Opinion ID: 1237353
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Admissibility of Mary Weaver's Statement (Trial Number 2)

Text: Finally, Taylor claims that the district court erred during the second trial by admitting into evidence Mary Weaver's statement to Officer Schell that he just took a gun across the street. Taylor bases this argument on two grounds. First, he asserts that the evidentiary rules against hearsay prohibited the admission of Weaver's statement. See Fed.R.Evid. 801-802. Second, he argues that admitting Weaver's statement without calling Weaver herself to testify violated his constitutional right to confront witnesses against him. See U.S. Const. amend. VI. We find both arguments unavailing. We typically review a district court's decision to admit statements into evidence for an abuse of discretion. United States v. Akinrinade, 61 F.3d 1279, 1283 (7th Cir.1995). During trial, however, defense counsel raised no objections to the references to Weaver's statement, limiting our review to plain error. See United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 731, 113 S.Ct. 1770, 123 L.Ed.2d 508 (1993); see also Fed.R.Crim.P. 52(b). Under this standard, we will not reverse unless we find not only an error, but an error that is `plain' and that `affect[s] substantial rights.' Olano, 507 U.S. at 732,113 S.Ct. 1770 (alteration in original). Even in the presence of a plain error, the decision whether to correct the error lies in our discretion, which the Supreme Court has instructed us not to exercise unless the error `seriously affect[s] the fairness, integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings.' Id. (alteration in original) (quoting United States v. Young, 470 U.S. 1, 15, 105 S.Ct. 1038, 84 L.Ed.2d 1 (1985)). We turn first to Taylor's hearsay arguments. The Federal Rules of Evidence prohibit the admission of hearsay: out-of-court statements made by non-witnesses that are offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted. See Fed.R.Evid. 801-802; United States v. Breland, 356 F.3d 787, 792 (7th Cir.2004). Here, Taylor challenges numerous references made by Officer Schell and others to Mary Weaver's statement that he just took a gun across the street. Such testimony created a potential hearsay problem because neither side called Weaver to testify, relying instead on other people to recount to the jury Weaver's statements. We find that the district court committed no error because the challenged statement did not satisfy the definition of hearsay. We have recognized repeatedly that statements offered to establish the course of the investigation, rather than to prove the truth of the matter asserted, are nonhearsay and therefore admissible. Akinrinade, 61 F.3d at 1283; see also, e.g., Breland, 356 F.3d at 792; United States v. Linwood, 142 F.3d 418, 425 (7th Cir.1998); United States v. Sanchez, 32 F.3d 1002, 1005 (7th Cir.1994). But see United States v. Silva, 380 F.3d 1018, 1020 (7th Cir.2004) (discussing, in the context of conversations between DEA agents and their confidential informants, that [a]llowing agents to narrate the course of their investigations... would go far toward abrogating the defendant's rights under the sixth amendment and the hearsay rule). Here, the references to Mary Weaver's statement by Schell, Cummings, and Hughes were offered to explain their own actions in the course of their investigation  for example, why they looked across the street, why they questioned Mario Dowell, and why they handcuffed Taylor when he approached. Indeed, Weaver's statement was the jumping-off point for the entire investigation. Our conclusion might be different if, as in Silva, the police were testifying to statements harvested from an ongoing relationship with an informant, see 380 F.3d at 1019, but those are not the facts of this case; here, the police were responding to a developing, potentially dangerous situation. The government offered Weaver's statement in the context of the officers' testimony to explain the course of law enforcement's investigation, not as evidence that Taylor possessed the gun. The district court, with no objections made by either party, properly admitted the testimony as nonhearsay. Turning, finally, to Taylor's Confrontation Clause argument, we again find no plain error. Absent complicating circumstances, such as a prosecutor who exploits nonhearsay statements for their truth, nonhearsay testimony does not present a Confrontation Clause problem. Lee v. McCaughtry, 892 F.2d 1318, 1325 (7th Cir.1990); see also Martinez v. McCaughtry, 951 F.2d 130, 133 (7th Cir.1991) (citing Tennessee v. Street, 471 U.S. 409, 414, 105 S.Ct. 2078, 85 L.Ed.2d 425 (1985)). We are satisfied that there were no complicating circumstances here; thus, because the testimony by Schell, Cummings, and Hughes was nonhearsay, nothing ran afoul of the Confrontation Clause. See Martinez, 951 F.2d at 133-34. Furthermore, given the other evidence in the record of Taylor's gun possession, namely, Mario Dowell's testimony, Taylor cannot claim that his substantial rights were affected. See Olano, 507 U.S. at 734, 113 S.Ct. 1770 (stating that in most cases an error affects substantial rights only if was prejudicial, i.e., it affected the outcome of the proceedings); Akinrinade, 61 F.3d at 1283 (noting the absence of a miscarriage of justice when reviewing a Confrontation Clause claim for plain error).