Opinion ID: 2718461
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: “Clearly Established” Right to Confrontation

Text: Supreme Court law clearly establishes that, under the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, a criminal defendant must have “a meaningful opportunity to cross‐examine witnesses against him.” Brinson, 547 F.3d at 392 (citing Pennsylvania v. Ritchie, 480 U.S. 39, 51 (1987)). See also Davis v. Alaska, 415 U.S. 308, 315 (1974) (holding that this confrontation right is applicable to state and federal defendants alike) (citing Pointer v. Texas, 380 U.S. 400 (1965)). The Confrontation Clause does not, however, guarantee unfettered cross‐ examination. See Delaware v. Fensterer, 474 U.S. 15, 20 (1985) (per curiam). The trial court has “broad discretion . . . ‘to impose reasonable limits on . . . cross examination based on concerns about . . . harassment, prejudice, confusion of the issues, . . . or interrogation that is repetitive or only marginally relevant.’” Brinson, 547 F.3d at 394 (quoting Van Arsdall, 475 U.S. at 679). “Combining the standard for restricting cross‐examination with the AEDPA standard, in order to grant [a] habeas petition we would have to conclude not only that the trial court abused its ‘broad discretion’ by precluding 14 13‐2828‐pr Julio Alvarez v. Robert Ercole cross‐examination . . . but also that the [state appellate court] could not reasonably have determined that the [evidence] would have been excludable had the trial court properly applied ‘standard rules of evidence’ . . . .” Watson v. Greene, 640 F.3d 501, 510 (2d Cir. 2011) (quoting Wade v. Mantello, 333 F.3d 51, 62 (2d Cir. 2003)). “On habeas corpus, . . . we do not sit to review the trial judge’s exercise of discretion, but rather to assess whether the state court’s denial of [the defendant’s] Confrontation Clause claim was reasonable.” Id. at 511. Moreover, for habeas to be warranted, the trial court’s denial must not have been harmless, that is, it must have had a “substantial and injurious effect or influence in determining the jury’s verdict.” Brinson, 547 F.3d at 395 (quoting Brecht v. Abrahamson, 507 U.S. 619, 637 (1993)) (internal quotation marks omitted). We “start with the propriety of the trial court’s evidentiary ruling.” Hawkins, 460 F.3d at 244 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Bronx County Supreme Court prohibited Alvarez from cross‐examining Detective Alfred about the Vasquez DD5 report on the ground that the questions solicited inadmissible hearsay. In this respect, the trial court abused its discretion. 15 13‐2828‐pr Julio Alvarez v. Robert Ercole
The state court’s conclusion—that the Vasquez DD5 “contained multiple layers of hearsay, and depended, for its relevancy, on at least some level being true”—would have been correct had Alvarez offered the report as a means of establishing the truth of its content (i.e., that the “problem” that Vasquez’s friend “Julio” had “t[aken] care of” was the murdered Dan Colon and that when “Julio” called Vasquez soon after the shooting, he was confessing to Dan’s murder). See People v. Alvarez, 845 N.Y.S.2d at 232. But that was not the object of Alvarez’s cross‐examination. Alvarez sought to demonstrate that the NYPD had failed to take even obvious, preliminary steps to investigate the leads that were generated by Vasquez’s interview—summarized in the Vasquez DD5. Alvarez’s strategy, which defense counsel heralded during opening and emphasized in closing, was to show that the NYPD’s incomplete investigation indicated that the NYPD had prematurely concluded that Alvarez was the guilty party, and in that way to raise a reasonable doubt that Alvarez was in fact responsible. This defense theory did not depend on the veracity of any of Vasquez’s (or, for that matter, Julio’s) statements. 16 13‐2828‐pr Julio Alvarez v. Robert Ercole
In a later ruling, the state trial court justified its decision to restrict Alvarez’s inquiry into the Vasquez DD5 by citing a New York evidentiary rule governing admission of evidence implicating a third party. In People v. Primo, the New York Court of Appeals recently clarified that this rule – formerly known as the “clear link” rule – requires state trial courts to balance the probative value of defense evidence implicating a third party against its potential for causing prejudice and confusion, a standard rule of evidence. See 96 N.Y.2d at 356 (clarifying that state courts should analyze the “admissibility of third‐party culpability evidence under the general balancing analysis that governs the admissibility of all evidence” and not under any higher standard). The state court’s ruling on this alternate ground was also clearly unreasonable under established Sixth Amendment law: not only was it incorrect, but it left Alvarez without any means of supporting his defense theory. See Olden v. Kentucky, 488 U.S. 227, 232 (1988) (per curiam) (reversing conviction where “the limitation [placed on cross‐examination] was beyond reason” given its centrality in undermining a lead witness’s testimony). For the reasons that follow, we therefore conclude that the trial court abused its discretion and “could not 17 13‐2828‐pr Julio Alvarez v. Robert Ercole reasonably have determined” that this line of questioning was precluded under the proper application of this rule, as well as “standard rules of evidence concerning admissibility.” See Watson, 640 F.3d at 510 (internal quotation marks omitted). First, the trial court’s application of Primo was wrong – and unreasonably so – under this standard balancing