Opinion ID: 2057903
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The statement as false exculpatory

Text: Reams's second ground for asserting that the jury was misled by the exclusion of portions of his statement is that a jury learning only (as it did) that he had denied having returned to Ivy City after the fight would infer that he could provide no account for his whereabouts on the night of the shooting. This [in turn] suggested guilt. An innocent person would attempt to account for his or her activities at the time of the shooting rather than simply deny his or her presence at the location of the shooting. (Br. for App. at 30.) In point of fact, Reams explains, his statement to the police gave an account of his activities on the day and night of the shooting: he was at home with his girlfriend (whose name and address he furnished to the police) that evening [w]atching T.V., cooking dinner ... I know I was in the house, a day moreover that stood out in his memory because he had earlier gone to the courthouse to provide a urine sample for a drug program. But a jury learning only his blanket denial that he ever went back to Ivy City would receive the impression, Reams argues, that he provided `false exculpatory information in the form of a doubtful alibi,' quoting Henderson, 632 A.2d at 429, an impression that could only be countered by Mr. Reams'[s] account of his whereabouts at the time of the shooting (Br. for App. at 30). Reams has preserved this argument, though only barely. At no place did he assert to the trial judge that his naked denial of having gone back to Ivy City would be viewed by the jury as a doubtful, because unexplained, alibiin short, as a false exculpatory admission. Yet it seems to us apparent from the hearing on the admission of the statement that this argument would have fallen on deaf judicial ears, unlike the argument discussed previously. The trial judge was fully aware that allowing the government to introduce Reams's denial would have the incidental effect of placing his alibi, in skeletal form, before the jury ([I]ndeed[,] if he says he didn't go back there, ... period, you [defense counsel] already have the premise for an argument that he wasn't there on the day of the murder.); but the judge was unambiguous in ruling, nonetheless, that portions of the statement that relate to the day of the homicide may not come in. To that extent, in other words, the judge had accepted the prosecutor's position that letting Reams introduce the details of the alibi would impermissibly (in the judge's words) be trying to get him to testify without being subject to cross-examination. In this setting, we regard the present claim that admitting only a truncated version of Reams's denial of ever having returned to Ivy City fostered a misleading impression as sufficiently preserved for review. We accept further the assertion that Reams should have been allowed to present the details of his alibi to counter the possible impression that he had made only a bald, unadorned denial of guilt ( i.e., that he had never gone back to the neighborhood) without explanation. A teaching of Henderson and the authorities it cites is that, once the government in a criminal case has profited from portions of an out-of-court statement, `cumbersome definitions' and `quibbling objections' should not prevent the defense from putting `the whole of what was said at the same time on the same subject' before the jury. Henderson, 632 A.2d at 427 (quoting 7 JOHN H. WIGMORE, EVIDENCE IN TRIALS AT COMMON LAW § 2113, at 659 (James H. Chadbourn ed. 1978)); see Butler v. United States, 614 A.2d 875, 882 (D.C.1992) (completeness doctrine helps secure for the tribunal a complete understanding of the total tenor and effect of the statement (citations omitted)). The possibility of an adverse inference by the jury from Reams's unexplained denial that he had gone back to Ivy Cityevidence the prosecution used partly as proof of motive required the jury to hear his entire explanation under the completeness rule. It is a different question, however, whether the danger that the jury would draw that inference without hearing Reams's alibi is realistic enough to warrant reversal of his convictions. Key to that inquiry are the centrality of the issue affected by the exclusion of the alibi, as well as the closeness of the case regarding his guilt. See, e.g., Clark v. United States, 593 A.2d 186, 193 (D.C.1991). The prejudice Reams claims, as pointed out, is that without learning of the rest of the statement the jury might well have concluded from the thinness of his explanation for his whereabouts, that he offered the police false exculpatory information (Br. for App. at 33). Important in this regard, however, is that at no place in the trial did the prosecutor attempt to exploit Reams's statement to the police for that purpose. Nowhere, that is, did the prosecutor suggest to the jury that the paucity of Reams's blanket denial was itself proof of his guilt as a false exculpatory admission. The lone remark Reams points to as such use was in the prosecutor's opening statement: Fight happens; Mr. Reams is gone. By his own words, never goes back. Actually, I'm getting a little ahead of myself because he did go back. Doesn't say he went back, but he did go back. We know he went back. Our evidence is going to convince you that he went back, and he went back on June 11th ... with a gun. As seems obvious, the prosecutor was asserting here that the government's evidence would show that Reams indeed went backnot that his own words, because so impoverished an explanation of his whereabouts, proved that he had returned to do the shooting. The consistent theme of the prosecution at trial, driven home in its closing argument, was that the eyewitness testimony together with the motive evidence of the fight established Reams's guilt. His statement to the police was marginal evidence of that motive, and was not used at all to imply his guilt because of its difference from what an innocent person would [have] likely provide[d] to the police ... to account for his whereabouts (Br. for App. at 29). Moreover, the aggregate eyewitness testimony identifying Reams as the shooter was strong. Moments after bullets were sprayed from a car killing Shaun Williams and wounding Donte Jenkins, Aiesha Jackson and Tanosha Harris saw Reams seated on the open window of a moving Taurus station wagon holding a handgun and leaning over the top of the car. Dawn Blake likewise heard the shots and saw Reams in the same position, though unable to see his hands as he tried to scoot down into the car. All three women knew Reams well from the neighborhood; at least two were friendly with him; all three had seen him in the station wagon on past occasions; and Harris (as well as Westley Ashe) had seen him in it earlier that day. None of the three women was claimed to have any motive to identify Reams falsely (defense counsel acknowledged in summation that it is not the defense's contention ... that these people made up that [Reams] was the shooter); and although each woman was impeached with one or more inconsistencies (Harris, for example, had initially mistaken Reams in the car for his brother), [3] the most the defense could suggest for why all three had placed Reams in the same tell-tale position was that they were close ... [and] talked about it, and had ingested the fruits of the rumor mill. And the same necessarily was true, the defense had to contend, of Wesley Ashe's testimony even though he had had no contact with the women since the shooting. Ashe too was unimpeached with any motive to accuse Reams falsely when he testified that he had watched him lean out of the Taurus and fire a handgun over the top of it at men running away. Although he could not see Reams's face, he recognized him from the back and side, especially from his distinctive back (one too long for the average person), as a young man he had been around ... so long (1,001 times probably) and knew well. Testimony by one or two of these witnesses, if that were all, might still leave us unable to say with reasonable assurance that the jury was not misled by hearing only Reams's unadorned denial that he had returned to Ivy City. Indeed, if that were all, Reams's alibi account of his whereaboutsbefore the jury, hearsay or not, under the completeness rulemight itself arguably have tipped the reasonable doubt balance even though Reams offered no testimony at all corroborating it. But that is not this case. Taken together, the testimony of four eyewitnesses confirming Reams's uniquely descriptive role as the shooter enables us to say, with fair assurance,... that the judgment was not substantially swayed by the exclusion of other portions of Reams's police statement. Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 765, 66 S.Ct. 1239, 90 L.Ed. 1557 (1946). Indeed, even if we apply the constitutional test of Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967), because Reams was denied the right to cross-examine the detective about the full statement ... taken from appellant, Henderson, 632 A.2d at 431-32 n. 36, [4] we reach the same result. The notion that all four eyewitnesses might have been disbelieved enough to create reasonable doubt on the strength of details of Reams's hearsay version of his whereabouts is too speculative to support reversal. [5] Affirmed.