Opinion ID: 2156106
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Refusal to Instruct Jury on Duress

Text: Finally, Verrecchia insists that the trial justice erred by refusing to instruct the jury on the affirmative defense of duress. His involvement with the stolen weapons, he maintains, directly resulted from threats issued by the very person who set him up to make the sale: namely, Rossi  his former partner-in-crime turned government informant. Verrecchia contended that Rossi threatened him and his family with physical harm when he visited Rossi in prison, thereby forcing Verrecchia to sell stolenweapons to an undercover police officer some four days later. A duress defense has three elements: 1) an immediate threat of serious bodily injury or death, 2) a well-grounded belief that the threat will be carried out, and 3) no reasonable opportunity to escape or otherwise to frustrate the threat. United States v. Arthurs, 73 F.3d 444, 448 (1st Cir. 1996). The failure to show any one element of duress is sufficient to justify denying a request to submit a defense theory to the jury. See id. at 448-49. Although Verrecchia now concedes that no evidence supported a duress instruction, he argues that this is so because the trial justice erroneously excluded key testimony on this point as hearsay. One witness whose testimony the court partially excluded was Verrecchia's girlfriend, Kate Cullen (Cullen). [15] Cullen would have testified that on the day following his prison visit with Rossi, Verrecchia appeared to her to be upset and nervous. Supposedly, Verrecchia told her that, during his prison visit with Rossi the day before, Rossi had threatened to kill both of them if Verrecchia did not sell the weapons as Rossi had demanded. Verrecchia argues that even though Cullen's testimony was hearsay, it should have been admitted pursuant to the excited utterance exception contained in Rule 803(2) of the Rhode Island Rules of Evidence because he related his statements to Cullen only one day after Rossi had threatened him. Therefore, he contends, he was still laboring under the stress of the nervous excitement when he spoke to Cullen. The hearsay rule does not exclude excited utterances, as that term is defined by Rule 803(2). An excited utterance is [a] statement relating to a startling event or condition made while the declarant was under the stress of excitement caused by the event or condition. Id. An utterance need not bestrictly contemporaneous with the startling event to qualify as spontaneous, so long as it was made while the declarant `was still laboring under the stress of [the]    experience.' State v. Krakue, 726 A.2d 458, 462 (R.I.1999) (quoting State v. Creighton, 462 A.2d 980, 983 (R.I.1983)). Whether a hearsay statement is admissible as an excited utterance is left to the sound discretion of the trial justice and any decision made by a trial justice concerning the admission of excited utterances shall not be overturned unless clearly wrong. State v. Perry, 574 A.2d 149, 151 (R.I.1990). We are unable to conclude that the trial justice was clearly wrong when he found that Verrecchia's statements to Cullen about Rossi's alleged threats were not excited utterances. A full day had passed after Verrecchia's meeting with Rossi before he finally told his girlfriend about it. As a result, and as the trial justice noted, Verrecchia had an opportunity to contrive and to, perhaps, misrepresent what had actually occurred. Moreover, even if the court had admitted Cullen's testimony into evidence, Verrecchia still would not have satisfied his burden of justifying a duress instruction. [16] See Arthurs, 73 F.3d at 448-49. To do so, a defendant must produce sufficient evidence on each of the Arthurs elements. See Mathews, 485 U.S. at 63, 108 S.Ct. at 887, 99 L.Ed.2d at 61 (As a general proposition a defendant is entitled to an instruction as to any recognized defense for which there exists evidence sufficient for a reasonable jury to find in his favor.). Once a defendant has produced sufficient evidence to support a duressinstruction, the burden shifts to the state to show beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant's criminal acts were not the product of duress. See United States v. Amparo, 961 F.2d 288, 291 (1st Cir. 1992). When reviewing a trial court's determination of whether a defendant has produced sufficient evidence of duress, we examine the record most charitably to the proponent of the instruction. Coady, 809 F.2d at 121. But even after examining the record most charitably to Verrecchia, we are unable to conclude that any evidence supported his theory that he possessed the weapons in question because he was under an immediate threat of serious bodily injury or death. Verrecchia contends that four days after he was threatened by Rossi  a prisoner who then, as now, remained confined behind bars  the threat was still so real and immediate to him that he was forced to possess the weapons in question. But no evidence was presented (or excluded by the trial justice) substantiating Verrecchia's claim that Rossi's tentacles extended beyond the prison walls, so that he would be capable of carrying out the alleged threatened harm. Therefore, we cannot fault the trial justice for remaining unconvinced that the alleged threat of harm to Verrecchia was any more imminent than that faced by the defendant in the Arthurs case. [17] Even if Verrecchia had succeeded in convincing the trial justice that Rossi's alleged threat was sufficiently imminent, the evidence did not support the conclusion that he had no reasonable opportunity to escape or otherwise to frustrate such a threat. In addition to possessing a large cache of weapons before the alleged threat, Verrecchia would have had more than four days to flee from any alleged threat. Therefore, because Verrecchia did not adduce (nor did the trial justice improperly exclude) sufficient evidence to support his request for a jury instruction on duress, we hold that the trial justice did not err by refusing to provide one.