Opinion ID: 572682
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Count 2--Possession with Intent to Distribute Marijuana

Text: 28 As to Evans's conviction of possession with intent to distribute marijuana, even if the statement of an unidentified informant that Evans was in El Paso to conduct a drug deal was used as hearsay, the error in admitting it was harmless, and had little impact on his ultimate conviction. The agents who observed Evans for many days in El Paso amassed (and presented at trial) an overwhelming amount of evidence against him. The accumulation of that evidence, presented below, is more than sufficient to show that Evans was participating in a prolonged transaction for the purchase of drugs. 29 While in El Paso, Evans moved back and forth between two motels. He drove to an auto garage and returned to his room carrying a bag containing a green leafy substance. He went to a K-Mart to have copies made of his car keys. When he came out of the store, he had trouble opening his car door; he returned to the store, asked a clerk for help with his key, returned to his car, and left. He returned to the auto garage, where an employee came out to his car with a container and lifted its lid to show him the contents before Evans noted a BATF agent watching him; the employee then left his car. Two visitors came to Evans's room and left, driving Evans's car and leaving their own. They returned and drove away in both cars, leaving Evans in the motel. Evans's car returned. A passenger got out and entered Evans's room; the driver drove to a nearby Denny's restaurant. The passenger left Evans's room and walked to Denny's. The other car arrived at Denny's, and its driver joined the passenger and driver of Evans's car in the restaurant. Evans then left his room, walked to Denny's, bought a newspaper outside the window where the three men were seated, and then drove away in his own car. At a nearby supermarket parking lot he stopped, opened the trunk, rearranged its contents, and returned to his motel, where he gathered his belongings, packed them into his car, and left. 30 Viewing the evidence as a whole, the probative value of a statement that Evans was in El Paso for a drug deal is virtually insignificant. It certainly did not contribute to the jury's verdict that Evans was in knowing possession of the marijuana in his car. 31 B. Counts 1 and 3--Knowing Possession and Use of a GunThe use of Ms. Melton's statement to support the gun convictions differed fundamentally from the use of a statement placing Evans in El Paso for a drug deal. Melton's alleged statement was inherently susceptible to the abuses we noted above. And the prosecution did not hesitate to use, emphasize, and reemphasize that statement to show that Evans did possess a gun identical to the pistol found in his car in El Paso. The trial court abused its discretion in overruling Evans's objection to this hearsay evidence. Because the evidence constituted virtually the only evidence proving an essential element of counts 1 and 3 (that Evans's possession was knowing ) 7 we find that it did have a substantial impact on his conviction. 32 Our extensive quotations from the transcript reveal a textbook example of the abuse of hearsay. The government relied on Ms. Melton's statements to show the truth of what she said. The prosecutor referred repeatedly to her declaration that Evans owned a pistol, and to her description of it, as proof that Evans did own a pistol of such a description. The use of her statements had almost nothing to do with explaining the background of the surveillance of Evans. It had almost everything to do with showing that Evans was guilty of counts 1 and 3. 33 Evans's defense to counts 1 and 3 was his ignorance of the gun's presence in his car, a car driven by several other drug dealers immediately before he retook control of it. The prosecution used Melton's statement, and that statement alone, to refute this defense. The statement was its only direct evidence showing that Evans would have known the gun was there. 34 Unlike the mass of evidence tending to show Evans's participation in a drug deal, there is little non-hearsay support for a finding that Evans also possessed a gun. We have reviewed the record and see only the following, meagre support for a finding of knowledge. 35 BATF Agent Manny Olmos observed Evans when he returned to his motel after leaving Denny's and stopping in a parking lot to examine the marijuana in his trunk. Olmos watched from a vehicle 8-10 feet away from Evans's car; he said that nothing stood between him and that car. Yet he never saw Evans put a gun into the car. He did see Evans carry clothes and bags from his motel room and put them in the car. When pressed by the prosecutor to refer to the car's floorboard areas, Olmos offered only this equivocal statement: I observed him lean, yes, sir, onto the floorboard and, yes, sir, put, possibly put articles in there. 36 That sentence is the only evidence aside from Melton's statement that might prove Evans's knowledge that a gun was on his rear floorboard. When the government did refer to Olmos's statement, it exaggerated his certainty. The prosecutor said Evans was observed putting items on the floor behind the driver's seat.... But aside from this misleading characterization, the prosecutor almost ignored any corroborative value of Olmos's observations. We infer that the government failed to rely more on this weak (but admissible) evidence because it intended to rely so extensively on the infinitely more effective (and inadmissible) hearsay statements of Ms. Melton. In its closing argument the prosecution asked the jury to base the gun verdicts on the truth of Melton's statements. It must have known, as we recognize now, that its only other evidence was entirely insufficient to prove Evans guilty. 37 Otherwise, the government's evidence offers more support to Evans's defense than to its own case. Before Evans got into his car at Denny's it had been driven, as even the government admits, by at least two or three other people. Nor was the gun--any gun--seen during more than five days of constant government surveillance of Evans. In fact, the only time that the government admits it gave up surveillance of Evans's car (because it suspected countersurveillance) was when those other men drove it. Further, the government's case does not explain whether Evans kept the gun in the car or in his motel room. If the former, when Evans stopped after leaving Denny's and looked in his trunk to examine the marijuana left there by others, it seems odd that he did not look into the back seat to see if they had removed his gun. If the latter, why did Olmos not see Evans put a gun into the car? Finally, the government offered no evidence connecting the sock in which the gun was found to Evans (for example, by matching it to a lone sock in his luggage or apartment). 38 It is certainly not beyond the realms of probability that the gun did belong to Evans, and that he knew it to be in the car. But we cannot ignore--as the government ignored--the constitutional and equitable logic of the hearsay rule. Without having produced the declarant, Ms. Melton, to confirm her statement to Bohan (and to be subjected to cross-examination), the government violated Evans's Sixth Amendment right to confront the witnesses against him. The government now asks this Court to affirm two convictions and a twenty-year jail sentence based on evidence that Bohan himself could simply have made up. On such a foundation a criminal conviction may not stand.