMMARY ORDER MUST SERVE A COPY 

OF IT ON ANY PARTY NOT REPRESENTED BY COUNSEL. 

 At a stated Term of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, held at the 

Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, 40 Foley Square, in the City of New York on the 

27th day of February, two thousand nineteen. 

Present: ROSEMARY S. POOLER, 

 RAYMOND J. LOHIER, JR., 

 SUSAN L. CARNEY 

 Circuit Judges. 

 

_____________________________________________________ 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

 Appellee, 

 v. 18-336 

JEFFREY HERRING, 

 Defendant-Appellant.

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_____________________________________________________ 

 

Appearing for Appellant: Troy A. Smith, White Plains, N.Y. 

Appearing for Appellee: Maurene Comey, Assistant United States Attorney (Michael 

Gerber, Lauren Schorr, Won S. Shin, Assistant United States 

Attorneys, on the brief), for Geoffrey S. Berman, United States 

Attorney for the Southern District of New York, New York, N.Y. 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Karas, J.). 

 

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 The Clerk of the Court is directed to amend the caption as above. 
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ON CONSIDERATION WHEREOF, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED, 

AND DECREED that the judgment of said District Court be and it hereby is AFFIRMED. 

 Appellant Jeffrey Herring appeals from the January 25, 2018, judgment of the United 

States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Karas, J.), convicting him, after a 

jury trial, of conspiracy to commit Hobbs Act robbery, 18 U.S.C. § 1951, Hobbs Act robbery, id.

§§ 2, 1951, causing the death of a person while possessing a firearm during and in relation to the 

commission of a crime of violence, id. §§ 2, 924(j), participating in a racketeering conspiracy, id.

§ 1962(d), and murder in aid of racketeering, id. §§ 2, 1959(a)(1). The district court sentenced 

Herring principally to a mandatory term of life imprisonment followed by a mandatory 

consecutive five-year term of imprisonment. We assume the parties’ familiarity with the 

underlying facts, procedural history, and specification of issues for review. 

 Herring’s primary argument is that the district court erred by declining to admit certain 

statements that a co-conspirator, Deanna Duncan, made during various proffer sessions with the 

government. The principal statement on which Herring focuses on appeal is, in sum and 

substance, that Duncan saw a co-conspirator, Jesse Hummel, pointing a gun at someone who was 

lying on a couch in the house in which the robbery and murder took place. Herring argues that 

the district court should have admitted the statement as a statement against Duncan’s penal 

interest pursuant to Rule 804(b)(3) of the Federal Rules of Evidence. 

 “We review a district court’s decision to exclude a statement under Rule 804(b)(3) for 

abuse of discretion.” United States v. Lumpkin, 192 F.3d 280, 287 (2d Cir. 1999). “Federal Rule 

of Evidence 804(b)(3) permits the admission of a statement against an unavailable declarant’s 

penal interest” when the statement, at the time of declaration, “had so great a tendency to expose 

the declarant to criminal liability that a reasonable person in his position would have made the 

statement only if he believed it to be true, and corroborating evidence clearly indicates the 

trustworthiness of the statement.” United States v. Dupree, 870 F.3d 62, 80 (2d Cir. 2017). 

 Thus, the Rule first requires courts to conduct “an adequately particularized analysis,” 

United States v. Saget, 377 F.3d 223, 231 (2d Cir. 2004), asking “whether a reasonable person in 

the declarant’s shoes would perceive the statement as detrimental to his or her own penal 

interest, a question that can be answered only in light of all the surrounding circumstances,” 

United States v. Gupta, 747 F.3d 111, 127 (2d Cir. 2014) (citations omitted) (internal quotation 

marks omitted). This particularized analysis requires courts to parse out and exclude “non-selfinculpatory statements, even if they are made within a broader narrative that is generally selfinculpatory.” Williamson v. United States, 512 U.S. 594, 600-01 (1994). “[T]he court must then 

determine whether there are corroborating circumstances indicating both the declarant’s 

trustworthiness and the truth of the statement.” Gupta, 747 F.3d at 127 (internal quotation marks 

omitted). “[T]he inference of trustworthiness from the proffered ‘corroborating circumstances’ 

must be strong, not merely allowable.” United States v. Salvador, 820 F.2d 558, 561 (2d Cir. 

1987). “The burden is on the proponent of 804(b)(3) evidence to demonstrate sufficient 

corroboration.” United States v. Paulino, 445 F.3d 211, 220 (2d Cir. 2006). 
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 Here, we need not decide whether Duncan’s statements were against her penal interest 

because we find no error in the district court’s conclusion that Herring failed to meet his burden 

to show that the statements were sufficiently corroborated by circumstances indicating that they 

were true. On that score, Herring points us to no evidence in the record corroborating Duncan’s 

statement that Hummel possessed a firearm while in the house in which the robbery and murder 

took place, much less that Hummel pointed a gun at someone during the course of the robbery. 

