Opinion ID: 2371832
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Mrs. Ayer's Statements to Officer Matthews

Text: The defendant first argues, based upon Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 124 S.Ct. 1354, 158 L.Ed.2d 177 (2004), that because Mrs. Ayer did not testify at his trial, the State should not have been permitted to introduce her statements to Officer Matthews. The defendant contends that admitting Mrs. Ayer's statements violated his right to confrontation under the New Hampshire and United States Constitutions. See N.H. CONST. pt. I, art. 15; U.S. CONST. amends. VI, XIV. Because the defendant has raised his claim under the State and Federal Constitutions, we would normally address his State claim first. See State v. Dedrick, 132 N.H. 218, 226, 564 A.2d 423 (1989). However, in this case, the defendant has raised an issue under the Federal Constitution and has not enunciated either a State standard different from the Federal one or a reason to adopt such a standard; we will therefore address his claim under the Federal Constitution first. Id. In Crawford, the defendant was arrested for stabbing a man who, he claimed, attempted to rape his wife. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 38, 124 S.Ct. 1354. The defendant's wife was interrogated at the police station, and gave a taped statement about the incident. Id. at 38-39, 124 S.Ct. 1354. At trial, the defendant's wife did not testify. Id. at 40, 124 S.Ct. 1354. The State, therefore, sought to introduce her tape-recorded statement. Id. The defendant objected on the ground that introducing the tape would violate his Sixth Amendment right to confrontation. Id. In ruling that the admission of the taped statement violated the Sixth Amendment's guarantee that, in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him, id. at 38, 124 S.Ct. 1354 (quotations and ellipsis omitted), the Court overruled, in part, a line of cases beginning with Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56, 100 S.Ct. 2531, 65 L.Ed.2d 597 (1980). Under the Roberts analysis, certain out-of-court statements could be admitted if the declarant was unavailable and the statements fell within a firmly rooted exception to the rule against hearsay, or if they bore particularized guarantees of trustworthiness. Roberts, 448 U.S. at 66, 100 S.Ct. 2531. In rejecting the Roberts formulation as it pertained to testimonial statements, the Court stated, Where testimonial statements are involved, we do not think the Framers meant to leave the Sixth Amendment's protection to the vagaries of the rules of evidence, much less to amorphous notions of `reliability.' Crawford, 541 U.S. at 61, 124 S.Ct. 1354. Accordingly, the Court ruled that testimonial statements of a declarant absent from trial would only be admitted when the declarant is unavailable and the defendant has had a prior opportunity to cross-examine the declarant. Id. at 59, 124 S.Ct. 1354. The Court did not alter the Roberts analysis pertaining to the admissibility of nontestimonial statements. See, e.g., Horton v. Allen, 370 F.3d 75, 84 (1st Cir.2004) ([U]nless [the] statements qualify as `testimonial,' Crawford is inapplicable and Roberts continues to apply.). Under Crawford, a declarant's `testimonial' out-of-court statement is not admissible under the Confrontation Clause unless (1) the declarant testifies, or (2) the defendant had a prior opportunity for cross-examination and the declarant is unavailable, or (3) the evidence is admitted for purposes other than establishing the truth of the matter asserted. United States v. Maher, 454 F.3d 13, 19-20 (1st Cir.2006). Therefore, [a]ssuming the declarant does not testify and is in fact available, and/or there was no prior opportunity for cross-examination of the declarant, Crawford claims will usually turn on one of two issues. First, was the out-of-court statement testimonial? Second, if so, is it admissible for reasons other than the truth of the matter asserted? Id. at 20. Resolution of the matter before us turns on the first issue. In Crawford, the Supreme Court did not define what statements qualify as testimonial. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 68, 124 S.Ct. 1354. Instead, the Court listed, for illustrative purposes, various types of statements that fall within the core class of testimonial statements. With only the Supreme Court's illustrations to guide them, however, state and federal courts developed numerous, and often conflicting, analyses for determining which evidence is testimonial and therefore subject to Crawford. See, e.g., Flores v. State, 121 Nev. 706, 120 P.3d 1170, 1177 (2005). Recently, in Davis v. Washington, ___ U.S. ___, 126 S.Ct. 2266, 165 L.Ed.2d 224 (2006), the Supreme Court clarified the definition of testimonial statements. Davis involved two consolidated cases. In the first, Davis v. Washington , a woman made a 911 call during the course of a domestic disturbance with her former boyfriend. Id. at 2270-71. The victim gave numerous statements to the 