Opinion ID: 2325528
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Trial Testimony Compared to the CPO Hearing Testimony

Text: In Aiken I, we instructed that on remand, the government would have to prove that any changes in Parker's testimony were independent of her exposure to appellant's immunized testimony. 956 A.2d at 50 n. 68. [17] We also said that the government would have to show that Parker's later testimony was not affected . . . subtly, but nonetheless materially, by her reaction to what [appellant] said at the CPO hearing. Id. at 50. Appellant's brief focuses not only on the trial testimony of Parker, but also on the trial testimony of appellant's cousin, David Brox (who began living in Parker's apartment during August 2000, and who testified with regard to two of the property destruction charges). Regarding Parker, following the Kastigar hearing, appellant filed a memorandum arguing that the government had (1) failed to prove that his CPO testimony did not motivate Parker's trial testimony and (2) failed to prove that his immunized testimony did not influence Parker's trial testimony about several matters, including the circumstances of the alleged March 11 assault, why Parker did not appear for the first scheduled trial on that alleged assault, the alleged March 13 threat, and the August 22 threat. Appellant asserted that Parker included a number of additional details about these incidents in her trial testimony that she did not include in her CPO hearing testimony, and that she did not disclose the true nature of her relationship with appellant until after she had heard appellant's immunized testimony. He renews those arguments on appeal.
During his testimony at the CPO hearing, appellant described Parker as a crack head and testified that she and appellant had smoked crack together. Appellant also claimed that Parker had left him with her children while she went out and sold her body. He asserted that Parker was jealous of his dealings with other women, has nothing but anger for me and hate, and was vindictive and would do [a]nything to get [him] to do time. Appellant accused Parker of having cried wolf before, questioning why she had not previously tried to obtain a protection order, and suggesting that Parker wanted to control appellant by having him locked up. By the time of the Kastigar hearing, Parker had died (of cancer) and thus the government could not present testimony from her about the effect of appellant's CPO hearing testimony on her or on her reasons for testifying at trial. Appellant urges us to hold that without Parker's testimony, the government could not meet its burden of proving that his immunized testimony did not motivate Parker to testify at trial. We decline to adopt such a per se rule. [18] Quite the contrary, we are satisfied that the trial court did not clearly err in finding, and did not err as a matter of law in concluding that the government met its burden of proving, that appellant's CPO testimony did not motivate Parker to testify against him during the criminal proceedings. In addition to Herndon and Satterfield, the other witness who testified at the Kastigar hearing was Deardre Smith-McGuire, who was employed by the U.S. Attorney's Office and who was Parker's victim/witness advocate and worked with her throughout the duration of the case. Smith-McGuire memorialized her interactions with Parker on a Victim/Survivor Intake Form, which was admitted at the hearing. [19] The intake form describes the various incidents of threats and destruction of property that Parker reported to Smith-McGuire between March and October 2000. An August 21, 2000 entry notes that Parker was concerned b/c her criminal case was dismissedwants to know why & to have it re-brought. Attached to the intake form was an August 24, 2000 email from Smith-McGuire to the assigned prosecutor. In the email, Smith-McGuire noted that the March 11 assault case had been dismissed for want of prosecution. She noted that Parker was upset when she found out the case had been dismissed. The email also stated that Parker was keeping a log book of everything and was totally on top of this. [20] Smith-McGuire testified that Parker was in repeated contact with her. A Subsequent Contacts Form admitted into evidence showed that between August 21 and September 20, 2000, Parker called or spoke with Smith-McGuire at least seventeen times to discuss the case. Parker expressed frustration about appellant's continuing to elude the police and provided Smith-McGuire with information regarding potential witnesses. In addition, as the trial court noted, Parker went to the extraordinary effort of posting wanted pictures of appellant (almost 300 copies, she estimated) in public areas to help facilitate his arrest. Parker gave Smith-McGuire a few copies of her wanted poster to give to the U.S. Marshal to help in apprehending appellant. Smith-McGuire observed that Parker stood out from a lot of the other women I worked with in just her strength and her determination. If the pre-CPO hearing events were not enough to cause Parker to testify, the post-CPO events appear to have provided any additional needed incentive. Parker testified at trial that on October 2, 2000, appellant hit her in the face with his fist and beat and stomped her in front of her