Opinion ID: 2785252
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Trial of Hector Rivas

Text: Rivas was tried before a jury in March 1993, with now-deceased Onondaga County Court Judge J. Kevin Mulroy presiding. He was represented by Richard J. Calle, an attorney then practicing in Queens, New York. Rivas, who had moved downstate, hired Calle because Calle happened to be representing him in a civil arbitration matter in the fall of 1992, around the time the District Attorney’s Office renewed its investigation of him in connection with Hill’s murder. See Section 440.10 Hearing Tr. at 11. Calle did not work out of a formal business office and, on the occasions that he met with Rivas prior to Rivas’s incarceration, those meetings were typically held in Rivas’s sister’s apartment or at a local diner.11
The People’s case was almost entirely circumstantial.12 District Attorney Fitzpatrick, who tried the case himself, presented Rivas as an obsessive, jilted 11Calle was later indicted and convicted on federal charges of obstruction of justice and mail fraud unrelated to his representation of Rivas. He was disbarred from the practice of law in New York State nine years after Rivas’s trial. See In re Calle, 301 A.D.2d 218, 749 N.Y.S.2d 528 (1st Dep’t 2002). 12Several of Rivas’s fingerprints had been found on items in Hill’s house, including a bottle of wine. However, the prosecution acknowledged at trial that Rivas had been in the apartment many times before, including in the week prior to Hill’s death. 18 lover who harassed Hill following their breakup and was pushed over the edge when he learned that Hill was planning to take a trip to the Bahamas alone. Trial Tr. at 1127–28. As Fitzpatrick summarized: ‚Hector Rivas stalked this woman [for] two and a half months, and finally strangled her and killed her in a jealous rage on March the 27th of 1987.‛ Id. at 1069. Trial testimony and exhibits supported at least part of this theory. Friends of Hill testified that Rivas persisted in contacting Hill on a regular basis, even after she had made clear that she did not want to continue or revive their relationship. In addition, the prosecution introduced dozens of notes, cards, and letters that Rivas had written to Hill in the months between their breakup and her death. See id. at 1092–97. Police investigators also testified regarding Rivas’s strange behavior when he was first questioned, including his lack of reaction when he was told that Hill had died. Id. at 247. Several witnesses testified regarding Rivas’s whereabouts on Friday, March 27, 1987, the alleged date of the murder. Taken together, the testimony of these witnesses suggested that there may have been a window of time during which Rivas could have gone to Hill’s house and strangled her while en route from Coleman’s in Syracuse to Albert’s in Cazenovia, about thirty minutes away. Prosecution witnesses testified that Rivas left Coleman’s at around 9:00 or 9:30 p.m. and did not arrive at Albert’s until sometime between 11:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. Id. at 461–63, 439–40, 849. One witness, a clerk at a liquor store near Hill’s apartment, testified that he saw Rivas enter the store between 9:30 19 and 10:00 p.m. Id. at 496–99. Two witnesses testified that they observed Rivas smoking a cigarette in his car, which was parked outside Hill’s house, sometime between 11:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. that night—around the time that the prosecution theorized Hill was murdered. Id. at 533–34, 936–37.13 Beyond making the case that Rivas had motive and the opportunity to murder Hill on Friday night, Fitzpatrick deftly turned Rivas’s alibi for Saturday against him. Through witness testimony and in his opening and summation, Fitzpatrick suggested that Rivas had contrived to be seen by many people at all hours of the day Saturday and into Sunday morning, so that he would have an alibi in the event that police focused on Saturday evening as the time of death. See, e.g., id. at 1084, 1124. For example, Elizabeth Lewis, one of Hill’s friends, testified that Rivas sought her out at a party Saturday evening and remarked that ‚i+t’s too bad Valerie’s not feeling well, that she can’t be here tonight.‛ Id. at 780. The implication, according to the prosecution, was that Rivas wanted to plant the idea in Lewis’s mind that Hill was alive on Saturday evening, 13 One of these witnesses, Hill’s upstairs neighbor, was in fact called by Rivas as a defense witness, apparently because she had initially told police that she had seen Hill in their shared basement on Saturday morning, March 28. However, under cross examination by Fitzpatrick, she readily conceded that she was mistaken in her initial statement to police and had in fact seen Hill on Friday morning, March 27. Trial Tr. 928–29, 932. 