Opinion ID: 216020
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Importance of the Improperly Admitted Evidence

Text: The next factor to be considered is the importance of the erroneously admitted evidence. See Wray, 202 F.3d at 526. The disputed statement, as the majority notes, was not a confession, but rather an account of Hall's murder intended by Wood to be exculpatory with respect to his own role in procuring it. In his approximately 15 minute statement (made to an Assistant District Attorney after Wood was apprised of his Miranda rights, see Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), for at least the second time), Wood asserted that he had been at the scene of the crime, that he saw Harry and a friend in a Honda there, and that he, Wood, in making conversation, pointed out Hall, who was walking down the street, as someone with whom his girlfriend had experienced problems. A few minutes later, he heard two gunshots and then saw Harry coming around the corner. Subsequent to Hall's murder, Wood stated that he gave Harry a little money occasionally and a bag of weed in response to his requests. While he did not claim to have actually seen Harry commit the murder, Wood stated that he believed Harry had done so, and that he sent Harry away from the video store he owned, calling Harry crazy. Wood claimed that after the crime, he tried to don't even have conversations with [Harry]. I didn't trust him any more. I didn't know if he was gonna shoot me. Wood's videotaped statement was thus an account of Hall's murder intended by him to be exculpatory, and not a confession to his own role in orchestrating the crime. To the extent it bore on the central disputed issue, Wray, 202 F.3d at 530, whether Wood procured commission of [Hall's] killing pursuant to an agreement with a person other than the intended victim in exchange for something of value, N.Y. Penal Law § 125.27(1)(a)(vi), it constituted a denial by Wood that he committed the crime. The majority asserts that the videotape nevertheless had a substantial, injurious influence at this trial because it `locked [Wood] into' an implausible and highly incriminating depiction of the shooting. Maj. Op. at 1675. The admissible evidence, however, had already put Wood in the lockbox that the majority describes. As outlined previously, to create a reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury, Wood faced the difficult task of explaining why the admitted shooter would identify him as the procurer of the murder-for-hireat a time when in doing so he implicated himself in a first degree murder with no cooperation agreement in placeor why Wood's then-girlfriend would corroborate this account with detailed testimony relating Wood's admissions to her regarding his role. And, again, Wood needed some theory as to how Bernard even knew the details of the crime she related and was able to pick Harry out of a line up if her account of Wood's admissions was in any way untrue. Indeed, Wood's videotaped statement was helpful to the defense to the extent it suggested an otherwise missing explanation as to how Bernard came upon her knowledge of the crimenamely, through supposedly truthful statements made by Wood, who was present at the scene. The defense, arguing that [w]hen it was in [Bernard's] best interest to get rid of Ellis Wood, she had no problem going to the authorities, played the videotape during its own summation, using it in precisely this way: Now, again, Ms. Bernard is telling you basically about what she thinks were some conversations she had with Ellis Wood. And she's telling you about what she thinks were some observations that she made about Ellis Wood having some kind of meeting with Rasheen Harry. In a couple of minutes, or at some point today before I sit down, and close to the end when I sit down, you will know when you see the video tape that. . . I will not be talking to you much beyond that. But, in that video tape, Ellis Wood speaks to Detective Arnao, and tells Detective Arnao what Ellis Wood got to say about what happened on June 2nd. When you watch that video tape, I'm going to ask you to watch very, very carefully. . . . [W]e will prove to you that what my client says to you in that video tape is accurate and that it's truthful and that you can rely on it. The fact of the matter is it's something you can rely on a whole lot more than anything you're hearing from Rasheen Harry and anything you're hearing from Nisha Bernard. To be clear, I do not take issue with the majority's conclusion that the admission of Wood's exculpatory statement was harmful to the defense in various waysprincipally, by further corroborating the facts that Wood was present at the scene, that he identified Hall to Harry, and that he paid Harry after the fact. To the extent it locked Wood into an implausible story, however, the record is devoid of any indication that without the videotape, there was any more plausible tale to be told. Thus, the majority suggests that the videotape was devastating to the defense argument that Harry was an irresponsible fabricator. Maj. Op. at 97. But Bernard's testimony bolstered Harry's credibility more than the videotape since, after all, she was the person to whom Wood, in substance, confessed. On this record, the only explanation as to how Harry and Bernard came to offer mutually corroborative accounts of a crime at which only one of them