Opinion ID: 788362
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Admission of the AI Documents

Text: 53 Aspinall contends that the AI evidence constituted double hearsay from sources she was unable to cross-examine and that the admission of the documents thus violated her rights of confrontation under the Constitution and Fed.R.Crim.P. 32.1(b). Although we agree that some of Febus's testimony with respect to the AI documents was hearsay, we see no basis for reversal, given, inter alia, the absence of any objection by Aspinall in the district court to one level of hearsay, the nature and reliability of the hearsay evidence to which Aspinall did object, and the inapplicability of the Confrontation Clause and the Federal Rules of Evidence to probation revocation proceedings. And although a defendant threatened with probation revocation has rights to certain procedural protections under the Due Process Clause and Rule 32.1, we find no violation of those rights here.
54 We begin by noting that part of Febus's testimony was indeed hearsay. Febus testified that (1) the FBI agent told her (2) what AI indicated as to (3) what instructions Aspinall had given AI. Thus, there are three levels of out-of-court statements at issue. The first and second, i.e., what the FBI agent told Febus and what AI communicated to the FBI agent, were, as will be discussed below, hearsay. The third-level statements, however, i.e., the instructions written on the AI documents, were not hearsay for two reasons. The classic definition of hearsay is testimony as to an out-of-court statement, offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted in that statement. See, e.g., McCormick, Evidence § 246, at 584 (2d ed. 1972) ( McCormick on Evidence ); Fed.R.Evid. 801(c) (`Hearsay' is a statement, other than one made by the declarant while testifying at the trial or hearing, offered in evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted.). The AI documents were not offered for the truth of their contents but for the fact that the statements were made, i.e., that the services of AI were engaged (Exhibit 3) and that AI was given instructions, as responses on its questionnaire form, on how to describe Aspinall's employment ( see Exhibit 2); indeed, the government argued that the contents of the responses to the AI questionnaire were false ( see, e.g., Rev. Tr. 25). Accordingly, as they were not offered for their truth, the statements in the AI documents were not within the definition of hearsay. Further, if those statements were made by Aspinall, they would not be hearsay even if offered by the government for their truth, because a party's own statement, offered against that party, is defined as not hearsay. Fed.R.Evid. 801(d)(2)(A). See also McCormick on Evidence § 262, at 628-29 (even if regarded as hearsay, statements of a party opponent are admissible without presentation of any predicate or foundation). 55 On the other hand, the testimony of Febus as to statements made to her by the FBI agent was plainly hearsay. Part of that testimony described the agent's observations and matters within the agent's own knowledge: the layout of the premises at the address Aspinall had given for Shard, the observation that there was only a telephone answering service, not a consulting firm, operating there, and the fact that the agent was given two documents by AI. Although on this appeal Aspinall complains that the FBI agent was not produced at the hearing and hence could not be cross-examined, Aspinall made no objection to that part of Febus's testimony at the hearing. As revealed by the transcript passages set forth in Part I.A. above, defense counsel did not object until Febus, after giving the above testimony, was asked what the AI documents themselves showed with respect to Aspinall ( see Rev. Tr. 23); and the objections focused solely on the source and import of the documents' contents ( see, e.g., id. at 23, 24, 26, 27). Thus, Aspinall's present challenge to so much of Febus's testimony as described the FBI agent's actions and observations is reviewable only for plain error, see Fed.R.Crim.P. 52(b). 56 A plain error is one that prejudicially affected the defendant's substantial rights and seriously affect[ed] the fairness, integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings. United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 732, 113 S.Ct. 1770, 123 L.Ed.2d 508 (1993) (internal quotation marks omitted); see, e.g., United States v. Gordon, 291 F.3d 181, 193 (2d Cir.2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1114, 123 S.Ct. 866, 154 L.Ed.2d 788 (2003). A plain-error challenge to the admission of evidence faces an uphill battle when the defendant has raised no question as to the information's relevance or accuracy. Cf. United States v. Szakacs, 212 F.3d 344, 353 (7th Cir.2000) (consideration of hearsay evidence at sentencing hearing held not plain error, in part because there was no indication nor even an assertion at sentencing or on appeal that the hearsay was in any way inaccurate or misleading), cert. denied, 532 U.S. 985, 121 S.Ct. 1631, 149 L.Ed.2d 492 (2001). 