20 knowing that he was at that very moment cementing his alibi. See id. at 1124.14 Similarly, Fitzpatrick emphasized a seemingly exculpatory item of evidence: a Stephen King novel that Hill had checked out from the Cazenovia Public Library, and which a witness had seen in the back seat of Hill’s car on Friday afternoon. See id. at 190–91. The book was returned to the library’s drop box sometime between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, suggesting that Hill (the most likely person to have returned it) was alive at least as late as Saturday afternoon. But Fitzpatrick theorized that it was Rivas who returned the book, hoping that it would cause investigators to believe that Hill was not killed on Friday night, when his alibi was relatively weaker. Id. at 54–55, 1085.15 14 Lewis did not testify that Rivas claimed to have spoken to Hill on Saturday. However, it was her sense, six years later, that he was trying to convey the impression that he had. This purported plan backfired, because Lewis—unlike Rivas—knew that Hill was planning to be out of town that weekend. Rivas’s comment therefore struck her as odd. Trial Tr. [at] 780. 15 As Rivas pointed out in his state collateral motion, however, Hill had requested the book through an interlibrary loan and all of the markings on the book indicated it was from a different library, in Utica. Thus, Rivas (belatedly) argued, only Hill would have known to return it to Cazenovia library and not the original library. Furthermore, although the prosecution’s fingerprint expert examined the book and found three prints that he could not identify, he apparently did not recover any of Rivas’s prints from the book. See Trial Tr. at 588. 21 Finally, [Fitzpatrick] elicited testimony from Joe Fields, an acquaintance of Rivas, who encountered him at Albert’s bar approximately three weeks after the murder. Rivas had been drinking heavily and was crying over Hill’s death. According to Fields, at a moment when Rivas did not know that Fields was in earshot, he said to himself, ‚Valerie, Valerie, I didn’t mean to do it.‛ Id. at 817–18.
No matter how much circumstantial evidence the prosecution could amass tending to link Rivas to the crime, however, it had no case unless it could prove that Hill died on Friday night. Fitzpatrick himself acknowledged that Rivas’s alibi was ‚complete—for Saturday night.‛ Id. at 55. Indeed, it was the People’s position that Rivas’s alibi was so strong on Saturday night precisely because he had concocted it, having murdered Hill the night before. Therefore, the prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on the testimony of Mitchell, the medical examiner, to persuade the jury that Hill died on Friday night and not on Saturday as Mitchell had initially determined. Mitchell testified that, when he first observed Hill’s body on the afternoon of Monday, March 30, it ‚was in rigor,‛ and that by the time he performed an autopsy later that day, ‚s+he was coming out of rigor.‛ Id. at 869, 872.16 He cautioned that no medical examiner 16In the ‚scene investigation‛ report that Mitchell prepared and signed at the time of his initial inquiry into the 22 can pinpoint with certainty the time of a person’s death, id. at 886, but stated that, based on his observations of the body, there was nothing inconsistent with Hill having died on either the night of Saturday, March 28, or Friday, March 27. Id. at 888. However, taking into account a number of external factors—namely, that Hill’s cat was seen outside on Saturday morning; that Hill had not been seen after Friday; that she never contacted the friend whom she intended to visit that weekend; that her car had apparently not been driven since Friday; and that she had not been in touch with her father despite the fact that his wife was gravely ill— Mitchell opined that ‚it’s more likely that she died Friday night, to possibly very early Saturday morning‛ than on Saturday night. Trial Tr. [at] 889–90. He also stated his opinion ‚within a reasonable degree of medical certainty‛ that Hill died as a result of being strangled. Id. at 891.17 Confronted on cross-examination with contemporaneous newspaper accounts that reported on his preliminary findings, Mitchell admitted that he ‚q+uite possibly‛ had estimated at some point that Hill died late on Saturday night or early Sunday morning. cause and time of Hill’s death, he reported that he had found Hill’s body in ‚full rigor, with fixed anterior livor.‛ See Remand Hearing Tr. [at] 75–76[, dated Sept. 21 & 22, 2009] (emphasis added). 17 Whether by design or oversight, Mitchell did not testify that his opinion on Hill’s time of death was ‚within a reasonable degree of medical certainty.‛ Trial Tr. at 891. 