Opinion ID: 1906760
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Effect of Rock v. Arkansas

Text: The Rock Court very clearly carved out a Constitutional exception to any rule, whether one like Shirley or one like Collins, that per se precludes a defendant from testifying to relevant facts on the ground that his or her testimony is based on hypnotically-enhanced memory. Such testimony may be excluded upon a specific finding, based on an examination of the pertinent circumstances, that it is unreliable, but it may not be excluded on the general premise that all testimony based on hypnotically enhanced memory is always and inherently unreliable. Burral contends that the same principle necessarily applies with respect to other defense witnesses and is not limited just to the defendant. His contention is based on the Supreme Court's citation to Chambers v. Mississippi, supra, 410 U.S. 284, 93 S.Ct. 1038, 35 L.Ed.2d 297 and its mention of the Sixth Amendment right of a defendant to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor as one of the sources of the supervening Constitutional right of a defendant to testify. It is illogical, he argues, to find the prohibition against a per se rule of exclusion applicable only to the testimony of the defendant himself. The State may continue to apply the Collins rule to State's witnesses and in civil cases if it chooses, he says, but it may not apply that rule to defense witnesses in criminal cases. This question appears to be a matter of first impression. Although Rock v. Arkansas has been cited and applied in a number of cases since its filing, no court, to our knowledge, has yet to deal, except in dicta, with whether it serves to bar application of a Collins -type rule to other defense witnesses. When faced with a previously hypnotized defendant, some courts, following Rock, have adopted Hurd -type standards by which to determine whether to allow the testimony. See State v. Woodfin, 539 So.2d 645 (La.App.1989); Morgan v. State, 537 So.2d 973 (Fla.1989) (expert opinion of defense psychiatrist as to defendant's criminal responsibility not inadmissible based, in part, on statements made by defendant while under hypnosis). The Woodfin court required that the defendant show, by clear and convincing evidence, the lack of suggestiveness and the reliability of the testimony in strict compliance with those standards. Some courts, citing Rock, have abandoned the Collins approach generally in favor of Hurd -type or other standards. See State v. Butterworth, 246 Kan. 541, 792 P.2d 1049 (1990); Zani v. State, 758 S.W.2d 233 (Tex.Cr.App.1988), aff'd on remand, 767 S.W.2d 825 (Tex.App.1989); Tumlinson v. State, 757 S.W.2d 440 (Tex.App.1988). Other courts have maintained their view that such testimony is inadmissible (as to witnesses other than a defendant in a criminal case) and have not been persuaded by Rock to modify that position. See State ex rel. Neely v. Sherrill, 165 Ariz. 508, 799 P.2d 849 (1990); State v. Johnston, 39 Ohio St.3d 48, 529 N.E.2d 898 (1988); Hall v. Com., 12 Va.App. 198, 403 S.E.2d 362 (1991); People v. Zayas, 131 Ill.2d 284, 137 Ill.Dec. 568, 546 N.E.2d 513 (1989). In 1984, based on a 1982 amendment to the California Constitution added by Proposition 8, the California legislature, in effect, overruled Shirley in favor of a modified Collins approach, permitting testimony by a previously hypnotized witness limited to matters that the witness recalled and related prior to the hypnosis if certain enumerated safeguards are met. See California Evidence Code § 795; People v. Aguilar, 218 Cal.App.3d 1556, 267 Cal.Rptr. 879 (1990); People v. Burroughs, 188 Cal.App.3d 1162, 233 Cal.Rptr. 872 (1987). Notwithstanding the Constitutional exception carved out in Rock, the majority of courts still appear to use a Collins approach for witnesses other than the defendant. See State v. Fertig, 143 N.J. 115, 668 A.2d 1076 (1996), noting that, as of 1996, 26 States held hypnotically-refreshed testimony to be inadmissible per se, four States considered such testimony to be generally admissible, three States and a number of Federal courts had adopted the totality of circumstances approach, and seven States, in addition to New Jersey, opted for Hurd -type standards by which to judge admissibility. See also Thomas M. Fleming, Annotation, Admissibility of Hypnotically Refreshed or Enhanced Testimony, 77 A.L.R.4th 927 (1990 and 1998 Supp.). The Fertig court, faced with the proffered testimony of a previously hypnotized State's witness, declined to abandon Hurd. There is no doubt but that Rock itself was carefully confined to the testimony of the defendant. That is apparent not only from the footnote