911 operator about her assailant during and immediately after the assault. Id. at 2271. When police arrived a few minutes later, they observed the victim's shaken state, her fresh injuries and her frantic efforts to collect her belongings in order to leave. Id. When her attacker, Davis, was tried for the assault, the victim did not testify and the State sought to introduce her statements to the 911 operator. Id. The Supreme Court of Washington held that some of the statements to the 911 operator were nontestimonial and thus not barred by Crawford, and that admitting any statements which were testimonial was harmless. Id. at 2271-72. In the second case, Hammon v. Indiana, police responded to a report of a domestic disturbance. Id. at 2272. Upon arriving, the police found a woman, Amy, sitting on the front porch of her home. Id. She informed the police that nothing was wrong, but that they could, nonetheless, enter. Id. Once inside, the police noticed signs of a physical altercation and sought to question Amy as well as a man found inside, the defendant. Id. The police took the two people into separate rooms and questioned them about what had happened. Id. After hearing Amy's account of how the defendant had attacked her, the police had her fill out a battery affidavit. Id. At the defendant's trial, Amy did not appear and the State, over the defendant's objection, introduced her oral statements to the officers and her statements in the battery affidavit. Id. The Indiana Supreme Court held that her oral statements were admissible as excited utterances and were not testimonial so as to be barred by Crawford. Id. at 2273. The Indiana Supreme Court found that the battery affidavit was testimonial, but that its admission was harmless. Id. In addressing these cases, the United States Supreme Court noted that [a] critical portion of th[e] holding [in Crawford ], and the portion central to resolution of the two cases now before us, is the phrase `testimonial statements' because [o]nly statements of this sort cause the declarant to be a `witness' within the meaning of the Confrontation Clause. Id. Accordingly, the Court stated: Without attempting to produce an exhaustive classification of all conceivable statements  or even all conceivable statements in response to police interrogation  as either testimonial or nontestimonial, it suffices to decide the present cases to hold as follows: Statements are nontestimonial when made in the course of police interrogation under circumstances objectively indicating that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency. They are testimonial when the circumstances objectively indicate that there is no such ongoing emergency, and that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution. Id. The Court made sure not to imply, however, that statements made in the absence of any interrogation are necessarily nontestimonial. Id. at 2274 n. 1. This is so because [t]he Framers were no more willing to exempt from cross-examination volunteered testimony or answers to open-ended questions than they were to exempt answers to detailed interrogation. Id. Thus, even when interrogation exists, it is in the final analysis the declarant's statements, not the interrogator's questions, that the Confrontation Clause requires us to evaluate. Id. Applying its new definition of testimonial statements to the facts of Davis, the Supreme Court held that the victim's statements to the 911 operator were nontestimonial. Id. at 2276-77. The Court noted that the victim was speaking about events as they happened and immediately afterward as opposed to describing past events, any reasonable listener would realize that the victim was facing an ongoing emergency, the questions asked and answered were relevant to the resolution of the ongoing emergency, and the victim gave frantic answers in an environment that was not tranquil or safe. Id. In sum, the victim in Davis simply was not acting as a witness; she was not testifying.  Id. at 2277. Conversely, in evaluating Hammon, the Court found that Amy's oral statements and those in the affidavit were testimonial. Id. at 2278. In Hammon, as in Crawford, there was no ongoing emergency, there was no immediate threat to Amy or anyone else, and the purpose of the officers' questioning was to determine what had happened at some point in the past. Id. According to the Court, [o]bjectively viewed, the primary, if not indeed the sole, purpose of the interrogation was to investigate a possible crime. . . . Id. In comparing the statements in Hammon to those in Crawford, the Court found that: Both statements deliberately recounted, in response to police questioning, how potentially criminal past events began and progressed. And both took place some time after the events described were over. Such statements under official interrogation are an obvious substitute for live testimony, because they do precisely what a witness does on direct examination; they are inherently testimonial. Id. The Court also noted: Although we necessarily