Opinion ID: 170335
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Ms. Key’s Preliminary Hearing Testimony

Text: Mr. Flournoy contends that Ms. Key’s preliminary-hearing testimony was improperly admitted at trial. Although he cites only to Kansas law, we join the district court in treating his argument as alleging a violation of the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, as incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment. Because Ms. Key’s testimony was undoubtedly “testimonial” hearsay, see Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 51–52 (2004), the Confrontation Clause bars its admission unless (1) Ms. Key was shown to be unavailable and (2) Mr. Flournoy had a prior opportunity to cross-examine her, see id. at 53–54. Mr. Flournoy disputes only whether Ms. Key was unavailable. Mr. Flournoy, citing state and federal law, challenged admission of the preliminary-hearing testimony in his direct appeal to the Kansas Supreme Court, contending that the state had not exercised due diligence in trying to locate Ms. Key. The court disposed of the unavailability issue on state-law grounds, see Kan. Stat. Ann. § 60-460(c)(2) (2000 Supp.), without citing any federal Confrontation Clause precedents. See Flournoy, 36 P.3d at 285–86. Nevertheless, AEDPA deference is still required. We look not to the authorities -7- relied on by the state court but to the court’s reasoning and result. See Early v. Packer, 537 U.S. 3, 8 (2002) ( “A state-court decision is contrary to our clearly established precedents if it applies a rule that contradicts the governing law set forth in our cases or if it confronts a set of facts that are materially indistinguishable from a decision of this Court and nevertheless arrives at a result different from our precedent. Avoiding these pitfalls does not require citation of our cases—indeed, it does not even require awareness of our cases, so long as neither the reasoning nor the result of the state-court decision contradicts them.” (citation and internal quotation marks omitted)). Our decision in Cook v. McKune, 323 F.3d 825 (10th Cir. 2003), is directly in point. The Kansas Supreme Court had ruled on the unavailability of a witness under Kansas law without discussing federal case law. We said that a state court’s “failure to discuss or even to be aware of federal precedent does not in itself render a state court’s decision contrary to federal law,” id., 323 F.3d at 831, and reviewed the case under AEDPA’s deferential standard. Thus, we apply the AEDPA standard here. Under Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56, 74 (1980), overruled on other grounds by Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), a witness is not unavailable unless the prosecution has made a good-faith effort to obtain her attendance at trial. Whether the government has made a good-faith effort is “a question of reasonableness.” Cook, 323 F.3d at 835 (internal quotation marks omitted). In determining the reasonableness of the government’s efforts, courts should -8- consider the following: (1) “the more crucial the witness, the greater the effort required to secure [her] attendance”; (2) “the more serious the crime for which the defendant is being tried, the greater the effort the government should put forth to produce the witness at trial”; (3) “the defendant’s interest in confronting the witness is stronger” in cases “where a witness has special reason to favor the prosecution, such as an immunity arrangement in exchange for cooperation”; and (4) a state should “make the same sort of effort to locate and secure the witness for trial that it would have made if it did not have the prior testimony available.” Id. at 835–36. The Kansas Supreme Court described the government attempts to locate Ms. Key: During the trial, the prosecutor told the court that she had been unable to personally serve Key with a subpoena. The prosecutor moved the court for a finding of Key's unavailability in order to introduce the preliminary hearing transcript. The State presented testimony from two investigators from the district attorney's office. One testified that he first located Key in May 1998. He said the district attorney's office had trouble getting Key to appear at the preliminary hearing. At the time she lived in Kansas City, Missouri. Her family brought her in for the hearing. Because of the nature of this case, the investigator wrote down Key's date of birth, where she and family members lived, her social security number, and her place of employment. According to the investigator, for out-of-state witnesses such as Key, the district attorney's office often “[goes] through the out-of-state witness act to secure a witness,” which is what the State did here. In June 1999, two investigators attempted to find Key for the trial. One discovered that Key had moved and left no forwarding address. Key's mother had died, so the investigator checked with -9- other agencies to see where Key might have been living. He discovered places that Key had worked and got an address on Belfontaine in Missouri where she was receiving unemployment checks. He went to that address. Key was not there, but a woman told him she would be back later. He left a card and a message for Key to call him. He was told that Key did not have a phone number. The next day, he returned to the house, and he could hear people talking inside, but nobody would answer the door. He also went to the last known address of Key’s mother, but the house had been condemned by the city. The investigators prepared out-of-state motions. A second investigator testified that he tried to locate Key and serve her with a subpoena to testify at trial. He mailed subpoenas to three addresses, but two of the subpoenas were returned undeliverable. After out-of-state witness paperwork was filed, the chief investigator for the Jackson County, Missouri, District Attorney’s office assisted in attempting to serve Key. A hearing was set in Jackson County, but investigators were unable to find her. The second investigator went to Missouri to look for Key, going to four addresses. At the Belfontaine address he spoke to a young man who initially said Key did not live there, but then said that he knew her but did not know when she would be back. When the investigator returned to the house later that day, the front door was open, but when he started walking up the sidewalk, the front door slammed. He heard someone locking the door. He knocked, but nobody answered. The young man he had talked to earlier walked up to the front porch. He was “rude and guarded.” The investigator left his card and a subpoena and asked the young man to give them to Key. The investigator also learned that Key had been issued a new driver's license with the Belfontaine address on it. The investigator testified that the Missouri “SRS” gave him a phone number, which he called. He said the person who answered the phone was very “rude” and said they did not know Key and that she did not live there. In addition, he also tried to track down Key's brother. During the investigation, he encountered someone who knew her brother, and this person asked him about Flournoy. He also found Key’s -10- cousin, who said he would try to contact Key. Later, the cousin told the investigator that Key did not want to be involved and “[t]hat’s why she is hiding.” Right before trial, the investigator stopped by the Belfontaine house another time and left a note and a subpoena with a young woman. Flournoy, 36 P.3d at 285–86. The court affirmed the trial court’s finding that the state had “made a good faith effort to find Key.” Id. at 286. Mr. Flournoy does not dispute the Kansas Supreme Court’s statement of fact regarding the state’s efforts to bring Ms. Key to court. Rather, he disputes whether those facts support the conclusion that the government put forth a good-faith effort. No reasonable jurist could debate that the Kansas court’s decision was “contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1); see Roberts, 448 U.S. at 75–77 (affirming determination that witness was unavailable).