added by the Court but from the overall text of the majority opinion. On several occasions, the Court noted that it was dealing only with the testimony of the defendant and stressed as the basis for its holding the overarching right of the defendant in a criminal case to tell his or her story in his or her own words. See Antonia F. Giuliana, Between Rock and a Hurd Place: Protecting the Criminal Defendant's Right to Testify after Her Testimony Has Been Hypnotically Refreshed, 65 FORD. L.REV. 2151, 2186 (1997). Indeed, subsequent pronouncements from the Supreme Court, from Justice Blackmun, who authored the majority Opinion in Rock, and from Justice Marshall, who joined that Opinion, indicate that the ruling in that case was based on the special significance of the defendant's right to testify. Writing separately in Clemons v. Mississippi, 494 U.S. 738, 769, 110 S.Ct. 1441, 108 L.Ed.2d 725 (1990), Justice Blackmun cited Rock for the proposition that the Court had attached Constitutional significance to an individual's interest in presenting his case directly to the finder of fact, noting the language used in Rock that the right to be heard, which is so essential to due process in an adversary system of adjudication, [can] be vindicated only by affording a defendant an opportunity to testify before the factfinder. Dissenting in Perry v. Leeke, 488 U.S. 272, 291, 109 S.Ct. 594, 102 L.Ed.2d 624 (1989), Justice Marshall cited Rock as supporting the principle applied in Geders v. United States, 425 U.S. 80, 96 S.Ct. 1330, 47 L.Ed.2d 592 (1976) that a defendant in a criminal case enjoyed a unique status and could not, in all instances, be treated the same as other witnesses. Most significant, in United States v. Scheffer, 523 U.S. 303, 118 S.Ct. 1261, 140 L.Ed.2d 413 (1998), the Court characterized Rock as follows: In holding that the exclusion of [Rock's hypnotically enhanced testimony] violated the defendant's `right to present a defense,' we noted that the rule deprived the jury of the testimony of the only witness who was at the scene and had firsthand knowledge of the facts [citation omitted]. Moreover, the rule infringed upon the accused's interest in testifying in her own defense an interest that we deemed particularly significant, as it is the defendant who is the target of any criminal prosecution [citation omitted]. For this reason, we stated that an accused ought to be allowed `to present his own version of events in his own words.' (Emphasis added). The California Supreme Court also created that limited exception, for the same reason, in its second Shirley opinion. The choice that faces us, then, is whether to extend Rock beyond the limited scope given it by the Supreme Court itself. We have, essentially, four options: (1) adhere to Collins except with respect to a testifying defendant in a criminal case; (2) abandon Collins, on either a Constitutional or common law basis, in favor of a general admissibility ( Harding -type) approach, a Hurd -type approach, or a totality of the circumstances approach with respect to any defense witness in a criminal case; (3) abandon Collins, on a common law basis, in favor of one of those alternative approaches for all witnesses in a criminal case; or (4) abandon Collins, on a common law basis, in favor of an alternative approach for witnesses generally, in both criminal and civil cases. In making that determination, we need to recall the fundamental underpinning of Collins that hypnosis, as a memory enhancer, is a scientific technique to which the standard of acceptability set forth in Frye and Reed applies and that the technique had not gained general acceptance within the relevant scientific community. Although in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., supra, 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469, the Supreme Court, relying largely on Federal Rules of Evidence 104, 403, and 702, rejected the Frye condition that the technique be generally accepted in favor of the standards set forth in Fed.R.Evid. 702, we have not abandoned Frye or Reed. In adopting our counterpart to Fed.R.Evid. 702, Maryland Rule 5-702, in 1994, we blessed a Committee Note expressly pointing out that promulgation of the Maryland rule was not intended to overrule Reed or other cases adopting the Frye standard, and that [t]he required scientific foundation for the admission of novel scientific techniques or principles is left to development through case law. We have not been asked in this case to abandon Frye/Reed, either as a general standard or, other than as a byproduct of extending the Constitutional exception enunciated in Rock to all defense witnesses, as the standard applicable to