Opinion ID: 1135325
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Reliability of Hearsay Statements With Regard to Patricia.

Text: During the pretrial competency hearings, the district court determined that Patricia's hearsay statements were admissible under NRS 51.385, but not under any established hearsay exception. The district court held that the interviewing methodology was not so suggestive as to make Patricia's statements inherently unreliable. The court did not make any findings as to the reliability of each hearsay statement, or series of hearsay statements concerning one event, to be admitted. The district court's determination that Patricia's hearsay statements were not admissible under any firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule is supported by substantial evidence. Patricia's accusatory statements were made more than a year after the alleged incidents and only after substantial prodding and suggestive questioning. Patricia denied the truth of her allegations both before and after they were made. These statements were not excited utterances, because they were not made spontaneously or while under excitement of the event. See Dearing v. State, 100 Nev. 590, 592, 691 P.2d 419, 420-21 (1984) (victim's statements were excited utterances when made shortly after assault and when victim nervous and upset). Nor do we believe the statements to psychologist Bay were statements made to a health care professional for the purpose of treatment, and therefore admissible pursuant to NRS 51.115 as statements made in the course of securing medical diagnosis or treatment. [6] The incriminating statements Patricia allegedly made to Bay were made during an interview especially requested by the prosecuting attorney, and Bay took careful notes to report back to him. Bay indicated that she did not take notes when conducting treatment sessions. Patricia's initial interviews with Bay were more in the nature of investigatory sessions with the purpose of confirming that CSA had occurred. There is ample evidence to support the district court's determination that these sessions were not for the medical diagnosis or treatment of Patricia. Therefore, we must determine whether Patricia's hearsay statements were admissible under NRS 51.385 and recent United States Supreme Court cases. In Idaho v. Wright, 497 U.S. 805, 110 S.Ct. 3139, 111 L.Ed.2d 638 (1990), the defendant was convicted of CSA against two children who were five and one-half and two and one-half years old. Very soon after the alleged CSA, the younger child was taken to the hospital and medically examined for CSA. The doctor found indications that sexual abuse had occurred two to three days before. Id. at 808-09, 110 S.Ct. at 3143. At trial, the child did not testify, but the doctor recounted the statements the child made during the examination. He asked, Does daddy touch you with his pee-pee? The child said yes. The child also said, [D]addy does do this with me, but he does it a lot more with my sister. Id. at 810-11, 110 S.Ct. at 3143-44. The Court found that the admission of the hearsay statements was not pursuant to any firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule. This being the case, the Court determined that it must be shown that the statements bore a high indicia of reliability and that cross-examination of the declarant would add little to the quest for truth. The Court held that: (1) the child's first statement was not sufficiently reliable because it was given in response to suggestive questioning, and (2) the second statement was not reliable, even though it was volunteered. When there is evidence of prior interrogation, prompting, or manipulation by adults, spontaneity may be an inaccurate indicator of trustworthiness. Id. at 826-27, 110 S.Ct. at 3152-53. Also, the child's statement showed no additional guarantees of trustworthiness arising from the circumstances surrounding the statement itself. To find a hearsay statement reliable, a court must examine the totality of the circumstances surrounding the statement, and find that: (1) the declarant was particularly likely to be telling the truth when the statement was made; (2) the statement is at least as reliable as evidence admitted under any of the accepted hearsay exceptions; and (3) the statement is so trustworthy that adversarial questioning would add little to its reliability. Id. at 820-23, 110 S.Ct. at 3149-51. The Court in Wright concluded that corroborating evidence such as medical findings may not be used to demonstrate the reliability of a hearsay statement. Instead, reliability must come from the statement itself and the circumstances surrounding it and not by bootstrapping the statement to other evidence. Id. at 823, 110 S.Ct. at 3150-51. We have ruled that the district court must hold a hearing and determine the trustworthiness of a child's hearsay statement before that statement can be received into evidence pursuant to NRS 51.385. Lytle v. State, 107 Nev. 589, 816 P.2d 1082 (1991). In the case at bar, the court ruled that all of Patricia's hearsay statements were not unreliable. We conclude that the clear import of both Wright and NRS 51.385 is that the court must affirmatively determine the reliability of each hearsay statement, or series of statements regarding one transaction or event, prior to its admission. Therefore, the lower court's blanket ruling on the reliability of any and all of Patricia's statements did not satisfy either Nevada law or federal constitutional requirements. If a trial court determines that a child's statements are reliable, it should then