 Nor do we find error in the district court’s determination that Herring did not meet his 

burden to show that Duncan’s trustworthiness was sufficiently corroborated. Duncan initially 

proffered that, during the robbery, she remained at or near the doorway of the house. However, 

allegedly after having been hypnotized by a social worker while in jail, she later admitted to 

having entered the house and rummaged through one of the bedrooms. The court did not exceed 

the bounds of its discretion by relying on such inconsistencies in Duncan’s statements to the 

government and Duncan’s dubious explanation for the inconsistencies to conclude that Duncan 

was not trustworthy. See United States v. Doyle, 130 F.3d 523, 544 (2d Cir. 1997) (finding no 

error in district court’s exclusions of statements by a declarant who had offered “inconsistent 

stories,” suggesting a “risk of fabrication”). 

 Herring argues that the district court erred by giving insufficient weight to the fact that 

the government had introduced the statements at issue during grand jury proceedings and that a 

government investigator testified during those proceedings that Duncan’s statements were 

corroborated. However, Herring overlooks the fact that it was only after the grand jury testimony 

that Duncan called her credibility into question by changing her account of the robbery. 

Moreover, the district court was not required to accept the government investigator’s assertion 

that Duncan’s statements were corroborated; whether the statements were admissible under Rule 

804(b)(3) was a determination for the court to make, not a government investigator. 

 More significantly, even if we were to identify error in the district court’s decision to 

exclude Duncan’s statements, we are convinced that any error was harmless. See Fed. R. Crim. 

P. 52(a). We will “uphold a verdict in the face of an evidentiary error” when it is “highly 

probable that the error did not affect the verdict.” United States v. Dukagjini, 326 F.3d 45, 61 (2d 

Cir. 2003) (internal quotation marks omitted). “In conducting this inquiry, we consider factors 

including: (1) the importance of the unrebutted assertions to the government’s case; (2) whether 

the excluded material was cumulative; (3) the presence or absence of evidence corroborating or 

contradicting the government’s case on the factual questions at issue; (4) the extent to which the 

defendant was otherwise permitted to advance the defense; and (5) the overall strength of the 

prosecution’s case.” United States v. Oluwanisola, 605 F.3d 124, 134 (2d Cir. 2010). 

 Here, the government presented testimony from three cooperating witness who 

participated in the robbery. All three identified Herring as the person who shot the robbery and 

murder victim. Moreover, even if the district court had allowed Herring to introduce Duncan’s 

hearsay statements, they would not have corroborated his defense. Herring testified at trial that, 

although he initially agreed to participate in the robbery, he backed out once he and his 

co-conspirators arrived at the victim’s house and instead waited outside. Yet, in Duncan’s 

post-hypnosis revised version of events—that is, after she admitted to having gone into the house 

during the robbery—she placed Herring inside the house during the robbery. Additionally, 
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Herring’s conviction for murder in aid of racketeering, for which he received a mandatory life 

sentence, did not depend on the jury finding that he was the shooter. Instead, the district court 

instructed the jury on aiding and abetting and felony murder theories of criminal liability. Under 

those theories of liability, which Herring does not contest on appeal, the jury still could have 

found Herring guilty even if it had credited Duncan’s statement that Hummel had a gun and 

pointed it at someone and inferred from that statement that Hummel was the one who fatally shot 

the victim. 

 Finally, Herring argues that we wrongly decided that “Hobbs Act robbery is a crime of 

violence under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(3)(A).” United States v. Hill, 890 F.3d 51, 53 (2d Cir. 2018). 

He contends that Hobbs Act robbery is not a crime of violence under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(3)(A), 

and thus his conviction for violating 18 U.S.C. § 924(j)—which is predicated on Hobbs Act 

robbery being a crime of violence—must be vacated. However, we “are bound by the decisions 

of prior panels until such time as they are overruled either by an en banc panel of our Court or by 

the Supreme Court,” United States v. Wilkerson, 361 F.3d 717, 732 (2d Cir. 2004), or called into 

question by “an intervening Supreme Court decision,” Lotes Co. v. Hon Hai Precision Indus. 

Co., 753 F.3d 395, 405 (2d Cir. 2014) (internal quotation marks omitted). Herring points us to no 

en banc panel or Supreme Court decision overruling Hill, nor does he cite any Supreme Court 

decision that calls Hill into question. We are therefore bound to follow Hill. 

 We have considered the remainder of Herring’s arguments and find them to be without 

merit. Accordingly, the judgment of the district court hereby is AFFIRMED. 

 FOR THE COURT: 

 Catherine O’Hagan Wolfe, Clerk