Opinion ID: 795795
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Crawford Evidence at Trial

Text: 8 In defending at trial against the charge of conspiracy to murder, Martinez's counsel argued that if any conspiracy was established, it was a conspiracy to kidnap, not to murder. In response, the Government supplemented its extensive evidence of the murder objective of the conspiracy with testimony from a case officer that (1) Banks had pled guilty to narcotics charges and to being an accessory to murder after the fact; (2) another organization member, Diego Mojica, had pled guilty to narcotics trafficking; (3) Junior had pled guilty to murder and narcotics charges; and (4) Peralta had told him during a proffer session that Peralta had falsely told Robinson that Martinez was shot during the incident. In addition, the Government introduced Banks's plea allocution, in which Banks admitted giving money to two people involved in a payback murder. Banks, Mojica, Junior, and Peralta did not testify at Martinez's trial. (The evidence did not include the fact that Robinson, Junior, and Peralta had pled guilty to conspiracy to murder.) 9 In connection with the evidence described above, the prosecutor argued in summation: 10 [A]sk yourselves if this was really a kidnapping, why on earth would Robinson Reyes, Tony Matos, Andres Peralta, [Junior] Reyes, Robert Banks, why would they all have pled guilty to murder, or in Banks' case accessory after the fact to murder, if this was supposed to be a kidnapping. . . . It simply doesn't make sense. Nobody would voluntarily subject themselves to a life sentence falsely. 11 The Government concedes that at least some of this evidence was impermissible under the Supreme Court's later decision in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 124 S.Ct. 1354, 158 L.Ed.2d 177 (2004).