test. Alvarez’s counsel specifically argued that the purpose of the line of questioning regarding the Vasquez DD5 was not to show that an alternate perpetrator had in fact committed the crime, but was pursued to demonstrate that there was an alternate suspect that the police had disregarded in their investigation. The trial court’s ruling instead was entirely predicated on the assumption that Alvarez was trying to present evidence of “third‐party culpability.” Second, the trial court’s grounds for barring this line of inquiry were seriously flawed. On the probative value side of the scale, there is no doubt that the content of the DD5 supported an inference that the police did not pursue the lead provided to them by Vasquez – an omission that could have led the jury seriously to doubt the adequacy of the murder investigation. But this fact was wholly overlooked by the state court. On the contrary, the judge asserted that 18 13‐2828‐pr Julio Alvarez v. Robert Ercole Vasquez’s description in the DD5 “does not, in my judgment, match the Defendant” because there was “an automobile that’s described that does not fit any automobile that I know of that’s involved in this case,” nor was there any other evidence of a dispute between Dan Colon and “a Julio” or his wife. There are certainly enough parallels, however, that could be drawn between the alternate suspect and the information the police had about the murder to make Julio Guerrero a person of interest in the investigation: Guerrero’s first name, his general physical characteristics, and his automobile’s color and appearance were consistent with the descriptions given to the police by eyewitnesses to the shooting. And had detectives investigated the lead, they would quickly have learned that Guerrero lived not far from the crime scene. Of course, there was a risk that the jury would have interpreted this line of questioning to suggest Julio Guerrero’s guilt of the crime – the type of confusion or unfair prejudice this rule was intended to prevent. And as we have said, “trial judges retain wide latitude insofar as the Confrontation Clause is concerned to impose reasonable limits” to avoid such harms. Watson, 640 F.3d at 510 (quoting Van Arsdall, 475 U.S. at 479). In the unusual circumstances of this case, however, the combined effect of the state trial court’s erroneous hearsay and Primo rulings 19 13‐2828‐pr Julio Alvarez v. Robert Ercole entirely precluded Alvarez from fleshing out his main defense theory: that the police investigation into the murder was flawed and had improperly disregarded a promising alternate suspect. In Watson v. Greene, we held that there had been no Confrontation Clause violation when the trial court prohibited the defendant in a homicide prosecution from cross‐examining a police witness about the contents of an anonymous phone tip, contained in another officer’s note. 640 F.3d at 511. The tip was traced to an off‐duty officer who explained that she called in the tip after overhearing her family members repeat rumors relating to another suspect’s involvement in the murder. Id. at 510. The police never discovered the identity of the officer who recorded her tip. Id. at 504. Watson held that the trial court’s exclusion was not an “unreasonable” application of Sixth Amendment law for these reasons: (a) the likelihood that the note would cause confusion; (b) the police department’s inability to determine the note’s author; (c) the strength of the evidence the police already possessed may have indicated to the jury that a disregard of the note “did not reflect a serious lack of thoroughness in the police investigation”; and (d) the fact that the defendant had available to him, and 20 13‐2828‐pr Julio Alvarez v. Robert Ercole indeed had introduced, ample alternative evidence to discredit the police investigation. Id. at 511‐12. The present case is quite different, for the trial court’s exclusion left Alvarez without any support for his theory of the case. And the district attorney repeatedly emphasized that shortcoming in summation, labeling as “speculation” criticism of the police investigation and “submit[ting] to” the jury that the detectives “did a good job on this case” and “followed up on leads.” “By thus cutting off all questioning about an event the State conceded had taken place,” the state court disabled Alvarez from contradicting Detective Alfred’s portrayal of the NYPD investigation as thorough and reliable. See Van Arsdall, 475 U.S. at 677, 679 (the Confrontation Clause is violated when “the trial court prohibited all inquiry into” a potential source of bias on the part of a witness, a ruling that “kept from the jury facts . . . that were central to assessing [the witness’s] reliability”); Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284, 302 (1973) (holding that state evidentiary rules “may not be applied mechanistically to defeat the ends of justice” where the result is the exclusion of “testimony . . . critical to [the] defense”). Moreover, we cannot determine regarding the Vasquez lead (as the panel could in Watson as to the anonymous note) that the disregard of the lead, 21 13‐2828‐pr Julio Alvarez v. Robert Ercole given the relative weakness of the case against Alvarez, would not have been taken by the jury as “reflect[ing] a serious lack of thoroughness in the police investigation.” See 640 F.3d at 511. Accordingly, we conclude that the trial court’s total exclusion of inquiry into the Vasquez DD5 was an “unreasonable application” of clearly established Sixth Amendment law. Was it, however, harmless?