hypnotically-enhanced memory, and we therefore shall not do so. We thus adhere to the rule, as a matter of Maryland common law, that hypnosis is a scientific technique that is subject to the Frye/Reed standard. There is nothing in the record of this case to indicate that hypnosis as a memory enhancer has gained general acceptance in the relevant scientific community since 1983. No experts testified in that regard and no scientific literature was presented to the court. At least as of 1986, it appears that every court that applied a Frye test concluded that hypnosis as a memory enhancer failed to meet the test, and even five years later the consensus seemed to be that the technique was not regarded as reliable. See Gary M Shaw, The Admissibility of Hypnotically Enhanced Testimony in Criminal Trials, 75 MARQ. L.REV. 1, 18 (1991); also Paul Giannelli, THE ADMISSIBILITY of Hypnotic Evidence in U.S. Courts, Int. J. of clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 43, 212-233 (1995). As noted, the Rock majority itself acknowledged that the technique was controversial and that both the medical and legal view of its appropriate role was unsettled. Rock v. Arkansas, supra, 483 U.S. at 59, 107 S.Ct. 2704. Faigman, Kaye, Saks, and Sanders, writing in 1997, report a consensus within the scientific community on six points regarding hypnosis, among them that any increase in accurate memories during hypnosis is accompanied by an increase in inaccurate memories, that hypnosis may compromise the subject's ability to distinguish memory from imagination or fantasy, and that when hypnotic (as opposed to nonhypnotic) techniques are used to interrogate, subjects later report being more certain of the content, even when it is inaccurate. 1 MODERN SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE § 12-2.2.3 (1997). See also American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs (1985), SCIENTIFIC STATUS OF REFRESHING RECOLLECTION BY THE USE OF HYPNOSIS, Journal of the American Medical Association, 253, 1918-1923. Giannelli and Imwinkelried note the conclusions drawn from a 1994 meta-analysis of 24 research studies that (1) increased recall accuracy for hypnotized subjects has not been substantiated at this time; (2) control subjects had a higher accuracy rate for lineup identifications than hypnotized subjects, who had more false alarms; and (3) hypnotized subjects are more confident about their recall accuracy. 1 SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE § 12-4(A) (2d ed. 1998 Supp.). Perhaps the most telling piece of evidence in this regard is that Dr. Orne, whose view that hypnosis as a memory enhancer could be made reliable through the use of the safeguards he recommended was the underpinning of Hurd, has changed his opinion and now believes that hypnotically induced memories should never be permitted to form the basis for testimony by witnesses or victims in a court of law. Orne, Whitehouse, Dinges, & Orne, RECONSTRUCTING MEMORY THROUGH HYPNOSIS: FORENSIC AND CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS, in Hypnosis and Memory 21, 50 (H.M. Pettinati ed.1988); also Orne, COMMENTS ON THE DRAFT HOME OFFICE GUIDELINES, 5 British J. Experimental & Clinical Hypnosis 37. 42 (1988); Orne, Soskis, Dinges, & Orne, HYPNOTICALLY INDUCED TESTIMONY, in Eyewitness Testimony: Psychological Perspectives 171, 211 (G. Wells & E. Loftus eds.1984). In the face of this overwhelming and largely uncontradicted evidence, we find no justification to depart, as a matter of common law, from the approach we took in Collins. The fact is that both the scientific community and a majority of the courts continue to view hypnosis, when used as a memory enhancer, as unreliable and, in terms of testimony in court, as likely to produce false recollections and inaccurate testimony that cross-examination may be unable to expose. The same deficiencies that were prevalent in 1983 appear to remain prevalent today. [9] Rock v. Arkansas obviously stands as a Constitutionally-based exception to the predominant rule that testimony based on hypnotically enhanced recollections is not admissible, but we find no Constitutional requirement to extend that exception to other defense witnesses. The entire underpinning of Burral's proposed extension of Rock is the Court's reference to the Sixth Amendment right to compulsory process and to Chambers v. Mississippi . Those references need to be viewed in context, however, especially in light of the Court's clear intent to limit its holding to testifying defendants. The right to compulsory process is a Constitutional source of a defendant's right to testifya right, as the Court has noted on several occasions, that did not