Opinion ID: 2070680
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Defendant Failed to Preserve this Issue for Appeal

Text: According to Rhode Island's well-settled raise-or-waive rule, a trial justice's claimed errors that are not specifically objected to at trialthat is, by an objection that is sufficiently focused so as to call the trial justice's attention to the basis for said objectionare not preserved for consideration by this court on appeal. State v. Toole, 640 A.2d 965, 972 (R.I.1994) (quoting State v. Warren, 624 A.2d 841, 842 (R.I.1993)). [A]llegations of error committed at trial are considered waived if they were not effectively raised at trial, despite their articulation at the appellate level. Toole, 640 A.2d at 973. (Emphasis added.) Because defendant here failed to raise an effective bolstering objection before the trial justice, this court may not consider this specification of error on appeal. On direct examination Janikuak testified concerning her discussions with complainant. After she said that she was very cautious to make sure that what [complainant] was telling me was the truth because we're trained to be sure that just because someone makes an allegation does not mean it's true, defense counsel simply stated, [O]bjection. The court immediately overruled the objection. However, no grounds were stated either for the objection or for the court's overruling. There was no mention made by defendant of bolstering. Indeed there was no motion to strike the testimony, and the objection itself came too late to be of assistance to defendant. The defendant also failed to request a mistrial or to ask that any cautionary instruction be given to the jury. Thus the trial justice was never apprised that defendant considered the pastor's remarks to constitute bolstering. Accordingly under our established raise-or-waive rule defendant should not be allowed to pursue this issue on appeal. In Toole a defendant who had been convicted on various counts of sexual assault argued on appeal, among other things, that the prosecutor improperly questioned witnesses to vouch for their truthfulnesson several occasions querying a witness about the real reason she had performed a certain act. 640 A.2d at 972. He contended that this questioning was improper because it implied that the prosecutor had some special knowledge regarding the facts of the case. Id. The state responded that the defendant did not preserve this issue for appeal because the objection asserted at trial by the defense was a general rather than a specific objection. Id. This court agreed and concluded that the defendant's objection was not sufficiently specific or focused for us to review this contention in this particular instance. Id. at 973. In this case not only was defense counsel's objection ineffective because it was not specific, but his colloquy with the trial justice led the latter to conclude that defendant's objection to the pastor's statement was hearsay based. A close review of the trial transcript reveals that defense counsel's proffered objections concerning Janikuak's testimony about her meeting with complainant (wherein complainant first divulged to the pastor that defendant had sexually abused her) were strictly limited to their alleged hearsay status. Indeed the allegedly offending statement itself is sandwiched between bookend hearsay objections. [13] Although defendant thereby waived any bolstering objection, he also fails to proffer any legitimate exception to the raise-or-waive rule here. A party must satisfy three criteria to qualify for such an exception: (1) the error complained of must be more than harmless error, (2) the record must be sufficient to permit a determination of the issue, and (3) counsel's failure to raise the issue at trial must be attributed to a novel rule of law that counsel could not reasonably have known during the trial. State v. Cassey, 543 A.2d 670, 676 (R.I.1988). Moreover, a defendant's basic constitutional rights must be at issue. Id. Because the bolstering argument is hardly a novel rule of law, there can be no colorable claim that this stringent three-part test has been satisfied here.