young children, fracturing her facial bone. She testified that appellant also chase[d] one of [Parker's children] when [the child] ran to get help. Appellant acknowledged that he hit Parker repeatedly on that day, causing her to fall to the ground. Following that incident, Parker, while driving with her friend Donald King, spotted appellant, who had absconded from a halfway house, on the street and chased him in her vehicle. King held appellant down until police arrested himfurther evidence of Parker's resolve to see him prosecuted. Appellant acknowledged this chase. Upon this record, the trial court found that Parker was dogged in her efforts to prosecute [appellant] to protect herself and her children before and after his CPO testimony. That finding is amply supported by the record, and we discern no reason to disturb the trial court's rejection of appellant's claim that his CPO testimony possibly motivated Ms. Parker to testify in the grand jury and at trial. We do not overlook that the types of insults and accusations appellant hurled at Parker during his CPO testimony can be in some contexts and for some people fighting words. Nor do we overlook that Parker had failed to appear as a witness against appellant at the first scheduled trial regarding the March 11 assault, or that a domestic violence complainant's initial efforts are not necessarily an accurate barometer of what her motivation will be as a case progresses. [21] But the track record of Parker's pre-and post-CPO hearing efforts to bring appellant to justice enabled the trial court to conclude that the government met its burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that appellant's immunized testimony was not a cause of Parker appearing and testifying in the criminal proceedings. We discern no reason to disturb that conclusion.
In her direct testimony at the CPO hearing, Parker testified that she and appellant used to date, explaining that they had dated from October 1999 until appellant assaulted her in March 2000. Parker also testified that in March 2000 (on or about March 11 [22] ), appellant hit her in the eye after she asked him to leave her apartment (where the two had been living together) following a disagreement. Appellant, who was unrepresented by counsel at the hearing, cross-examined Parker as to that testimony, asking her, when we first met[,] we were smoking coke, that's how we met right[?]; that's when we started dating? In response to a relevance objection from the Assistant Attorney General, appellant explained: Because I'm leading on to when we started dating. I don't want to leave out the facts as to when we started. . . . I don't want her credibility to try to overwhelm my credibility because what she's trying to do is make it look like we just met. And what we do, we go back. And we have a circle. [23] Following his cross-examination of Parker, appellant took the stand. He asserts that his testimony contained significant new information, including an account of his relationship with Parker that was very different from the one Parker had described and his account of what precipitated the March incident. Specifically, appellant testified that his relationship with Parker began in 1995 and ended in July 2000 (although he and Parker w[eren't] dating exactly for those five years, during some of which he was in jail). Appellant described Parker as a crack head and testified that she and appellant had smoked crack together. Appellant further testified that he had no recollection of an incident happening on March 12th, but described an incident that he claimed occurred on March 3, 2000. According to appellant, Parker had asked him to babysit her kids so she could go out. Appellant told Parker that he, too, was going out, and Parker got mad, calling appellant bitch and throwing a cell phone at him. Appellant stated that, as he was putting his clothes on to leave, Parker pushed him, grabbed a bat and an ax, and told her son to call the police. Appellant testified that Parker was never hurt. Almost four months after the CPO hearingin January 2001Parker testified at trial. In her trial testimony, Parker described her relationship with appellant by saying I met him in '94. And we used to have a drug and sex relationship. . . . We did drugs and had sex. That was it. . . . We used to smoke crack cocaine together. Parker further testified that she and appellant did drugs together for about eight or nine months from 1994 to 1995. She testified that her earlier relationship with appellant ended after she started studying with Jehovah's Witnesses and decided to change her life after having used cocaine for three years. Parker testified that she did not see or hear from appellant from 1995 to 1999, but that they started seeing each other again in October 1999. Regarding the March incident, Parker testified that she had asked appellant to watch her twin sons that morning because [appellant] was in the bed and . . . [she] wanted to go to the grocery store to get some breakfast food. Parker stated that she was not aware that he already had previous plans to go out. According to her, appellant flicked out and said `I'm not no fucking babysitter. And I'm not watching nobody's damn kids. . . . I got something to do.' Parker told appellant to get dressed and go home. When