Opinion ID: 2264062
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 14

Heading: Testimony of Bruce Sartwell

Text: The defendant next draws our attention to three different occasions in which the trial justice prevented Bruce Sartwell (Sartwell), an investigator hired by defendant, from testifying about what other people told him during the course of his investigation. Earlier in the trial, the testimony of three defense witnesses, Jeanne Zinn (Zinn), John Kalamaras (Kalamaras), and Louellen Pratt (Pratt), placed defendant in New Hampshire on the evening of the murder. On cross-examination of Zinn, Kalamaras, and Pratt, the state sought to discredit each witness's testimony. Later, during Sartwell's testimony, the trial justice sustained the state's three objections to defendant's three separate questions asking Sartwell whether Zinn, Kalamaras, or Pratt had told him that they saw Briggs in New Hampshire on the night of the murder. The defendant contends that those hearsay statements should have been admitted because they qualified as prior consistent statements. Under Rule 801(d)(1)(B) of the Rhode Island Rules of Evidence, a statement is not hearsay if: The declarant testifies at the trial or hearing and is subject to cross-examination concerning the statement, and the statement is    consistent with the declarant's testimony and is offered to rebut an express or implied charge against the declarant of recent fabrication or improper influence or motive   . We agree with defendant that the state had challenged the credibility of the testimony of Zinn, Kalamaras, and Pratt. The defendant's argument, however, fails to recognize the United States Supreme Court's interpretation of the identical federal rule in Tome v. United States, 513 U.S. 150, 115 S.Ct. 696, 130 L.Ed.2d 574 (1995), an interpretation that we adopted in State v. Haslam, 663 A.2d 902, 908 (R.I.1995). This rule does not accord weighty, nonhearsay status to all prior consistent statements, and [p]rior consistent statements may not be admitted to counter all forms of impeachment or to bolster the witness merely because she has been discredited. Tome, 513 U.S. at 157, 115 S.Ct. 696. Instead, the recent fabrication language in Rule 801 creates a temporal requirement: [T]he consistent statements must have been made before the alleged influence, or motive to fabricate, arose. Tome, 513 U.S. at 158, 115 S.Ct. 696; accord Hazard, 745 A.2d at 758; Haslam, 663 A.2d at 908. Here, the state sought to discredit the alibi testimony of the three witnesses, necessarily implying that they fabricated the alibi to aid defendant's criminal case. Thus, the trial justice was within her discretion to determine that the motives of Zinn, Kalamaras, and Pratt to aid defendant's criminal case preceded their statements to Sartwell, the man whom defendant hired to investigate the murder on his behalf. Rule 801(d)(1), therefore, did not remove these statements from the definition of inadmissible hearsay. B