Opinion ID: 2164307
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Admissibility of Gordon's October 24, 1990 Statement as a Declaration Against Penal Interest

Text: As previously described, a face-to-face confrontation between John Lohan and Gordon occurred on October 24, over the latter's sexual advances toward Lizette Lebron. During that confrontation, Gordon inadvertently disclosed the October 20 cheating session attended by Lebron and other officers at Gordon's home. Lohan threatened to disclose this to the Internal Affairs Bureau of the Transit Police. Immediately following that meeting, Gordon made the telephone call to Lebron in which he requested that she turn over to Joyce or Sam or somebody the papers, which she understood to mean the notes she took at the late night October 20, 1990 meeting. He specifically asked her not to give the papers to Lohan. Lebron testified that she had copied information Gordon furnished them on the actual questions which would be included in the Transit Police promotional exam. She also testified that Sam referred to defendant, and Joyce to Joyce Sellers, another personal friend of Gordon's and a District One Transit Police officer under his command. On this appeal, defendant has not contested that Gordon's October 24 recorded telephone call to Lebron meets all four of the prerequisites of our case law for admissibility as a declaration against penal interest ( see, People v Thomas, 68 NY2d, supra, at 197). First, Gordon was unavailable as a witness, having invoked his constitutional privilege against self-incrimination. Second, it was clearly inferable that Gordon, a career police officer, was aware at the time that his October 24 statement was highly incriminating, involving the suppression or potential destruction of evidence establishing his criminal conduct in giving out answers to the exam. Third, Gordon certainly had competent knowledge of the matter under discussion. The fourth requirement was also satisfied. There was ample independent, direct and circumstantial evidence to assure the trustworthiness of Gordon's statement linking him to the cheating scheme and its attempted cover-up. Unquestionably, Gordon knew from the immediately preceding circumstances that what he said was of the highest importance. He was at risk of criminal prosecution and the ruination of his career if Lebron did not comply with his request. Thus, he had every reason to be sincere and honest in speaking to her. Lebron corroborated defendant's participation in the October 20 session on the exam questions. Independent corroboration was also supplied by the evidence of the officers' significantly poorer rankings on the second exam after the results of the first test were invalidated. Cumulatively the foregoing evidence amply satisfied the fourth requirement for admissibility of a declaration against penal interest that circumstances independent of the hearsay declaration itself are present which fairly tend to support the assertions made and thereby assure their trustworthiness ( People v Thomas, supra, 68 NY2d, at 200 [emphasis supplied]). Defendant's contention is that the trial court committed reversible error in admitting Gordon's October 24 statement without redacting his and Sellers' names. He argues first that, under our precedents, redaction of the name of a nondeclarant defendant is always required because admissibility is strictly limited to the portion of the statement that inculpates the declarant and no other person. We have not, and should not adopt any per se rule requiring invariable redaction of the name of a co-perpetrator in any declaration against penal interest. The United States Supreme Court's decision in Williamson v United States (512 US 594, supra ) teaches why such an ironclad rule would unduly restrict the declaration against penal interest exception to the hearsay rule. In Williamson, the Supreme Court interpreted rule 804 (b) (3) of the Federal Rules of Evidence (the hearsay exception for declarations against penal interest) much as our Court has established by common law, to limit admissibility to those portions of the hearsay statement which are actually self-inculpatory to the declarant ( see, People v Brensic, 70 NY2d 9, 16; People v Thomas, supra, 68 NY2d, at 198; People v Maerling, 46 NY2d 289, 298). Justice O'Connor, writing for the majority in Williamson, expressly eschewed application of broad general rules to determine whether a given statement is against the declarant's penal interest. [W]hether a statement is self-inculpatory or not can only be determined by viewing it in context (512 US, at 603), and can only be answered in light of all the surrounding circumstances ( id., at 604). To illustrate that point, Justice O'Connor demonstrated that, in a particular context, the identification of a co-perpetrator in a statement may indeed be so additionally inculpatory of the speaker as to itself constitute a declaration against penal interest: Even statements that are on their face neutral may actually be against the declarant's interest. `I hid the gun in Joe's apartment' may not be a confession of a crime; but if it is likely to help the police find the murder weapon, then it is certainly self-inculpatory. `Sam and I went to Joe's house' might be against the declarant's interest if    being linked to Joe and Sam would implicate the declarant in Joe and Sam's conspiracy (id., at 603 [emphasis supplied]). Justice Scalia, in a concurring opinion in Williamson, also recognized that naming an accomplice may well add to the incriminatory nature of a statement and, therefore, qualify it as a declaration against penal interest: Moreover, a declarant's statement is not magically transformed from a statement against penal interest into one that is inadmissible merely because the declarant names another