make specific findings of fact embracing the reliability determination, considering the factors set forth in Wright, and explaining why it concluded that cross-examination would add little to the determination of reliability. The district court placed the burden of challenging the reliability of Patricia's hearsay statements on the defense, and it did not make an affirmative determination that Patricia's statements contained the requisite indicia of reliability. Wright held that the State, as the proponent of the hearsay evidence, bears the burden of affirmatively rebutting the presumptive unreliability of a child's hearsay statements. Wright, 497 U.S. at 821, 110 S.Ct. at 3149-50. Courts have considerable discretion in considering factors relevant to reliability. However, the totality of the evidence must indicate that the incriminating hearsay statements are particularly trustworthy. Wright sets forth a non-exclusive list of pertinent factors in determining trustworthiness, which include: (1) whether the statements were spontaneous; (2) whether the child was subjected to repetitive questioning; (3) whether the child had a motive to fabricate; (4) whether the child used terminology unexpected of a child of similar age; and (5) whether the child was in a stable mental state. Id. at 821-26, 110 S.Ct. at 3149-52. Although the Wright Court viewed the doctor's leading questions as an important factor, it specifically refused to hold that all interviews of children must be recorded, or that leading questions in interviews are a per se bar to reliability. Id. at 815-19, 110 S.Ct. at 3146-49. In assessing reliability, courts should examine the earliest statements made by a child-declarant and look for continuity in subsequent statements. See Gail S. Goodman and Vicki S. Helgeson Goodman, Child Sexual Assault: Children's Memory and the Law, 40 U. Miami L.Rev. 181, 195 (1985) (because research indicates that children's memories are better in interviews conducted soon after the incident, the first interview is critical and should be conducted by specialists, not by police officers or therapists untrained in CSA investigations). Patricia made her first incriminating statement more than a year after the charged offense and then only after much suggestive questioning. The L. children's first interview showed that they did not remember incidents of CSA, and Aaron's trial testimony showed that his memory was unreliable. If Patricia had testified and had been cross-examined, her testimony may have been equally inconclusive. In State v. Babayan, 106 Nev. 155, 787 P.2d 805 (1990), this court listed several types of contamination errors which occur in children's interviews and diminish the reliability of the children's statements. These errors include: systems contamination (outside information gained from police or other sources); cross-contamination (using information gained from other children during therapy with another child); concertizing (repetitive, leading discussions creating false memories in the child); assuming incidents occurred and following a preconceived agenda; coercive questioning; and ignoring or discounting a child's denials. Almost all of the above-mentioned interviewing errors repeatedly occurred in the case at bar. The following excerpt shows the technique used by Detective Bishop and psychologist Bay at their first interview with Patricia: BAY: Did somebody tell you not to tell something? PATRICIA: No. I never was (inaudible) but there's one thing I didn't like about Martha. BISHOP: What was that? PATRICIA: She yelled a lot. BISHOP: Did she ever give you a bath? PATRICIA: No. BAY: Tell us more about what happened at Martha's house. PATRICIA: He, she was quite mean. BISHOP: What do you mean by mean? ... PATRICIA: Like spanked them sometimes. BAY: What else? PATRICIA: I can't remember. It was such a long time ago.... BISHOP: Whereabouts did she spank you? PATRICIA: Right here. BISHOP: Right on the bottom. Okay. Trish, think about this real careful, did anybody touch you when you were at Martha's in a place you didn't like? PATRICIA: No. BISHOP: Would you tell me today if somebody did? PATRICIA: Can't remember, it's too far back. BISHOP: If someone would have touched you in a place you didn't like you would tell me about it? Would you? PATRICIA: Yes, but I, but that never happened to me. BAY: Where would be a place that someone shouldn't touch you? Can you show me on this doll. What do you call that? PATRICIA: I don't know. BAY: What do you call this area right here? What do you do with that part of the body? PATRICIA: Go potty.... BAY: Right. Did anybody ever try and touch you there? PATRICIA: No. BAY: Did you ever see anybody get touched there? PATRICIA: No. BISHOP: Did anybody ever take any pictures when you were at Martha's? PATRICIA: No.... BISHOP: Did you ever see anybody get put in closets to get punished? PATRICIA: No.... BISHOP: Are there some things that you just don't want to talk about? PATRICIA: That's all I could remember.... BAY: Hey Trish, has anyone ever touched right here on your privates? PATRICIA: No. BAY: Do you ever touch yourself there? It's okay, are you embarrassed?... That's alright. Who taught you how to do that? PATRICIA: Nobody. Bay testified that in the next interview, which was unrecorded, Patricia pointed to her vagina and said, Martha hurt me. Bay said she could not remember whether this was a spontaneous statement. In the interview after that, Patricia allegedly made the two statements that support Felix's convictions. Bay said that Patricia made the first statement in response to a prompt that