exist at common lawand that is all that it was cited to establish. Rock was obviously an unusual caseone in which the rule barring testimony based on hypnotically-enhanced memory precluded the defendant herself, who was the only live witness to what had occurred, from presenting a defense, from telling her story. To take the Court's reference to the right of compulsory process, made in that context, and extend it to a Constitutional doctrine effectively precluding a State from enforcing neutral and well-founded rules of evidence against defense witnesses in a criminal case would have the most profound implications, well beyond what was at issue in Rock. Would the testimony of a defense witness, who, by reason of tender age or mental disability is unable to understand an oath and is incompetent for that reason, nonetheless be admissible as a Constitutional imperative? Is a defense witness no longer subject to the hearsay rule? Until United States v. Scheffer, supra, 523 U.S. 303, 118 S.Ct. 1261, 140 L.Ed.2d 413, could it have been argued that polygraph evidence supporting the testimony of a defense witness was Constitutionally admissible? Federal Rule of Evidence 605 and its Maryland counterpart, Rule 5-605, provide that the judge presiding at a trial may not testify in that trial as a witness. Would those rules apply if the judge is called as a defense witness? The Rock Court's reference to the right of compulsory process can be given proper effect without extending it beyond what we believe was intended. That reference, as noted, was only one of three sources cited by the Court as establishing the right of a defendant to testify in his or her own defense. The other twothe due process right to be heard in one's own defense and the Fifth Amendment right to testify or notare peculiar to defendants. No other court in the country has so extended the Rock holding on a Constitutional basis, and in light of the Supreme Court's own expressed limitation, we shall not be the first to do so. If the high court believes that the right of compulsory process precludes a Collins approach to the testimony of other defense witnesses, it will, in due time, inform us of that belief. JUDGMENT AFFIRMED, WITH COSTS. Dissenting Opinion by CHASANOW, J. in which BELL, C.J., joins. Dissenting opinion by ELDRIDGE J. CHASANOW, Judge, dissenting. I respectfully dissent. The majority holds that the State can preclude a defendant from questioning an eyewitness with exculpatory testimony because a State agent hypnotized that witness. The majority cites many of the vast number of cases and articles concerning hypnosis, and misapplies them to create a rigid, inflexible, illogical, and probably unconstitutional per se rule of exclusion precluding a defendant from calling a witness or questioning the witness because the State interrogated that witness under hypnosis. Post-hypnotic testimony unquestionably has some value, but it is fraught with potential problems. As one evidence text notes, the most directly pertinent studies do suggest that in certain circumstances hypnosis can enhance memory. The problem is that it also appears that it can alter memory. JOHN W. STRONG, 1 MCCORMICK ON EVIDENCE § 206, at 918 (4th ed.1992) (emphasis in original)(footnote omitted). Over 100 years ago, in what was probably the first case to deal with the issue of hypnotized witnesses, a court made the statement, the law of the United States does not recognize hypnotism. People v. Ebanks, 117 Cal. 652, 49 P. 1049, 1053 (1897). Without any critical analysis of the divergent issues associated with hypnosis, this Court expands the above statement into an inflexible, rigid, and unreasonable approach. While I agree that statements made by a person while under hypnosis are suspect and should generally not be admitted, at least not without safeguards, the instant case concerns a slightly different issuethe admissibility of post-hypnotic testimony of a witness whose recollections have been enhanced or possibly evoked by the party objecting to the witness's testimony. This is analogous to saying that a defense eyewitness may be precluded from testifying because a police officer beat the witness to enhance the witness's memory. In neither case should the improper actions of the State bar the defendant from calling the witness. If the State, without the consent of the defendant, has done something to a witness that may have impaired the witness's memory, then that ought to be a basis for impeachment by the State, not disqualification of the defense witness. The State should not be able to unilaterally make witnesses unavailable to the defense by secretly hypnotizing them as part of the police investigation.