Opinion ID: 199536
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Motive and Opportunity Evidence to Burn the F/V TWO FRIENDS

Text: 14 Prior to trial, the district court engaged in an extended colloquy with both parties over the relevance and potential prejudice of defendant's proffer to present evidence of F&D's financial hardship, a proffer, defendant argued, that would tend to prove that F&D had a motive, in addition to the opportunity, to burn their boat, the F/V TWO FRIENDS. Plaintiff objected to this evidence on the ground that it was irrelevant. All parties having agreed that the sole question put to the jury would be Do you find that the defendant, St. Paul Mercury Insurance Company, has established by a preponderance of the evidence that the fire was of an incendiary nature or deliberately set?, plaintiff sought to persuade Judge Harrington that evidence of either motive or opportunity to commit arson would be irrelevant to a determination of the ultimate issue. Then, as now, plaintiff argued that evidence of motive and opportunity to start a fire aboard the F/V TWO FRIENDS was irrelevant to the only explicit question to be answered by the fact-finders: whether or not the fire aboard the F/V TWO FRIENDS was intentional. As an alternative, plaintiff argued that the prejudicial effect of evidence that F&D shareholders had a motive and opportunity to burn their boat substantially outweighed its probative value. 15 At various times during the pre-trial conference, Judge Harrington pressed plaintiff's counsel for a persuasive explanation of why evidence of motive and opportunity was irrelevant to the ultimate issue of incendiarism. Like Judge Harrington, we are puzzled by plaintiff's constricted interpretation of relevance as defined by Federal Rule of Evidence 401. Consider the evidence that ultimately came out at the trial: 16 The F/V TWO FRIENDS was locked at the time the fire started. No sign of forced entry into the vessel was found. As both parties' experts agreed that the fire began inside the vessel, St. Paul was faced with the obstacle of explaining, in order to establish that the fire was deliberately set, how an arsonist (be it the insured or a third party) gained access to the vessel. This goes to opportunity. 17 As it turned out, there were four keys to the F/V TWO FRIENDS, three in the hands of the insured-owners and one hanging in a warehouse adjacent to where the boat was moored. The undisputed testimony was that all four keys were in their expected places shortly after the fire. The owner of the warehouse testified that access to the key hanging in the warehouse was not closely guarded, however, and that it was possible that before July 3, 1993, somebody could have illicitly taken the key from the warehouse and made a copy of it. No evidence was put before the jury of anyone being seen near the boat between the hours of 4:30 p.m on July 2, 1993, when Leo Ferrara locked the boat after a fishing trip, and 2:30 a.m. the following morning, when the Gloucester Fire Department responded to the fire. 2 After a lengthy investigation that led St. Paul's investigators to the conclusion that, due to the burn patterns inside the vessel, the fire had been deliberately set, St. Paul set out to investigate why someone who might have access to the TWO FRIENDS would wish to destroy it. This goes to motive. 18 Evidence was presented that the plaintiff company F&D, along with its principle shareholders (various members of the Ferrara-DiMercurio family), was in dire financial trouble. The company, organized as a commercial fishing venture in 1987, was losing money and was unable to meet its mortgage payments on the vessel to Gloucester Bank & Trust Company. In fact, F&D had operated at a loss since its inception. As the company fell further behind in its payments, the bank threatened to foreclose not only on the boat mortgage, but on the collateral that was pledged on the loan for the F/V TWO FRIENDS, such as the personal homes of the individual shareholders. 19 Despite successfully negotiating various repayment plans, F&D continued to have difficulties making timely payments to the bank. So, in April 1993, in an effort to quell those financial troubles, F&D and Gloucester Bank & Trust Company agreed that F&D would attempt to sell the TWO FRIENDS for $225,000, a sum that was $150,000 less than the price F&D paid for the vessel in 1987 and significantly less than the outstanding balance of the debts owing, which totaled more than $425,000. The jury heard testimony that the boat was insured for $350,000 under a Hull Policy issued to F&D in 1992 by St. Paul, a sum which if collected by F&D might have protected the homes of the Ferraras and DiMercurios from foreclosure. 20 The standard for admissibility under Federal Rule of Evidence 401 is a liberal one. Evidence is relevant if it has any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without that evidence. We think the existence of a motive and an opportunity to burn an undisputedly locked boat from the inside-out tends to make the disputed issue -- whether the fire aboard the F/V TWO FRIENDS was an act of arson -- more probable, especially in light of the conflicting expert testimony as to incendiarism. See Part II.B infra. Given especially the nisi prius court's superior vantage point for discerning relevance and the broad discretion accorded to it in doing so, see, e.g., United States v. Tierney, 760 F.2d 382, 387 (1st Cir. 1985), we can find no error in Judge Harrington's determination of relevance. 21 Unpersuaded, as are we, by plaintiff's argument under Fed. R. Evid. 401, Judge Harrington pushed plaintiff to move forward, on to the balancing required by Federal Rule of Evidence 403. 3 As with Rule 401, the district courts have considerable discretion in calibrating the Rule 403 scales. United States v. Griffin, 818 F.2d 97, 101 (1st Cir. 1987). This is primarily because Rule 403 balancing is a quintessentially fact-sensitive enterprise and the trial judge is in the best position to make such factbound assessments. Udemba v. Nicoli, 237 F.3d 8, 15 (1st Cir. 2001). Only rarely - and in extraordinarily compelling circumstances - will we, from the vista of a cold appellate record, reverse a district court's on-the-spot judgment concerning the relative weighing of probative value and unfair effect. Id. (citing Freeman v. Package Mach. Co., 865 F.2d 1331, 1340 (1st Cir. 1998)). 22 After a lengthy discussion, Judge Harrington took the matter of Rule 403 balancing under advisement. Two weeks later, on the first day of trial but before jury empaneling began, Judge Harrington informed counsel that he would allow defendant to proffer evidence of motive and opportunity as he determined that such evidence's probative value outweighs any prejudice to the plaintiff. 23 Plaintiff's arguments to the contrary, it is not the case that Judge Harrington's decision was arbitrary or unfounded or that he failed to provide a reasoned decision for admitting the evidence despite its prejudicial effect. See Brief for the Appellants at 29. The pre-trial colloquy during which the district court explained its difficulties with plaintiff's position provides ample support for the district court's ruling allowing defendant to put before the jury evidence of plaintiff's motive and opportunity to burn its own boat. The matter of the admissibility of this evidence and its prejudicial effect was debated at length, with due consideration to the rulings we made in Ferrara I and the nature of the evidence as a whole. 24