57 Aspinall's present challenge to the admission of Febus's description of the FBI agent's observations and receipt of documents from AI clearly fails the plain-error test. The lone presence of the AI answering service at the address Aspinall had given for Shard was relevant to the allegation that Aspinall had lied to the Probation Department about her employment. The FBI agent obviously would have been competent to testify to her observations of those premises; and, as the district court later noted, the layout of AI's premises was neither hard to prove or disprove nor controversial (Bail Hearing Transcript, August 12, 2004 (Bail Tr.), at 5). Further, there can be little question that the AI documents were given to the agent by AI. Indeed, the substance of the unobjected-to hearsay testimony by Febus has not been contested by Aspinall in any way. The admission of Febus's unchallenged testimony as to the FBI agent's observations and receipt of the documents from AI did not constitute plain error. 58 Aspinall did, however, challenge the testimony by Febus to the effect that AI had represented to the FBI agent that the instructions given in Exhibits 2 and 3 came from Aspinall. Febus did not attempt to recount the precise conversations between the agent and AI—which would have made the hearsay nature of the information received from AI clear—and the record does not include the details of those conversations. However, it was established that the agent had gone to AI's premises expressly to inquire about Aspinall and Shard; AI's giving the agent those two documents in response to the agent's questions constituted a representation by AI that it had received the statements on those documents from Aspinall, and as such, it was hearsay, for actions may be as much a part of the speaker's effort at expression as his words are, McCormick on Evidence § 250, at 596; see, e.g., Fed.R.Evid. 801(a)(2) (nonverbal conduct of a person, if it is intended by the person as an assertion, is a statement within the meaning of the hearsay rule); Stevenson v. Commonwealth, 218 Va. 462, 237 S.E.2d 779 (1977) (where a police officer requested that the defendant's wife give him the clothes the defendant had been wearing on the day of a certain homicide, the wife's giving the officer a shirt constituted a nonverbal assertion that defendant wore that shirt on the day of that homicide). Thus, AI's giving the agent Exhibits 2 and 3 in response to the agent's inquiry is properly viewed as an assertion by AI that the source of the written statements on the documents was Aspinall. 59 At the hearing, Aspinall objected to that assertion as hearsay, stating, inter alia, that the admission of the documents would violate her constitutional right of confrontation (Rev. Tr. 24). On this appeal, she argues that the admission of Febus's testimony as to AI's representation that Aspinall made the statements in Exhibits 2 and 3 violated her rights of confrontation and cross-examination, as recently enunciated by the Supreme Court in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 124 S.Ct. 1354, 158 L.Ed.2d 177 (2004), and as provided by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. 60
61 In Crawford v. Washington, the Supreme Court held that in the trial of a criminal case, an out-of-court testimonial statement is prohibited by the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause unless the witness is unavailable and the defendant has, or previously had, an opportunity to cross-examine him. See 541 U.S. at ___ n. 9, 124 S.Ct. at 1365-66, 1369 n. 9. That Clause, however, gives an accused the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him [i]n ... criminal prosecutions,  U.S. Const. amend. VI (emphasis added), and it has long been established that [p]robation revocation, like parole revocation, is not a stage of a criminal prosecution, Gagnon v. Scarpelli, 411 U.S. 778, 782, 93 S.Ct. 1756, 36 L.Ed.2d 656 (1973); see Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471, 480, 92 S.Ct. 2593, 33 L.Ed.2d 484 (1972) (revocation of parole is not part of a criminal prosecution). Thus, in Morrissey, the Supreme Court noted that although a parolee is entitled not to have his parole revoked without due process, id. at 482, 92 S.Ct. 2593, the full panoply of rights due a defendant in [a criminal prosecution] does not apply to parole revocations, id. at 480, 92 S.Ct. 2593; and in Scarpelli, the Court held that the same principles apply to proceedings for the revocation of probation, see 411 U.S. at 782 & nn. 3, 4, 93 S.Ct. 1756. Nothing in Crawford, which reviewed a criminal trial, purported to alter the standards set by Morrissey/Scarpelli or otherwise suggested that the Confrontation Clause principle enunciated in Crawford is applicable to probation revocation proceedings. 62