reject the Indiana Supreme Court's implication that virtually any initial inquiries at the crime scene will not be testimonial, we do not hold the opposite  that no questions at the scene will yield nontestimonial answers. We have already observed of domestic disputes that officers called to investigate need to know whom they are dealing with in order to assess the situation, the threat to their own safety, and possible danger to the potential victim. Such exigencies may often mean that initial inquiries produce nontestimonial statements. But in cases like this one, where Amy's statements were neither a cry for help nor the provision of information enabling officers immediately to end a threatening situation, the fact that they were given at an alleged crime scene and were initial inquiries is immaterial. Id. at 2279 (italics, brackets, quotations and citations omitted). In the wake of Crawford and Davis, we are left with a two-step analysis for determining whether an unavailable declarant's statements may be admitted at trial. First, it must be determined whether the statements at issue are testimonial under the Crawford and Davis criteria. If the statements are testimonial, then it must be determined whether the declarant is, in fact, unavailable, and whether there has been a prior opportunity to cross-examine, or whether the statements are admissible for some reason other than their truth. If the statements are not testimonial, the second step is to determine if the statements are admissible under Roberts. With the above framework of Crawford and Davis in mind, we turn to the issue presented. Whether a statement is testimonial under Crawford and Davis is a legal conclusion which is determined by an objective analysis of the primary purpose of the interrogation which produced the disputed statement. Davis, 126 S.Ct. at 2273. Thus, although we defer to the trial court's determination of historical facts, we review its legal conclusion that Mrs. Ayer's statements were nontestimonial de novo. See State v. Allen, 150 N.H. 290, 292, 837 A.2d 324 (2003). During trial, the defendant objected to Officer Matthews' testimony about Mrs. Ayer's declarations that He had said that morning that he was going to shoot him, and, he'd been sitting across the street in his truck all morning waiting for him. Although the trial court did not have the benefit of Davis, it ruled that Mrs. Ayer's statements were not testimonial and thus not subject to Crawford. The trial court also found that the statements were admissible hearsay because they qualified as excited utterances. We agree with the trial court that the statements were not testimonial and were otherwise admissible. Because the declarant, Mrs. Ayer, was not the victim of the charged crime, we note that Davis is not precisely on point. However, it is sufficiently analogous to inform our analysis. As quoted above: Statements are nontestimonial when made in the course of police interrogation under circumstances objectively indicating that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency. They are testimonial when the circumstances objectively indicate that there is no such ongoing emergency, and that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution. Davis, 126 S.Ct. at 2273. For the purpose of resolving this matter, we assume, without deciding, that by approaching Mrs. Ayer, Officer Matthews interrogated her, as the term is used in Crawford. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 53 n. 4, 124 S.Ct. 1354 (We use the term `interrogation' in its colloquial, rather than any technical legal, sense.). Therefore, the relevant inquiry under Davis is whether the primary purpose of this interrogation was to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency. At the point that Matthews' interrogation began, he knew only that a shooting had occurred just moments before. He did not know whether the perpetrator was still in the immediate area or whether he would return to the area. Nor did he know whether the perpetrator was armed, or whether any potential witnesses or other members of the public were or would become targets. In short, Matthews did not know anything about the perpetrator that would indicate whether the violence had ended or whether it might continue there or elsewhere. Thus, obtaining information about the perpetrator would enable Officer Matthews to address an existing threat to his safety and the safety of others. Furthermore, it was in a chaotic, non-tranquil setting filled with police, medical personnel and other bystanders, that Matthews approached a woman who was, like the victim in Davis, distraught, crying and hysterical, and who might have seen the shooting or might know the whereabouts of the perpetrator. Without any prompting, Mrs. Ayer offered the statements objected to by the defendant and then gave information about the perpetrator, including the fact that he had continued access to firearms. Here, as in Davis, Matthews' interrogation, objectively viewed, was primarily for the purpose