person or implicates a possible codefendant. For example, if a lieutenant in an organized crime operation described the inner workings of an extortion and protection racket, naming some of the other actors and thereby inculpating himself on racketeering and/or conspiracy charges, I have no doubt that some of those remarks could be admitted as statements against penal interest ( id., at 606-607 [emphasis supplied]). The same position was taken by the Advisory Committee on the then-proposed Federal Rules of Evidence: Whether a statement is in fact against interest must be determined from the circumstances of each case. Thus a statement admitting guilt and implicating another person, made while in custody, may well be motivated by a desire to curry favor with the authorities and hence fail to qualify as against interest    On the other hand, the same words spoken under different circumstances, e.g., to an acquaintance, would have no difficulty in qualifying (Advisory Comm Notes, reprinted following US Code Annot, Fed Rules Evid, rule 804, at 449). Our own decisions are not to the contrary. Indeed, while expressing similar skepticism regarding the reliability of statements inculpating others given during custodial interrogation, we opted against a per se rule of redaction of the accusatory portion of the declaration in the prosecution of a co-defendant, in favor of a nonconclusive presumption against reliability, with the ultimate determination dependent upon the circumstances of the individual case ( see, People v Brensic, supra, 70 NY2d, at 26; People v Geoghegan, 51 NY2d 45, 49; see also, People v Blades, 93 NY2d 166). Alternatively, defendant argues that, in this case, the specific naming of defendant as the requested recipient of Lebron's exam notes was not self-inculpatory of Gordon and therefore should have been redacted. We disagree. As the preceding discussion shows, a determination of whether the specific naming of defendant in Gordon's October 24 telephone conversation with Lebron constitutes a declaration against penal interest requires an assessment of the incriminatory potential of the instruction to give the papers to defendant and not to Lohan, in the situational context in which it was made. That context was Gordon's urgent need to have Lebron's papers turned over to a reliable ally before Lohan got them from her. The papers constituted conclusive documentary proof that he had divulged the contents of the exam questions. Gordon was aware of Lohan's hostility because of his sexual overtures toward Lebron and feared that she had revealed the scheme for cheating on the examination. In the confrontation between Gordon and Lohan on October 24, Gordon admitted that Lebron's papers contained answers to the exam and implored Lohan not to turn the papers over to the Internal Affairs Bureau, because it would ruin him. When Lohan rejected his entreaties, Gordon threatened him. Significantly, Gordon told Lohan that disclosure of Lebron's notes on the exam questions would be futile because he had friends who would destroy them and quash the investigation. It was immediately after that meeting that Gordon telephoned Lebron to instruct her not only to withhold her notes from Lohana personal enemybut also to turn them over to defendant, or another trusted subordinate in the District One unit, or somebodypresumably someone within the same intimate circle. Surely, it was reasonably inferable by the trial court that Gordon's motive for requesting that the papers be released to the specific persons named was that they would be willing confederates in an obstruction of justicethe destruction of evidence of his official misconduct in disclosing the answers to the sergeant's promotional examthe very same threat he expressed to Lohan at their meeting just before his call to Lebron ( see, Penal Law § 215.40 [Tampering with physical evidence]). Thus, it seems indisputable that the call and naming of defendant were indivisible components of the second set of Gordon's criminality, the attempted cover-up of his earlier crime. The naming of defendant, a friend and participant in the first crime, was, therefore, unequivocally self-inculpatory and hence, admissible as a declaration against penal interest. By no means could Gordon's naming of defendant as the requested recipient of Lebron's papers be considered neutral (and therefore not against penal interest), because Gordon did not expect defendant to be a neutral party if he obtained possession of the papers. In those respects, the specific naming of defendant in Gordon's urgent call on October 24 for Lebron to deliver the papers to defendant bears a remarkable likeness to Justices O'Connor's and Scalia's examples of when a declarant's inclusion of another person in the statement falls within the declaration against penal interest exception to the hearsay rule and is, therefore, admissible in the prosecution of the person named. Moreover, the facts and circumstances surrounding the October 24 statement completely rule out any motive on Gordon's part to falsify in his declaration ( see, People v Blades, supra, 93 NY2d, at 175-176). Contrasted with the sliding scale [plea] bargain ( id., at 176) in Blades, which gave the co-defendant an incentive to allocute in aid of the prosecution's case irrespective of the true facts, here, Gordon's incentive was to be absolutely accurate and sincere in directing Lebron to transfer the incriminating documents to defendant. For all of these reasons, admission of the October 24 statement in unredacted form was well within the sound discretion ( People v Thomas, supra, 68 NY2d, at 199) of the trial court, `which is aptly suited to weigh the circumstances surrounding the declaration and the evidence used to bolster its reliability' ( id., at 198 [quoting People v Settles, 46 NY2d 154, 169]).