was present comes down to Wood himselfthe common denominator between them. This fact renders their accounts highly persuasive and any supposed alternative defense that Wood could have presented, absent the videotape, wholly ephemeral. The majority argues that the prosecution made substantial use of Wood's videotaped statement in its closing argument, and that this factor weighs against a finding of harmlessness. While the prosecution's early focus in this respect was to some degree necessitated by the defense counsel's own, previous use of the videotaped statement in dramatically closing its summation, I do not dispute that the prosecution referred to and made use of Wood's statement. The prosecution did not dwell on this statement alone, however, but instead wove it into the coherent narrative created by the testimony of the two principal witnesses. See Gutierrez v. McGinnis, 389 F.3d 300, 309 (2d Cir.2004) (noting, in finding harmless the improper admission of a 911 tape, that the prosecutor highlighted the [evidence] as only one of several important pieces of evidence that the prosecutor stressed during his lengthy summation). Thus, while the majority claims that Wood's statement was crucial to the establishment of Harry's credibility, the prosecution noted numerous reasons present in the record for the jury to credit Harry's testimonyfrom the lack of any other plausible motive for Harry to kill Hall other than the promise of payment, to the fact that Harry's cooperation agreement still left him serving a significant sentence and that he had implicated Wood, as well as himself, well before receiving the agreement. The prosecution also observed, importantly, that [Harry's] testimony doesn't stand on its own: [Bernard] takes her kids back to see [Wood] on the 4th of July. When she is there, he starts laying the whole thing down and, ladies and gentlemen, he provides her with details that she couldn't have known from any other source other than a person who was there and set it up. . . . . . . . [I]n July . . . Mr. Wood picks her up and drives her to Juanchi's store and says, We're going there because I am going to pay the man who killed Mr. Hall. He wants money. . . . . . . Mr. Wood points out that man. . . . And you know that he did because, ladies and gentlemen, Nisha Bernard looked at a police line-up and out of six people that she had never seen before, she picked out Rasheen Harry accurately and correctly. Because Rasheen Harry is the gunman. He's the killer. How could she possibly have done that if Mr. Wood, in fact, had not pointed him out that day? There is no answer for that other than the fact that he did, he did tell her that it was the man. And, again, the police didn't come looking for her. She went looking for them. . . . The prosecution's discussion of Wood's videotaped statement thus occurred in the context of a summation that focused principally on the testimony of Harry and Bernard. Even if the majority is right in concluding that the videotape was given a prominent place, Maj. Op. at 98, moreover, the prosecution's conduct in referring to erroneously admitted evidence simply does not weigh as heavily in our [harmless error] analysis as the overall strength of the prosecution's remaining case, Perkins, 596 F.3d at 179; see also id. (concluding that even though prosecutor made numerous references to improperly admitted confession during summation, the error in admitting the confession was harmless in light of the strength of remaining evidence establishing guilt). And contrary to what the majority contends, this case was strong indeed. The final factor to consider is whether the videotape was corroborative and cumulative of other properly admitted evidence. The district court found that it was, as it did not establish any facts not already established by other testimony but, instead, primarily corroborated Harry's testimony. The majority does not disagree, but claims that where guilt rests on witness credibility, key evidence affecting credibility is not merely corroborative or cumulative: by permitting the jury to credit otherwise suspect testimony, it provides a key link in the prosecution's case. Maj. Op. at 99. While the majority quotes approvingly the language in Zappulla that evidence is not cumulative when it fill[s] in a missing link, Zappulla, 391 F.3d at 472, however, Zappulla involved an improperly admitted statement that constituted the only evidence of motive the prosecution had, see id. at 473. In contrast, here, the majority can point to nothing in Wood's statement not otherwise before the jury and is forced instead to rely on its effect in bolstering the credibility of Harry, in which respect the statement was nevertheless still cumulative of Bernard's testimony. See Perkins, 596 F.3d at 179 (finding a defendant's recorded statement cumulative when properly admitted oral statement from defendant stated essentially the same facts); see also Newton, 369 F.3d at 679-80 (noting in finding admission of a statement harmless that the defendant had essentially acknowledged the same fact evidenced by the disputed statement in an admissible statement that was itself corroborated by other testimony). I agree with the district court that the statement was in large part cumulative of other evidence properly introduced at trial, and that this fact weighs against Wood's claim that the error was not harmless.