Opinion ID: 2197835
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Complainant's Bias

Text: Appellant also challenges the trial court's ruling disallowing cross-examination to explore the reason for C.M.'s recantation of the recantation when she reaffirmed that appellant had forcibly sexually assaulted her. The facts as gleaned from C.M.'s trial testimony as well as voir dire outside the presence of the jury are that on the night of the incident, June 6, C.M. told Officer Deirdre Fisher that appellant had rammed his fingers in her vagina. She repeated this account when she was taken to the hospital for evaluation, telling the attending physician that she had been physically and sexually assaulted. Likewise, the first time C.M. appeared before the grand jury, on June 11, she testified that appellant had forcibly inserted his fingers. Two days later, however, C.M. gave a statement to appellant's defense counsel that she had permitted appellant to insert his fingers inside her ([appellant] didn't do anything harmful to me; I let him do it). C.M. returned to the grand jury on June 16, and contradicted herself at various points during her testimony, stating both that she gave appellant permission to do so and that she did not give him permission. At trial, C.M. testified on direct examination, consistent with her initial reports to the police and the doctor, that appellant forcibly assaulted her, without her consent. Before cross-examining the complainant, defense counsel informed the trial judge that he intended to inquire into the motivation behind C.M.'s decision to return to the grand jury and abandon the statement she had given to the defense recanting her accusation. The defense sought to argue that C.M. changed her mind and returned to the grand jury to testify that appellant sexually assaulted her only because she felt threatened or coerced into changing her story because she was threatened with losing her children. During the course of an extensive voir dire on the question of whether C.M. was coerced into disavowing her recantation of her accusation because she was threatened by the government, C.M. said that she had been at the courthouse at the request of appellant's defense team and that, while there, she had told them that she had consented to appellant's examination of her vagina; according to defense counsel, she gave a thirteen-page statement to that effect. The prosecutor also saw her at the courthouse and asked if she would return to the grand jury, to which she agreed. C.M. testified that Deidre Smith, the victim's witness advocate of the U.S. Attorney's Office, told her that changing [her] story could be perjury . . . [and that she] could be convicted. Smith also told her that she risked losing her children if she continued to use PCP, and encouraged her to seek treatment. C.M. testified that she was never threatened. . . in any way with respect to what [she said] . . . [at] any time during the grand jury process. Her testimony on how she perceived her situation, however, was ambiguous. Initially she stated that she did not change the story because she was worried about losing her children, and that she had recanted her accusation because she did not want [appellant] to do time for [her]. Although at one point she said that she was not concerned about . . . the fact that [she] had changed her story . . . could [lead to] los[ing her] kids, she later conceded that, if she were convicted for perjury, she would lose contact with her children just as she would if she were convicted of using PCP. The trial judge did not permit this line of cross-examination into C.M.'s possible motive for disavowing her recantation on the ground that it would lead to evidence that was substantially more prejudicial than probative: [N]o one really threatened her from the U.S. Attorneys Office to testify as she did. They may have mentioned consequences such as . . . she will be separated from [her children] . . . As she also testified there was fear of perjury that she didn't consider much as a reason for losing her children . . . the court does not see any evidence that the government forced, compelled her to testify as she did the second time in front of the grand jury on February 16th . . . My ruling is therefore . . ., that as far as any risk that she would lose her children, that is not going to be mentioned. She is not going to be asked questions about that. The relevance of that, even within the context of how it's being offered is less relevant and more prejudicial to the government's case. The essence is that the jury again will hear that she recanted and that's the crucial aspect of it. The exposure of a witness's motivation in testifying is [a] proper and important function of the constitutionally protected right of cross-examination. Delaware v. Van Arsdall, 475 U.S. 673, 678-79, 106 S.Ct. 1431, 89 L.Ed.2d 674 (1986). Cross-examination for bias [8] can be so important to the protection of a defendant's constitutional rights that we have said that [b]ias is always a proper