Opinion ID: 1195356
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 14

Heading: Internal affairs investigation

Text: Defendant contends that the court erred in preventing him from presenting evidence relating to the circumstances under which a police officer secured a statement from jailhouse informant Sutton  a person who did not testify at defendant's trial and whose statement to the police was not introduced against defendant. According to the preliminary hearing testimony of Sergeant Pesante of the Los Angeles Police Department, Sutton gave a statement to Pesante indicating that defendant planned to kill a robbery victim who was to testify against him in the robbery prosecution. By the time of the preliminary hearing, Sutton had recanted, testifying at that hearing that he had not given such a statement to Pesante. That Sutton had, in fact, made such a statement to Pesante, was corroborated by Detective Slack, who testified that Pesante had relayed Sutton's statement to him, and that Slack had relayed the statement to Detective Riscens, of the Los Angeles Police Department. (Riscens, however, denied receiving this communication from Slack.) Pesante's account also was corroborated by Sutton's statements to other officers after the Carpenter shooting, in which Sutton confirmed knowing of defendant's plan to murder Carpenter and having made a statement to that effect to Pesante, and in which Sutton stated that he would not testify against defendant because he feared him. A police department internal affairs inquiry had been conducted regarding whether Sutton's statement had been conveyed by Slack to Riscens. In the context of the internal affairs investigation, Riscens denied receiving Slack's communication. At stake in the internal affairs investigation was the question whether the police had failed to warn Carpenter of the planned shooting or protect him against it, not whether Pesante had attempted to manufacture evidence against defendant by concocting a statement and falsely attributing it to Sutton. At trial, the prosecution made a motion to exclude evidence that the police had received advance warning of the threat to Carpenter's safety but failed to warn him. Defendant contended at trial that this evidence was relevant to demonstrate that the police had manufactured evidence against him. His theory was that Pesante had lied about receiving a statement from Sutton, that the other officers colluded in this lie, and that therefore much of the evidence collected by the police could have been manufactured by them. Some of the disputed evidence regarding the circumstances under which Sutton's statement was obtained might have been relevant to impeach Pesante's testimony, had he testified. He did not. Sutton did not testify either. None of the evidence that formed the basis for the internal affairs investigation was relevant to the present case. It did not demonstrate or even suggest that the police had manufactured evidence that was admitted against defendant; rather it demonstrated that police communications had failed, resulting in a failure to warn or protect defendant's victim, Carpenter. The internal affairs investigation indicated that one of the police officers may have lied during the investigation about whether notification of Sutton's statement had been issued or received by the police, but this circumstance did not indicate that the police had fabricated any evidence against defendant. Such questions as whether Pesante or other officers took or kept notes of relevant interviews regarding the Sutton tip, or the precise dates when the interviews took place, were collateral to any issue at trial. The trial court was within its broad discretion in determining that the evidence would consume an undue amount of time in relation to its probative value and that it therefore should be excluded. (Evid.Code, § 352; see People v. Rodrigues (1994) 8 Cal.4th 1060, 1124-1125, 36 Cal.Rptr.2d 235, 885 P.2d 1.) Because the evidence had so little probative value, we also reject defendant's claim that the exclusion of this evidence violated his state or federal constitutional right to present a defense (see Crane v. Kentucky (1986) 476 U.S. 683, 690-691, 106 S.Ct. 2142, 90 L.Ed.2d 636; In re Martin (1987) 44 Cal.3d 1, 30, 241 Cal.Rptr. 263, 744 P.2d 374), or the provision of the California Constitution that relevant evidence shall not be excluded in any criminal prosecution. (Cal. Const., art. I, § 28, subd. (d).)