of resolving an ongoing emergency. The information Matthews obtained permitted him to know with whom he was dealing so that he could assess the situation, the threat to his safety, and the possible danger to other potential victims. See Davis, 126 S.Ct. at 2279. His initial inquiries thus resulted in the provision of information that enabled officers immediately to end a threatening situation. Id. As such, they were the type of initial inquiries that the Supreme Court identified as likely to produce nontestimonial statements. Id. Under these facts, we hold that the circumstances objectively indicate that the primary purpose of Matthews' interrogation was to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency and, therefore, Mrs. Ayer's initial statements were not testimonial as defined in Crawford and Davis. The defendant argues that the ongoing emergency language of Davis ought to be read narrowly. He contends that because Rowland had been shot and the gunman had fled, the emergency had abated and the police were primarily investigating past events. We do not read Davis so narrowly. Viewed objectively, as required by Davis, the interrogator knew that an armed assailant, who had just shot an unarmed individual in public in broad daylight, was loose, and could have remained in the immediate vicinity or could have gone elsewhere in search of other victims. The emergency created by the shooting had not necessarily ended merely because more shots had not yet been fired. See State v. Camarena, 208 Or.App. 575, 145 P.3d 267, 275 (2006) (although defendant had left the scene of an assault, the fact that he could easily return meant that the emergency had not ended); State v. Alvarez, 213 Ariz. 467, 143 P.3d 668, 674 (App. 2006) (Although the criminal activity that resulted in [the victim's] injuries and the ensuing charges against [the defendant] had ended, the emergency that those events set in motion was very much ongoing.). We do not believe that under these circumstances  when mere minutes had passed since the public shooting of an unarmed man by an unknown, at-large assailant  any rational police officer would believe that the emergency had subsided and that the primary concern would be to interrogate persons to obtain information potentially relevant to a future prosecution. Davis, 126 S.Ct. at 2273. Alternatively, the defendant invites us to admit only Mrs. Ayer's statements of identification as relevant to resolving an ongoing emergency, but to exclude all other statements as testimonial. We decline the defendant's invitation. It is true that a conversation which begins as an interrogation to determine the need for emergency assistance [can] . . . evolve into testimonial statements, once that purpose has been achieved,  id. at 2277 (quotations and citation omitted) (emphasis added), and that therefore a single conversation may have portions subject to Crawford's requirements and portions that are not. However, that analysis is not applicable here. Mrs. Ayer's disputed statements were made prior to any determination regarding the need for emergency assistance or the degree of danger presented by the circumstances. Therefore, the purpose of determining the need for emergency assistance had not yet been achieved and the interrogation had not evolved into the collection of testimonial statements. See Alvarez 143 P.3d at 674 (The Confrontation Clause does not prohibit questioning when, as here, its purpose, viewed objectively, is to ascertain if there is an ongoing emergency. (quotation omitted)). For the above reasons, we hold that Mrs. Ayer's statements were not testimonial under Crawford and Davis and that their admission did not, therefore, violate the defendant's rights under the Federal Constitution. Additionally, while the defendant argued during trial that Mrs. Ayer's statements were testimonial and thus barred by Crawford, he did not contend that the statements were barred by the Rules of Evidence or Roberts. Accordingly, as the admissibility of Mrs. Ayer's statements under Roberts and the Rules of Evidence was not raised before the trial court, we do not address it. See State v. Blackmer, 149 N.H. 47, 49, 816 A.2d 1014 (2003). Regarding the defendant's State constitutional claims, we have traditionally applied Roberts to Confrontation Clause challenges under the State Constitution. See, e.g., State v. Cook, 135 N.H. 655, 661-62, 610 A.2d 800 (1992). As noted, the defendant has not argued that Mrs. Ayer's statements were barred by Roberts; thus we do not address the admissibility of her statements under the Roberts standard. Blackmer, 149 N.H. at 49, 816 A.2d 1014. To the extent the defendant argues that Crawford applies to claims under the State Constitution, we need not decide the issue because, even assuming Crawford applies, for the reasons set out above we would not reach a different result. Accordingly, we conclude that admitting Mrs. Ayer's statements did not violate the defendant's rights under Part I, Article 15 of the New Hampshire Constitution.