Opinion ID: 662470
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Right of Confrontation and Counsel's Failure To Protect It

Text: 38 A defendant's right to confront the witnesses against him includes the right not to have the incriminating hearsay statement of a nontestifying codefendant admitted in evidence against him. Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123, 137, 88 S.Ct. 1620, 1628, 20 L.Ed.2d 476 (1968) (Bruton ). 39 Not only are the incriminations devastating to the defendant but their credibility is inevitably suspect, a fact recognized when accomplices do take the stand and the jury is instructed to weigh their testimony carefully given the recognized motivation to shift blame onto others. The unreliability of such evidence is intolerably compounded when the alleged accomplice ... does not testify and cannot be tested by cross-examination. It was against such threats to a fair trial that the Confrontation Clause was directed. 40 Bruton, 391 U.S. at 136, 88 S.Ct. at 1628 (footnotes omitted); see also Lee v. Illinois, 476 U.S. 530, 545, 106 S.Ct. 2056, 20, 90 L.Ed.2d 514 (1986) (codefendant's postarrest accusation of defendant is presumptively unreliable). 41 To implicate the defendant's confrontation right, the statement need not have accused the defendant explicitly but may contain an accusation that is only implicit. See, e.g., United States v. Danzey, 594 F.2d 905, 917-18 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 441 U.S. 951, 99 S.Ct. 2179, 60 L.Ed.2d 1056 (1979). In United States v. Danzey, 594 F.2d at 917-18, for example, an officer testified that the codefendant had admitted committing some 15 robberies and had named nine accomplices. Though the officer did not recite the names supplied by the codefendant, the clear implication was that the defendant was one of those named. We held that the defendant's right of confrontation was violated. See also United States v. Reynolds, 715 F.2d 99, 101, 104-05 (3d Cir.1983) (Confrontation Clause violation to allow officer to testify that after codefendant was arrested and the defendant appeared on the scene, codefendant said, I didn't tell them anything about you, implying that there was something incriminating to be told). In general, this Court has condemned practices designed to circumvent these principles by asking a witness what he learned from an out-of-court declarant. See, e.g., United States v. Figueroa, 750 F.2d 232, 240 (2d Cir.1984); United States v. Check, 582 F.2d 668, 678-79 (2d Cir.1978). 42 The New York State courts have likewise declared it obviously improper to create in jurors' minds the impression that a codefendant's unreported statement led to the defendant's arrest. See, e.g., People v. Tufano, 69 A.D.2d 826, 828, 415 N.Y.S.2d 42, 43 (2d Dept.1979) (mem.) (reversing conviction because of cumulative effect of trial errors); see also, e.g., People v. Cummings, 109 A.D.2d 748, 750, 485 N.Y.S.2d 847, 849 (2d Dept.1985) (mem.) (refusing to review admission of implicit-accusation testimony because there was no defense objection). In People v. Tufano, which bears a remarkable similarity to the present case, two men had robbed a pharmacy. The police arrested one Terenzi, who pleaded guilty to a lesser crime and implicated the defendant Tufano. Terenzi did not testify at trial, and the prosecution's case rested primarily on the eyewitness testimony of the owner of the pharmacy. In addition, the prosecution introduced the testimony of Walsh, a police detective, in an attempt[ ] to show that the police investigation had first led to Terenzi, and that it was Terenzi's statement that led them to arrest Tufano. 69 A.D.2d at 827, 415 N.Y.S.2d at 43. The Second Department found this impermissible: 43 Walsh was permitted to testify that he had had a conversation with Terenzi and that defendant was arrested shortly thereafter. Terenzi was not called as a witness. 44 It was error for the trial court to permit Walsh to testify concerning his conversation with Terenzi. Any statements made by Terenzi in the course of the conversation were, of course, hearsay, and therefore inadmissible. While the precise contents of the conversation were not revealed on direct examination, it was clearly the Assistant District Attorney's intention to create, in the jurors' minds, the impression that Terenzi had implicated Tufano. This was obviously improper. 45 Id. 46 The testimony of Fuhr in the present case similarly violated the rules against hearsay and violated Mason's right of confrontation. The fact that the content of Rivera's statement to Fuhr was not revealed in detail was immaterial, for the plain implication that the prosecutor sought to elicit, and emphasized in his summation, was that the conversation with Rivera led the police to focus on Mason. 47 The State urges that we reach the opposite conclusion, relying on the Fifth Circuit's decision in Foy v. Donnelly, 959 F.2d 1307 (5th Cir.1992), which rejected a Confrontation Clause claim based on a prosecutor's questions focusing on a confession whose content was not disclosed. There the prosecutor, after first eliciting from one officer the fact that Foy's codefendant Shelbia had given a confession, asked whether the officer had prepared a warrant for Foy's arrest subsequent to your investigation and after your taking of this particular statement. Id. at 1311. The circumstances of Foy, however, were starkly different from those at issue here. In Foy, another officer, Gerretts, had testified that during the robbery of one of the stores in question, he observed Foy waiting in a car near the store; he then saw Foy flash his lights and drive directly opposite the door to the store and stop. Gerretts watched the robber emerge from the store and get into the car, and saw the car speed away. Gerretts gave chase and continued to follow by car when Foy left his car and began to run. Foy then ran into a fence, Gerretts left his car, and for approximately one minute Gerretts had Foy cornered. Foy, however, managed to escape. Gerretts testified that during part of the time Foy was cornered, Gerretts viewed Foy's face. He positively identified Foy at trial. Id. at 1309 n. 2. Further, when Foy hit the fence, he dropped his gun, which Gerretts retrieved. The gun was found to be registered to the father of Foy. 48 The Foy court found no Confrontation Clause violation in the prosecutor's asking whether a warrant for Foy's arrest had been prepared after Shelbia's confession because the content of Shelbia's confession was not disclosed [so] that it clearly implicated Foy or directly alluded to him, id. at 1313, and because there was so much other evidence connecting Foy to the crime that there was no necessary inference that Shelbia's statement had implicated Foy: 49 The testimony concerning the officer's investigation, when considered together with the application for an arrest warrant, permitted the jury to connect what Officer Gerretts found from his own detective work--rather than Shelbia's statement--with the arrest warrant application. Because of the sequence in which the officer's testimony was developed, there were myriad reasons why Shelbia's statement could be thought to have pertained to his participation alone, and yet when coupled with Officer Gerretts' investigation of Foy and Shelbia, to have served as a basis to arrest Foy. 50 Id. We see no similarity between the Foy case and this one. Here, there was no police work that turned up Mason, and the only lead to him obviously came from Fuhr's conversation with Rivera. 51 We also reject the State's contention that even if admission of the Fuhr testimony violated Mason's confrontation rights his trial counsel's failure to object to it did not fall below professional standards of competence. The Bruton principle had long been established, and the Tufano court, nearly a decade before Mason was tried, had called the prosecutorial attempt to create an impression that a codefendant's unreported statement had led to the defendant's arrest an impropriety that was obvious[ ]. Notwithstanding the obviousness of the impropriety, trial counsel failed to object when the prosecutor first sought to elicit the testimony; failed to seek to have the testimony stricken; failed to object when the prosecutor argued the implication in summation; and failed to object to having that part of the Fuhr testimony read back to the jury. There can be no suggestion that these failures were tactical. Though trial counsel at one time claimed that there was a tactical explanation for his failure to attempt impeachment of Taylor with the police report, he never offered any explanation whatever for his failure to object at any of the three crucial junctures to Fuhr's implication that Rivera had named Mason. We agree with the district court that counsel's performance fell below the constitutional standard.