subject of cross-examination.' Scull v. United States, 564 A.2d 1161, 1165 (D.C.1989) (citing Springer v. United States, 388 A.2d 846, 855 (D.C. 1978)) (emphasis added). If the defendant is precluded from pursuing a meaningful degree of cross-examination, such as excluding a specific line of questioning altogether on an issue such as bias, the government has the burden of establishing that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. See Chapman, 386 U.S. at 24, 87 S.Ct. 824 (1967). We also recognize, however, that the trial judge has discretion in determining whether particular evidence is relevant to bias or motive. See MCCORMICK ON EVIDENCE § 40, at 87 (3d ed. 1984). Indeed, the trial court has a great deal of discretion in making this determination. Coles v. United States, 808 A.2d 485, 490 (D.C.2002). [T]he burden of showing the relevance of particular evidence to the issue of bias rests on its proponent. Id. (quoting Chambers v. State, 866 S.W.2d 9, 26-27 (Tex.Crim.App.1993)). Evidence relevant to bias should be admitted unless its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice. Ebron v. United States, 838 A.2d 1140, 1148 (D.C.2003) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). The probative/prejudice analysis is quintessentially a discretionary function of the trial court, and we owe a great deal of deference to its decision. Id. at 1152 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). An exercise of judicial discretion will not be reversed unless it appears that it was exercised on grounds, or for reasons, clearly untenable or to an extent clearly unreasonable. Id. at 1153 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Here, the trial judge did not abuse discretion in foreclosing cross-examination into C.M.'s motivation for changing her version of the events after conducting a comprehensive voir dire of the witness. Although the defense's proposed line of questioning for bias was plausible in theory, see Thomas v. United States, 824 A.2d 26, 32-33 (D.C.2003) (noting that the jury can, through common sense infer that a witness with children would not want to be convicted of perjury because she would not want to lose custody of her kids), in this case, the probative value of the evidence the defense wanted to elicit was limited. As the trial judge noted, in response to specific questions C.M. said she was not threatened and, although there seems to have been some confusion in her mind about the use of the phrase losing her kids, she testified that she did not disavow her recantation out of fear of losing her children. Even though knowing the reason why C.M. changed her story would have been useful to the jury's assessment of her trial testimony, C.M. maintained during voir dire (and presumably she would have repeated before the jury) that she was not motivated to falsely accuse appellant because she feared losing her children. Most importantly, the jury was presented with C.M.'s recantation of her accusation against appellant, and was made aware that C.M. had twice made statementsonce under oath to the grand jurythat completely exculpated appellant by denying the allegation at the core of the sexual abuse charge, that appellant had forcibly inserted his fingers in her vagina. [9] The jury was thereby informed of C.M.'s contradictory pre-trial statements from which it could have decided to disbelieve her testimony at trial. Compared to this evidence of her actual recantation, the probative value of evidence of bias that could have resulted from the proffered cross-examination was relatively slight. [10] If that were the end of the analysis, the defendant's right to meaningfully confront his accuser by exposing her potential bias would weigh heavily in favor of permitting the defense's proposed bias cross-examination. But here, the probative value of the bias cross-examination was, as the trial judge noted, outweighed by its potential for prejudice because it suggested, without a factual foundation, that the government was strong-arming the complaining witness to present a particular version of events, which could have had the effect of casting the prosecutor in a negative light and unjustifiably tainted the prosecution's case overall. The suggestion appears unfounded because this is not a case where the complainant accused the defendant only after being threatened with a perjury prosecution. Rather, she was informed of the possible consequences of perjury when she abruptly changed the story she had consistently maintainedthat appellant had sexually assaulted herwhen she called the police and went to the hospital immediately after the incident, and when she testified for the first time before the grand jury. Given the relatively slight probative value of questions about C.M.'s possible bias in light of the thorough impeachment at trial with her inconsistent statements, and the cross-examination's potential to unfairly prejudice the government's prosecution, the trial judge did not abuse discretion in precluding the cross-examination for bias.