63 The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure provide that, in a probation or supervised-release revocation hearing, the defendant is entitled to ... an opportunity to ... question any adverse witness unless the court determines that the interest of justice does not require the witness to appear. Fed.R.Crim.P. 32.1(b)(2)(C) (2002). Aspinall, relying on this Court's decision in United States v. Chin, 224 F.3d 121 (2d Cir.2000) (per curiam) ( Chin ), contends that this Rule required the district court to balance the reason for the government's failure to produce an AI witness against Aspinall's right of confrontation and that the court's admission of the AI documents without such a balancing analysis (and without even asking the government to explain that failure) constituted  per se error (Aspinall brief on appeal at 30). We find no basis for reversal. 64 Chin dealt with a supervised-release revocation proceeding in which the defendant was charged with violating the terms of his supervised release by committing an assault with a firearm. See 224 F.3d at 122. See also United States v. Jones, 299 F.3d 103, 109 (2d Cir.2002) (the constitutional guarantees governing revocation of parole or probation are identical to those applicable to revocation of supervised release); United States v. Sanchez, 225 F.3d 172, 175 (2d Cir.2000) (same). At the Chin revocation hearing, the government did not produce the alleged victim of the assault; rather, government witnesses testified that the victim had asked about the defendant's release status, stating that she feared for her life, and they testified that numerous attempts had been made to locate the victim to have her testify at the hearing, but without success. See 224 F.3d at 123. At that time, the pertinent subpart of Rule 32.1 provided simply that the defendant in a revocation proceeding shall be given ... the opportunity to question adverse witnesses, Fed.R.Crim.P. 32.1(a)(2)(D) (1993), without the qualification that appears in the current provision, to wit, unless the court determines that the interest of justice does not require the witness to appear, Fed.R.Crim.P. 32.1(b)(2)(C) (2002). The Chin panel ruled, however, that the defendant's right of confrontation [wa]s not absolute, 224 F.3d at 124, and that the district court was required to balance the defendant's right of confrontation with the government's grounds for not allowing confrontation, ... and with the reliability of the evidence offered by the government, id. The court concluded that there had been no violation in the case before it because the district court had performed the balancing analysis. 65 Though the Chin opinion stated, without apparent limitation, that the court must conduct such a balancing analysis, id., we subsequently held in United States v. Jones, 299 F.3d 103 ( Jones ), that that requirement is inapplicable where the out-of-court statement falls within an established exception to the hearsay rule, see id. at 114. In Jones, we noted that the out-of-court statement proffered by the government at the supervised-release revocation hearing was within the traditional hearsay exception for excited utterances, see Fed.R.Evid. 803(2), and we held that in that circumstance no balancing analysis and no explanation by the government for nonproduction of the declarant were required. 299 F.3d at 113-14. We distinguished Chin as follows: 66 The hearsay testimony offered in Chin did not appear to fall within any exception to the hearsay rule; neither was there any discussion in Chin of the applicability of hearsay exceptions. See [224 F.3d] at 123. This is significant because it is well established that where the government seeks to introduce testimony under the excited utterance exception, and where that testimony is properly admitted by the district court, the government is under no constitutional obligation to explain the unavailability of the hearsay declarant .... Consequently, Chin's requirement that the district court consider the government's grounds for not allowing confrontation does not apply to the instant case. 67 Jones, 299 F.3d at 113 (emphasis added). Thus, under Jones, the balancing analysis need not be made where the proffered out-of-court statement is admissible under an established exception to the hearsay rule. Jones also noted that a statement's `[r]eliability can be inferred without more in a case where the evidence falls within a firmly rooted hearsay exception,' id. at 114 (quoting Idaho v. Wright, 497 U.S. 805, 815, 110 S.Ct. 3139, 111 L.Ed.2d 638, (1990)), but that if further confirmation of reliability were needed at the Jones hearing, it was reflected in the district court's unimpeached view that the witness who testified to that statement had no reason to falsify the statement, Jones, 299 F.3d at 114. 