Opinion ID: 182445
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Hearsay Evidence of a Murder-for-Hire Plot

Text: Hayes takes issue with another hearsay violation. The violation occurred when Diane Weller volunteered hearsay evidence that Hayes had offered $25,000 in exchange for her murder. Weller explained, in response to the prosecutor's questions, that she had not revealed the murders of MacVicar and de Laet to law enforcement earlier because she feared Hayes. She testified to being threatened before she went to jail. Asked who had threatened her, Weller responded: I [received threats] at Jim Johnson's apartment in February when Kenny Hayes was there. He threatened to kill me if I ever said anything about what had happened in California. And then when I was at my apartment, I believe a day or two after Jim Johnson was arrested, Sondra Johnson said there was a contract out on me for $25,000 from Kenny Hayes. Defense counsel immediately lodged a hearsay objection, which the court sustained. The prosecutor maintained that Sondra Johnson's statement about the murder contract was offered not for the truth of the matter asserted, but to prove Weller's reason to fear for her life. The court nonetheless reiterated that the objection was sustained and told the jurors that the statement should be stricken from [their] minds. Hayes immediately argued, and now maintains, that Weller's inadmissible reference to the murder-for-hire plot required a mistrial, though the court sustained an objection to the statement and instructed the jury to disregard it. The court's failure to declare a mistrial, he contends, violated his right to due process recognized by the Supreme Court in Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U.S. 62, 112 S.Ct. 475, 116 L.Ed.2d 385 (1991). Due process guarantees the fundamental elements of fairness in a criminal trial. McGuire, 502 U.S. at 70, 112 S.Ct. 475 (quoting Spencer v. Texas, 385 U.S. 554, 563-64, 87 S.Ct. 648, 17 L.Ed.2d 606 (1967)). The McGuire Court cautioned, however, that we `have defined the category of infractions that violate fundamental fairness very narrowly.' Id. at 73, 112 S.Ct. 475 (quoting Dowling v. United States, 493 U.S. 342, 352, 110 S.Ct. 668, 107 L.Ed.2d 708 (1990)). Beyond the specific guarantees enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the Due Process Clause has limited operation. Id. (quotation and citation omitted). Hayes identifies no decisionmuch less a Supreme Court decision, as AEDPA requiresin which hearsay excluded by the trial court with an instruction to the jury to disregard it was nonetheless deemed prejudicial enough to undermine the fundamental fairness of a criminal trial. The due process claims in McGuire concerned (1) the admission at trial of nonhearsay evidence related to battered child syndrome, and (2) a jury instruction that the defendant maintained allowed the jury to consider past acts as evidence of his propensity to commit the crime charged. In any event, McGuire held that neither the introduction of the challenged evidence, nor the jury instruction as to its use, `so infused the trial with unfairness as to deny due process of law.' Id. at 75, 112 S.Ct. 475 (quoting Lisenba v. California, 314 U.S. 219, 228, 62 S.Ct. 280, 86 L.Ed. 166 (1941)). McGuire therefore sheds no light on what is required for a witness's volunteered and subsequently excluded hearsay statement to violate due process. Hayes's reliance on the Seventh Circuit case of Dudley v. Duckworth, 854 F.2d 967 (7th Cir.1988), is misplaced. As an initial matter, that decision is not federal law as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States, 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), so it is pertinent to our habeas review only to the extent it persuasively illuminates Supreme Court precedent. Dudley provides little guidance, because it, like McGuire, does not involve excluded hearsay. In Dudley, a witness testified that he had received threatening phone calls. [T]he threats admittedly came from an unknown source and were not linked to [defendants] except by prejudicial innuendo. 854 F.2d at 969. The trial court nevertheless declined to exclude the evidence of the threats or to declare a mistrial, decisions that the Seventh Circuit held violated due process. Id. at 972. In addition to Dudley's dealing with an entirely different violationnot hearsay, but evidence inadequately connected to the defendantthat case is distinguishable from this one because the trial court there admitted the problematic evidence instead of excluding it, as the trial court did in Hayes's case. Even if we assume that sufficiently prejudicial hearsay might violate due process despite an instruction to the jury to ignore it, the potential harm to Hayes from Weller's volunteered hearsay does not rise to the level of a due process violation. Weller gave admissible testimony, in nearly the same breath as her statement about the alleged murder contract, that Hayes had threatened to kill her in person. Whatever prejudice Hayes's allegedly offering a contract to do the same might have added to what the jury already knew was too little to undermine the trial's fundamental fairness. Hayes makes much of Justice Stewart's observation, in concurrence in Bruton, that certain kinds of hearsay ... are at once so damaging, so suspect, and yet so difficult to discount, that jurors cannot be trusted to give such evidence the minimal weight it logically deserves, whatever instructions the trial judge might give. Bruton, 391 U.S. at 138, 88 S.Ct. 1620 (Stewart, J., concurring). But, as explained in the discussion of Bruton above, the Court in that case addressed a specific situation in which the risk that a jury would disregard its instructions and the harm to the defendant that would follow were particularly acute. Hayes has not demonstrated that similar prejudice, or a similarly high risk of its occurring, existed here.