Opinion ID: 2335377
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Failure to Present Exculpatory Evidence

Text: The defendants first assign error to the hearing justice's denial of their motion to dismiss the indictment for failure of the prosecutor to present exculpatory evidence to the grand jury. Moreover, they urge this Court to adopt a rule that would require state prosecutors to present substantially exculpatory evidence to Rhode Island grand juries. [4] They contend that such a rule would not impose an undue burden on the grand jury system, and that it would recognize the grand jury's dual functions of determining probable cause and protecting citizens from prosecutorial overreaching. Mr. Russell and Mr. Sidibe argue that their assertions of consensual sex with Barbara amount to substantially exculpatory evidence because their testimony would have deterred the grand jury from finding the existence of probable cause and negated guilt. Both defendants characterize the case before the grand jury as a he said, she said dispute, whereby probable cause would not exist if the grand jury believed defendants' version of events. Several of our cases have touched upon the introduction of exculpatory evidence in grand jury proceedings. In Acquisto, 463 A.2d at 126-27, the defendant moved to dismiss the indictment based on the prosecutor's failure to present three letters from a key witness that tended to establish the witness's bias and impeached her credibility. This Court upheld the denial of the motion to dismiss and said, assuming, without deciding, that the letters in question tended to be exculpatory, we believe that the failure to present these letters [to the grand jury] did not constitute cause to invalidate the indictment. Id. at 127. We quoted Acquisto with approval in Lerner v. Moran, 542 A.2d 1089, 1093 (R.I. 1988), in which we explained that this Court would reject a motion to dismiss the indictment even if a key witness perjured himself before the grand jury on matters relating to promises made to him in exchange for his testimony. After Lerner, the United States Supreme Court decided, as a matter of federal law, that a court may not dismiss an otherwise valid indictment because the government failed to disclose substantially exculpatory evidence to the grand jury. United States v. Williams, 504 U.S. 36, 45-47, 112 S.Ct. 1735, 118 L.Ed.2d 352 (1992). This Court discussed Williams with approval in State v. Ellis, 619 A.2d 418, 427 (R.I.1993), a case that involved certain statements made by a key witness that were inconsistent with other information known to the prosecution. The Ellis Court noted that [w]e do not require that evidence that may later be determined by counsel for the defense to be exculpatory must be presented to the grand jury on pain of dismissal of the indictment. Id. Mr. Russell and Mr. Sidibe seek to distinguish our previous cases on the basis that they addressed impeachment and credibility evidence. The defendants contend that their assertion of consensual sex is different because the statute they were charged under, § 11-37-2, requires that the sexual act be nonconsensual. They allege their proposed grand jury testimony is substantially exculpatory because it would have addressed an essential element of the crimes at issue. Definitions of substantially exculpatory are, for the most part, quite similar. The Tenth Circuit, in a line of cases decided before Williams, adopted a rule that defined substantially exculpatory as, although a prosecutor need not present all conceivably exculpatory evidence to the grand jury, it must present evidence that clearly negates guilt. United States v. Reid, 911 F.2d 1456, 1460 (10th Cir.1990) (quoting United States v. Page, 808 F.2d 723, 727 (10th Cir.1987)). According to a leading treatise on grand jury practice, [m]ost states that recognize a prosecutorial duty    require[ ] the prosecutor to present to the grand jury evidence that is clearly exculpatory, in other words, evidence that would exonerate the accused or lead the grand jury to refuse to indict. Sara Sun Beale et al., 1 Grand Jury Law and Practice, § 4:17 at 4-85 (2d ed.2005). Another commentator defines substantially exculpatory evidence as evidence that directly negates or contradicts evidence of the defendant's guilt. R. Michael Cassidy, Toward a More Independent Grand Jury: Recasting and Enforcing the Prosecutor's Duty to Disclose Exculpatory Evidence, 13 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 361, 369 (2000). The commentator explains that [u]nlike general exculpatory evidence, which may simply cast some doubt on the credibility of government witnesses (such as impeachment evidence), evidence that affirmatively suggests that the defendant did not commit the crime, or that someone else did, is directly relevant to the grand jury's accusatory function. [5] Id. We decline defendants' invitation to adopt a rule requiring prosecutors to present substantially exculpatory evidence to grand juries within the context of this case, however, because we reject their underlying premise that the proposed evidence was substantially exculpatory. [6] The state presented to the grand jury Barbara's testimony, in which she alleged Mr. Sidibe and Mr. Russell engaged in nonconsensual sex with her. The defendants did not have  and the prosecutor was not aware of  evidence that they did not engage in the sexual act at all, for example, that they were elsewhere at the time of the alleged incident. The core of defendants' contention is that their version of events could have refuted Barbara's testimony in the eyes of the grand jury. This Court is of the opinion that defendants' assertion of consensual sex as substantially exculpatory evidence is really a challenge to the competency of the evidence before the grand jury. Cast in this light, defendants' argument must fail. We long have relied upon Costello, in which the United States Supreme Court declined to establish a rule permitting defendants to challenge indictments on the ground that they are not supported by adequate or competent evidence. Franco, 750 A.2d at 419. Even if we deviated from Costello, which we emphatically decline to do, we also have explained in the grand jury context that a subsequent guilty verdict means not only that there was probable cause to believe that [defendant was] guilty as charged, but also that [he is] in fact guilty as charged beyond a reasonable doubt. State v. Stone, 924 A.2d 773, 782 (R.I. 2007) (quoting State v. Tempest, 660 A.2d 278, 280 (R.I.1995)). The fact that Mr. Sidibe and Mr. Russell, after presenting their version of events, were found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a petit jury silences any question about the competency of the evidence before the grand jury, or indeed about the exculpatory nature of the evidence that defendants might have offered. In sum, this Court concludes that Mr. Sidibe and Mr. Russell did not possess substantially exculpatory evidence known to the prosecutor during the grand jury proceedings. Because we have determined that no substantially exculpatory evidence exists in this case, we reject defendants' argument that the hearing justice erred in denying their motion to dismiss the indictment for the failure of the prosecutor to present such evidence to the grand jury.