68 The present case is more like Jones than like Chin, for the out-of-court statements at issue in Chin could not have been admitted under any traditional exception to the hearsay rule, whereas the documents at issue here are unquestionably AI business records. Nonetheless, the present case differs from Jones in that, here, the government did not proffer all of the foundation evidence necessary to have the AI documents admitted under the traditional exception for business records. Under that exception, a business record is not excluded by the hearsay rule, even though the declarant is available as a witness, if it is a record ... of acts[ or] events ... made at or near the time by, or from information transmitted by, a person with knowledge, if kept in the course of a regularly conducted business activity. Fed.R.Evid. 803(6). 69 The Federal Rules of Evidence, however, other than those governing privileges, do not apply to proceedings revoking probation. Fed.R.Evid. 1101(d)(3). And although Criminal Procedure Rule 32.1(b)(2)(C) reflects one of the due process components enunciated in Morrissey, i.e., the right to confront and cross-examine adverse witnesses (unless the hearing officer specifically finds good cause for not allowing confrontation), 408 U.S. at 489, 92 S.Ct. 2593, it is clear that Rule 32.1(b)(2)(C) also incorporates Morrissey 's statement that in revocation proceedings the normal evidentiary constrictions should be relaxed: 70 The hearing required by [the 1979 version of Rule 32.1(b)(2)(C), which was then numbered 32.1(a)(2)] is not a formal trial; the usual rules of evidence need not be applied. See Morrissey v. Brewer, supra (the process should be flexible enough to consider evidence including letters, affidavits, and other material that would not be admissible in an adversary criminal trial) .... 71 Fed.R.Crim.P. 32.1 Advisory Committee Note (1979). Similarly, in Gagnon v. Scarpelli, with respect to the [probation revocation defendant's due process] rights to present witnesses and to confront and cross-examine adverse witnesses, the Court noted that 72 [w]hile in some cases there is simply no adequate alternative to live testimony, we emphasize that we did not in Morrissey intend to prohibit use where appropriate of the conventional substitutes for live testimony, including affidavits, depositions, and documentary evidence. 73 411 U.S. at 782 n. 5, 93 S.Ct. 1756 (emphasis added). 74 Although the government did not produce an AI employee to testify to the making or maintenance of Exhibits 2 and 3, the evidence in the present case was ample to permit the court to admit those documents under the more relaxed standard envisioned by Morrissey and Scarpelli, and hence by Rule 32.1(b)(2)(C) as well. First, there can be no question that those documents were AI business records: AI was in the answering-service business; Exhibit 2 was a 13-part Customer Service Questionnaire on AI letterhead, asking, inter alia, how the customer wanted AI to answer calls and inquiries from the customer's callers; and Exhibit 3 authorized payment to AI for its services. Nor can there be any question that the documents were maintained by AI: Febus testified without objection that the FBI agent was handed the documents by AI at AI's offices. Further, the record leaves little room for doubt that such records would normally be maintained by AI in the ordinary course of its business: AI had employees answering five telephones, presumably indicating its service of numerous customers; maintenance of records of each customer's instructions in response to the 13 questions would clearly be essential to AI's operations. 75 Finally, indicia of the reliability of AI's assertion that the customer information in Exhibits 2 and 3 had come from Aspinall were supplied by two types of evidence. First, the documents were obtained not from some random location but rather from the very address that Aspinall had represented both to the Probation Department ( see Government Exhibits 9 (Aspinall's monthly report) and 5 (the Shard Letter)) and to the Department of Justice ( see Government Exhibit 1 (Aspinall's financial statement)) was the address of her employer, Shard. 