Parker then walked over to appellant's side of the bed, appellant punched her in the face with his fist. The government introduced photographs showing how Parker's eye looked after the assault. [24] Appellant now argues that Parker's trial testimony regarding her relationship with appellant was in direct response to his testimony at the CPO hearing. He contends that in this testimony, Parker added new facts and events that . . . added depth to her story and significantly strengthened the credibility of her allegations. Emphasizing the importance of narrative in domestic violence cases, appellant characterizes Parker's CPO testimony as bare-boned and asserts that her trial testimony added descriptive richness [25] that gave the jury a view of the relationship between the parties that inform[ed] [their] credibility decisions and. . . conclusions about what occurred, improv[ed] the clarity and strength of [the government's] presentation, and added contextand credibilityto her claims that [appellant] was the initial aggressor. Appellant also asserts that through the testimony that Parker gave in reaction to his testimony about their early relationship and drug useParker's admission in her direct trial testimony that she had been a drug user but had changed her life by studying to become a Jehovah's Witnessthe government was able to blunt[] the impact of . . . damaging information that the defense could introduce. Appellant contends in addition that Parker's trial-testimony account about asking him to babysit so that she could go out to buy breakfast items and her references to his using vulgar language were intended to counter his CPO testimony about Parker going out to sell her body, and to buttress her image as a good mother and family caretaker while portraying him badly. Appellant argues that the government did not prove that this testimony was independent of Parker's exposure to his immunized testimony. We reject appellant's argument that Parker's testimony about her early relationship with appellant was based on her memory being refreshed or her attention being focused by his immunized testimony. To the contrary, as the account above shows, prior to testifying, appellant had already drawn Parker's attention to that early history through his cross-examination question and through the statements he made to the court in response to the relevance objection. It was only appellant's testimony that was immunized, D.C.Code § 16-1002(c), not his cross-examination questions or his unsworn statements to the court. [26] Regarding Parker's trial testimony about the context of the March 11 assault, the government showed at the Kastigar hearing that Parker reported to Smith-McGuire some of the additional information that testimony supplied, including that Parker and appellant began to argue after appellant said that he was going out and couldn't watch [Parker's] children. We agree with appellant, however that the account that Parker gave of the March 11 incident appears to have been affected by his immunized testimony; as discussed above, Parker added details seemingly designed to improve her image. We generally agree with the trial court that [t]he law does not require that a witness use the same words or syntax in relating testimony or limit the prosecutor from presenting evidence that was not presented at the CPO hearing, but we conclude that the trial court erred in finding that [n]othing in [appellant's] CPO testimony . . . affected the substance of Ms. Parker's testimony. Nevertheless, we agree with the government that the additional details Parker added in her trial testimony were tangential, and that, in light of the volume of the government's evidence against appellant and the evidence that amply exposed the failings of both Parker and appellant, any incremental support [they] lent to Parker's credibility in all reasonable probability made no difference in the outcome of the trial. In other words, we think this use of appellant's immunized testimony was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
During the CPO hearing, appellant cross-examined Parker about her failure to appear in court for his initially scheduled trial regarding the alleged March 11 assault. Parker explained that she did not appear because [she] didn't know that [she] was supposed to come. Appellant also asked Parker, [i]sn't it a fact that you . . . called [my attorney] . . . to find out . . . the situation with me[?] Appellant posed this question as part of a compound question, and Parker responded to a portion of the question without saying whether she had telephoned appellant's lawyer. During his immunized testimony, appellant testified that Parker failed to show up for his earlier scheduled trial because she wanted [them] to get back together. Appellant also said that Parker constantly called his lawyer to inquire about the status of [their] relationship. Appellant testified that the case was eventually dismissed because [Parker] didn't want to pursue [the charges] because after a while she felt that . . . she was wrong and . . . shouldn't have had [him] locked up. Subsequently, at trial, Parker testified that on March 13, 2000, appellant called her at home and stated, Bitch, if I go to jail, I am going to fuck you up. Parker testified that after she received this