23 Id. at 895–96.18 Mitchell also conceded that, when he testified before the grand jury in November 1992, he had stated that it was merely ‚on the outside edge of  + possibility‛ that Hill could have been murdered on Friday night. Id. at 907. At trial, however, he insisted that he had never ‚tied himself+‛ to a Saturday night estimate. Id. at 895. He stressed that the onset and relaxation of rigor mortis was highly variable and could be slowed, for example, by cold temperatures. Id. at 905–06. Although Mitchell thus acknowledged that in most cases rigor mortis relaxes within twenty-four to forty-eight hours (which would put Hill’s time of death somewhere between Saturday and Sunday afternoon), he suggested that the cool temperatures in Hill’s apartment could have retarded the process. On redirect examination, Mitchell explained that, when he testified before the grand jury several months earlier, he had not reviewed ‚some of his+ notes and slides.‛ Id. at 915. Having had the opportunity to review the ‚slides‛ before trial, he noticed in them ‚some 18 Although Calle attempted to impeach Mitchell with newspaper articles suggesting that Mitchell had initially estimated the time of death to be [Saturday] night, he did not refer to the police affidavit supporting the application to search Rivas’s residence, which stated that Mitchell had preliminarily estimated the time of Hill’s death to be ‚sometime between+ S+aturday the 28th of March afternoon and [S]unday morning [the] 29th of March 1987,‛ Section 440.10 Mot. Exh. 2. See Section 440.10 Hearing Tr. at 98. 24 decomposition to the brain.‛ Id. This, he stated, ‚tends to push the [time+ limits further out.‛ Id.19
At the close of the People’s case, Fitzpatrick disclosed the existence of an August 1988 affidavit from one Joe Morgan, in which Morgan attested that an individual named Patsy Barricella had admitted to Morgan that he (Barricella) murdered Hill. Trial Tr. at 19 Rivas contends that Mitchell committed perjury when he testified that he had examined ‚brain slides,‛ because the medical examiner’s file did not, in fact, contain any such slides. The state concedes that there were no ‚brain slides‛—that is, sectional slides containing actual brain tissue. It argues, however, that there were in fact two photographic slides containing images of Hill’s brain, and that Mitchell may have been referring to those slides in his testimony. We need not, and therefore do not, address Rivas’s allegation that Mitchell committed perjury. We note, however, that Fitzpatrick specifically characterized the slides in question as ‚autopsy sectional slides‛ in his closing argument. Trial Tr. at 1082–83. Furthermore, Rivas’s expert, Dr. Cyril Wecht, has testified [at the federal evidentiary hearing before the District Court in 2009] that a forensic pathologist would ‚not use the word slide synonymously with a photograph.‛ Remand Hearing Tr.[, dated Sept. 21 & 22, 2009,] at 27. In any case, Wecht has also testified [before the state collateral review court in 1999] that, even if Mitchell had examined ‚brain slides‛ (that is, sectional slides), such a review is ‚totally unreliable‛ as a means of determining the time of death, because the sections of the brain contained in such slides continue to decompose for up to ten days after the brain is placed in a formalin bath for preservation. See Aff. of Cyril H. Wecht[, dated June 11, 1999,] Supp. Section 440.10 Mot. at 6. 25 947–48.20 Recognizing that this evidence was ‚exculpatory without a doubt,‛ id. at 984, the trial judge allowed Calle, Rivas’s attorney, to decide whether to adjourn and attempt to call Morgan or Barricella as witnesses, or instead to bring out the information contained in the affidavits by examining the Syracuse police officer who had interviewed Morgan. Calle opted to draw the information out of the police officer, Michael Ostuni. Id. at 987. According to [Officer] Ostuni, Morgan claimed that he had a conversation with his friend and neighbor Barricella in March 1988, at which time Barricella confessed to killing ‚the girl on Hickok Avenue.‛ Section 440.10 Mot. Exh. 8. In addition, Barricella had, according to Morgan, driven by the crime scene several times as police were investigating Hill’s murder and was stopped by police as a result. (Indeed, a contemporaneous police report revealed that Barricella was stopped by police after driving by the crime scene repeatedly. See Section 440.10 Mot. Exhs. 9 & 10.) However, on cross- examination by the District Attorney, Ostuni also testified that Morgan was a con artist and career criminal who had contacted the police from a county jail cell, demanding release as a quid pro quo for cooperation. Trial Tr. at 998–1000. Ostuni further 20 Though it is unclear when Fitzpatrick first became aware of or obtained Morgan’s affidavit itself, the trial transcript suggests that he was in possession of at least some documents relating to Morgan before opening statements were made, and thus well before this information was turned over to the defense. See Trial Tr. at 65. 26 testified that Barricella was known to be ‚mildly mentally retarded.‛ Id. at 1001.