76 Second, and more importantly, compelling evidence that the information in the AI documents had come from Aspinall was provided by the confluence of two unusual facets of this case, namely that that information was handwritten and that there were indisputable samples of Aspinall's handwriting in the record. If the instructions on Exhibit 2 had been typewritten, for example, it would probably have been necessary for the government to produce an AI witness to provide a foundation for imputing those instructions to Aspinall— e.g., to testify that Aspinall herself had typed the instructions or that she had given the instructions to an AI employee who timely transcribed them or relayed them to another AI employee who did so. However, the instructions were in handwriting that matched the handwriting on Exhibits 1 and 9, which was undisputedly that of Aspinall ( see Bail Tr. 18), furnishing compelling circumstantial evidence that the source of the instructions on the AI documents was indeed Aspinall. 77 Given these circumstances and the extended colloquy between defense counsel and the court at the revocation hearing with regard to whether Aspinall was the source of the instructions on the AI documents, and given the court's observation that no person other than Aspinall was shown to have any incentive for giving AI instructions on how to answer questions with respect to Aspinall's employment ( see Rev. Tr. 26), we conclude that the district court made the requisite determination that the interest of justice did not require the presence of an AI employee for admission of the AI documents. In light of this record, we cannot conclude that the admission of the AI documents violated Aspinall's rights under the Due Process Clause or Rule 32.1(b)(2)(C). 78 In any event, a district court's failure to comply with the interest-of-justice-determination requirement of Rule 32.1(b)(2)(C) and Morrissey/Scarpelli is subject to harmless-error analysis. See, e.g., United States v. Redd, 318 F.3d 778, 785 (8th Cir.2003) (court of appeals, itself engaging in a balancing analysis and making an interest-of-justice determination with respect to laboratory reports, concluded that the district court's failure to do so was harmless error); United States v. Comito, 177 F.3d 1166, 1169-70 (9th Cir.1999) (conducting harmless-error analysis, but finding that district court's failure to conduct the balancing analysis was not harmless where the out-of-court oral statement was accusatory, did not fall within a recognized hearsay exception, and was of questionable reliability, and the nonhearsay evidence was insufficient). See also Fed.R.Crim.P. 32.1(b)(2)(C) Advisory Committee Note (2002) (citing, inter alia, Comito with respect to the need for a balancing analysis). 79 To the extent that the Rule or due process required a more explicit analysis or statement than is reflected by the record of the proceedings in the present case, we conclude that any error was, for two reasons, entirely harmless. First, the strong evidence, discussed above, of the reliability of the AI documents as reflecting statements made by Aspinall easily outweighed Aspinall's interest in cross-examining an AI employee, given, inter alia, that the AI documents are not accusatory, that AI had no apparent reason to fabricate instructions from Aspinall, and that no reason has been suggested why anyone else would have had an incentive to give AI instructions on how to answer questions with respect to Aspinall's employment. Second, any error was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence supporting the court's findings of Aspinall's guilt even without consideration of the AI documents. Plainly those documents had no bearing on the charges that Aspinall disregarded her home confinement schedule and tampered with her monitoring device. And as to the charges that Aspinall had provided fraudulent information to the Probation Department with regard to her employment, the non-AI documents and the testimony of Febus showed, inter alia, that the (AI) address Aspinall repeatedly gave the government for Shard was at the very least misleading; that Edna Reeves[,] Managing Partner of Shard, who purportedly signed the Shard Letter stating that Aspinall would be working in Connecticut, was a fiction; that Aspinall falsely reported that she was on her way to Connecticut on an occasion when surveillance revealed that she was instead going home; that Aspinall sought to forestall an attempt by Febus to verify the Shard Letter's statements by falsely representing to Febus that Shard did not know Aspinall was on probation, when in fact Shard's only adult employee was Aspinall; and that Aspinall's professed fear that she would be fired if the fact that she was on probation were disclosed to Shard— i.e., her own company—was clearly fraudulent. 80 In sum, the admission of the AI documents provides no basis for reversal. 81