phone call, she called appellant's attorney. She didn't tell [the] lawyer that [appellant had] threatened [her], but she was scared, so she told his lawyer that she was not going to press charges. She further testified that she did not show up for the trial because she never received the subpoena that was sent to her, and that [t]here is another gentleman in my building, his last name is Parker and we get each other's mail sometimes. She said she would have gone to court if she had known when the trial was going to be held. In response to a question asking for clarification, Parker stated that she did not show up because she was afraid of [appellant], but that if she had received the subpoena, she would have gone because she wouldn't have [had] any other choice. Appellant asserts that this trial testimony was the first time Parker linked her failure to appear for his trial to a threat, and that the threat allegation and the additional details that Parker offered for her failure to come to court were affected by his immunized testimony about her failure to appear and about her call to his lawyer out of a desire to resume their relationship after the March incident. But, as described above, it was appellant's (non-immunized) cross-examination questions about Parker's not appearing in court and calling his lawyer that drew Parker's attention to these subjects. [27] In addition, at the Kastigar hearing, the government presented evidence that Parker told Smith-McGuire about the March 13 threat before the CPO hearing. The government introduced a sworn statement signed by Smith-McGuire on September 12, 2000, that described threats appellant had made to Parker on both March 13 and September 9, 2000. The statement indicated that appellant had telephoned Parker on March 13, 2000, and told her that if he went to jail, he would fuck her up. In light of the foregoing, we are satisfied that the government met its burden of proving an independent derivation of the trial testimony it presented about the March 13 threat.
The 15-count indictment charged appellant with threatening to kill Parker and her children during a telephone call on August 22. During the CPO hearing, Parker did not testify about an August 22 threat, but only about a call, recorded and played at the CPO hearing, in which appellant admitt[ed] that he gets high. During his immunized testimony, appellant denied ever threatening Parker, but he acknowledged that in August 2000, he was angry with Parker because she had placed posters with his picture on it in stores and on poles, and the posters stated that appellant had threatened to kill Parker and her two sons (posters that appellant testified he saw before the 20th something of August). [28] At trial, Parker testified that, on August 18, appellant threatened to kill her and her kids, and that thereafter she created and put up in the neighborhood wanted posters with his picture on them. She testified that on August 22, appellant, who was angry because he had noticed the posters, called her and said, I am going to kill you because I'm tired of people telling me that you are hanging my pictures up. I keep seeing my pictures everywhere. Appellant asserts that this testimony was the first time Parker ever mentioned a motive for the alleged August 22 threat, and that it was based on his immunized testimony that he was angry about the posters. During the Kastigar hearing, the government submitted no evidence that prior to appellant's CPO-hearing testimony, Parker had mentioned the posters as a motive for the August 22 assault. The arrest report for that date, which the government introduced into evidence, states that Defendant called [Parker] at home and stated `I am going to kill you bitch,' but it makes no mention of the posters. Smith-McGuire's affidavit about the September 9 threat ties a September in-person threat to anger over the posters, but it makes no such connection for a threat made by telephone on August 22. We agree with appellant that the government failed to prove that the portion of Parker's testimony that ascribed to appellant a motive for the August 22 threat was derived from a source wholly independent of appellant's immunized testimony. Here, too, the trial court clearly erred in finding nothing in [appellant's] CPO testimony that affected the substance of Parker's testimony. This motive testimony was not insignificant evidence. Of course, the government is not required to prove motive, but lack of evidence of a motive can be considered by the jury in deciding whether the government has proved the charge beyond a reasonable doubt. [29] The additional important factor here is that the government emphasized this motive in its closing argument. The prosecutor asked the jury, Isn't this [Parker's having created the posters] what started it all, started him from just pestering her and calling her to becoming angry and violent? Because once this poster got posted all over the neighborhood[,] . . . this poster made Kenneth Aiken angry. [30] In light of this emphasis by the government, we cannot say that the motive testimony was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt as to appellant's conviction for the August 22 threat. Accordingly, we agree with appellant that he is entitled to reversal of his conviction on that charge.