Opinion ID: 2354118
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Appellant's Failure to Contact the Police

Text: Appellant also argues that the trial court violated [his] right to present material portions of his testimony when it ruled that he could not explain his failure to report the crime and inconsistent statements to the police without `opening the door' to evidence of prior police contacts. This ruling, he maintains, violated [his] constitutional rights under the Compulsory Process Clause of the Sixth Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the `necessary corollary to the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against compelled testimony.' We cannot consider the merits of this claim, however, because appellant failed to preserve it for appellate review. Relying primarily on the Supreme Court decision in the Luce case [22] and this court's adoption of the Luce rationale in Butler v. United States, 688 A.2d 381 (D.C.1996), the government contends that [t]he trial court never made a final ruling on the admissibility of prior police contacts with appellant, and appellant failed to preserve that claim for appeal. We agree. Butler provides a close analogy to the instant case. In Butler the trial court made a preliminary ruling before trial that, if the defense wanted to proceed on the theories of bias and fabrication ( i.e., that the officers who arrested the defendant were somehow biased against him), the government would be allowed to rebut those theories with evidence of the defendant's prior arrests and contacts with the police. As a result of that ruling, the defense chose not to present those theories at trial, but then claimed on appeal that the trial court erred in ruling that cross-examination of the arresting officers on bias `opened the door' to evidence of appellant's prior arrests by the same officers. Butler, 688 A.2d at 386. We rejected this argument and held, on the basis of Luce, that we had no factual or record context to resolve Butler's contention on appeal. As the Court said in Luce, `it would be a matter of conjecture whether the [trial court] would have allowed the government to attack [appellant's] credibility at trial by means of the prior conviction.' Id. at 388 (quoting Luce, 469 U.S. at 41, 105 S.Ct. 460). The present case is quite similar. Here, as in Butler, the trial court did not make a final ruling. While it did say that the government would be allowed to introduce some evidence of appellant's prior contacts with the police, the court never established or announced how far the government would be permitted to go. Moreover, upon learning that the government would be able to bring in some evidence of these prior contacts, defense counsel withdrew the question and never again raised the issue. Thus the court had no occasion to make any precise determination about what evidence would be excluded and what evidence would be admitted. Finally, if we were to conclude that the ruling was erroneous, the limited record before us would preclude us from determining whether the error was prejudicial or harmless. Bailey, 699 A.2d at 402. We cannot decide whether the court erroneously admitted any testimony about appellant's prior contacts with the police on the theory that the defense opened the door to such testimony, because the government did not seek to admit such testimony. Had appellant chosen to continue testifying about the earlier incident, and had the government then presented related evidence, this would be a different case. But without such evidence, we cannot assess any arguable error on the part of the court in suggesting that appellant's proposed testimony would open the door to anything.