Beyond the testimony of Ostuni, Rivas’s direct case was underwhelming. As Calle later testified, he did not appreciate at trial that the precise time of Hill’s death was important because he felt that Rivas had a strong alibi throughout the entire weekend. He therefore never considered calling an expert forensic pathologist to challenge Mitchell’s adjusted findings. See Section 440.10 Hearing Tr. at 85, 87. He did attempt to establish that Hill was alive on Saturday by calling a prosecution witness, Hill’s upstairs neighbor, to read from an affidavit in which she had stated that she had seen Hill in their shared basement that morning. However, on cross-examination by Fitzpatrick, the witness readily conceded that she had been mistaken in her affidavit and had in fact seen Hill on Friday morning, not the following day. See Trial Tr. at 927–932. Calle also attempted to establish Rivas’s alibi by calling a single witness who claimed to have seen Rivas at Albert’s in Cazenovia as early as 7:30 p.m. on Friday. Id. at 967. Finally, he called a witness who testified that Rivas was acting normally on Saturday night. Id. at 974. Rivas did not testify in his own defense, and claims that Calle never informed him of his right to do so. Section 440.10 Hearing Tr. at 17–18.
In his closing argument, Calle argued that the Hill murder had been solved backwards: The police and 27 the District Attorney’s Office had decided at the outset that Rivas was the killer and then set out to find, or fabricate, the proof of the murder from there, ignoring other potential leads along the way. Trial Tr. at 1044. With respect to the time of death, Calle argued that Mitchell had to stretch science beyond the breaking point to opine at trial that it was more likely that Hill had been killed on Friday than on Saturday, when Mitchell had previously testified before the grand jury that a Friday time of death was only ‚on the outside limits of possibility.‛ Id. at 1062. Calle did not explicitly challenge Mitchell’s credibility or suggest that he might be beholden to the District Attorney’s Office. Indeed, Rivas claims that neither he nor Calle were aware of the investigations into Mitchell’s conduct at the time of the trial, despite their widespread publicity in the weeks leading up to it, apparently because they both then lived downstate. See § 2254 Petition at iv; Remand Hearing Tr.[, dated Sept. 21 & 22, 2009,] at 271–72. Fitzpatrick, in his summation, defended Mitchell’s estimates: [A]s [Dr. Mitchell] told the grand jury, rigor mortis, the stiffening of the body after death, normally begins to pass off within 24 to 48 hours. If we were looking at a calendar, this would put the normal time of death or the normal median time of death sometime Saturday afternoon. Could it have been 16, 17, 18 hours earlier? Absolutely. Absolutely. Heating conditions refer, first of all, to 75 degrees. It wasn’t the 28 temperature of the house. The temperature of the house was 62 degrees. . . . Basement underneath her, cold floor. And the nights as you might expect, in March of 1987 were cold as well. Trial Tr. at 1082–83.21 Furthermore, Fitzpatrick argued, Mitchell had ‚had a chance to review autopsy sectional slides of the brain,‛ id., which tended to expand the range of possible times of death. This review, Fitzpatrick claimed, combined with the external indications Mitchell had identified, had led Mitchell to opine that it was most likely that Hill died on Friday, March 27. 21 In fact, the temperature of the apartment was never recorded and Hill was lying on a carpeted floor. The record also reveals that the week of Hill’s death was unusually warm. One witness told police that the last time she had seen Hill, Hill was sunbathing in her backyard. Section 440.10 Mot. Exh. 24. Another witness stated that she had her window open late Saturday night, when she heard a woman’s scream. Id. Exh. 4. Parenthetically, we note that, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the mean temperature in Syracuse, NY, on March 27, 1987, was 51° Fahrenheit, with a high of 61° and a low of 40°. On March 28, the temperature ranged from 37–65° with a mean of 51°. And on Sunday, March 29, the day before Hill’s body was discovered, the high temperature was 74° and the low 36[°] with a mean of 55°. See Local Climatological Data, Monthly Summary for Syracuse, NY, March 1987, available at http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/lcd/lcd.html?_finish=0.400803217 488396 (last visited July 3, 2012). 29 Summarizing the evidence against Rivas, Fitzpatrick theorized that Rivas had paid Hill a visit on Friday night after he left Coleman’s bar, and had brought over a bottle of rum and a bottle of wine in hopes that the two could mend their relationship. When he discovered that Hill not only did not want to reunite with him, but was also planning a trip to the Bahamas alone, he flew into a rage and strangled her. Then, realizing he needed to cover up the crime, he got rid of the airline ticket (but left an ashtray full of his cigarettes), and, on the way to his car, took Hill’s library book from the back seat of her car, intending to return it the next day to make it appear as though Hill were still alive. He then crafted a tight alibi for the rest of the weekend. Id. at 1125–30. The jury deliberated for eight hours over the course of one day, during which time it asked for further instructions on the meaning of ‚reasonable doubt.‛ Id. at 1188. At approximately 10:45 p.m. on March 25, 1993, nearly six years to the day after Valerie Hill was killed, Hector Rivas was found guilty of second-degree murder. He was subsequently sentenced on May 12, 1993, to an indeterminate term of imprisonment of twenty-five years to life.