Aaron said he saw Felix do things to her, but that the second statement was spontaneous. The method used to obtain the first statement is referred to as coercive questioning or assuming facts. In Babayan, we found this method was condemned by the experts, and the defense experts in this case challenged it as prejudicial and likely to elicit unreliable answers. Even if the second statement was spontaneous, there is no way to determine the extent to which the prior coercive questioning actually affected the statement. Under these circumstances, Patricia's second statement is less reliable than the spontaneous statement elicited in Idaho v. Wright, 497 U.S. 805, 110 S.Ct. 3139, 111 L.Ed.2d 638 (1990), and therefore it should not have been admitted. There are many other indications that the statements by which appellants were convicted of assaulting Patricia were not reliable. One prominent factor making the statements at issue here unreliable is something the expert in Babayan called systems contamination. Detective Coffey's police report before the first interview states that she asked Ms. L. to discuss the allegations with her children. In a subsequent interview, Aaron said that his mother had told him Ontiveros probably had touched Noray Ann's vagina. In the initial interviews, Patricia made no mention of animals being killed at the day care center as had Susan, but subsequently Patricia was making similar allegations. Bay clearly received some information on the children's stories from both Detective Coffey and Patricia's mother that was transmitted to the L. children. Other suggestions of prejudicial interviewing techniques include the fact that the children learned terminology from the psychologists, and that the critical second and third interviews were not recorded. Although Wright does not require that psychologists record interviews, the lack of recordation renders the interviews somewhat suspect, especially in light of the improper techniques used in later interviews in this case. Bay quoted Patricia as saying vagina, when, soon before, in the first interview, Patricia had not known how to refer to genitalia except by saying that they were used to go potty. In all, the interviewing techniques used on Patricia undermine the reliability of Patricia's statements, and it cannot be said that adversarial testing would add little to her statements' reliability. We have held that when a district court fails to make the determination that a child's hearsay statements are reliable, as required by NRS 51.385, the conviction must be reversed. Lytle v. State, 107 Nev. 589, 591, 816 P.2d 1082, 1083 (1991). Where, as here, the burden of proof was shifted to the defense and the wrong standard applied by the district court in making the reliability determination, we will also reverse the conviction unless the record clearly demonstrates that the hearsay statement or statements admitted were reliable to such a degree that cross-examination would have added little to the inquiry. We do not believe that we, as an appellate court, should be making the reliability determination in close cases. Reviewing Patricia's hearsay statements and the interviewing techniques to which she was subjected, her statements appear more unreliable than reliable. Perhaps that is the reason the district court failed to make an affirmative determination of reliability and only determined that the statements were not unreliable. Many courts have recognized, as we do here, that children's accusatory statements present special problems in assessing reliability. In State v. Matsamas, 808 P.2d 1048 (Utah 1991), Justice Stewart, in a concurring opinion, echoed the concerns of defense expert Dr. Lee Coleman: Children's declarations concerning abuse may raise special problems of reliability. That is especially true when the adults concerned are involved in a custody dispute or for other reasons are antagonistic to each other. Accusations made by children may have such a reverberating clang as to all but drown out exculpatory evidence in the minds of jurors. For the most part, children, especially young children, do not lie, at least in the sense that gives rise to a judgment of moral culpability. However, they can misstate reality and even confuse imagination, fantasy, and confabulation with reality, and sometimes not know that they have done so. Children may also perceive in a reasonably accurate way, but describe the perception in an unintentionally misleading manner. A child's inaccurate declaration may also result from psychological processes that have the appearance of accurate recall, but in reality are not. Discrimination between factually accurate and inaccurate statements can be difficult, and sometimes impossible. One important cause of unreliability may be a child's desire to please adults or avoid blame or guilt feelings. The willingness to give suggested answers to leading questions and thereby construct facts in response to a suggested scenario is not uncommon. Childrenand sometimes adultswho accept such suggestions and transmute them to facts can construct a memory of those facts that becomes indistinguishable from reality in their minds. Id. at at 1055 (Stewart, J., concurring). And, in Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836, 110 S.Ct. 3157, 111 L.Ed.2d 666 (1990), Justice Scalia, in his dissent, cautioned that a parent could be convicted of CSA without giving the parent so much as the opportunity to sit in the presence of the child and ask the child whether the charges are false. Perhaps that is a procedure today's society desires; perhaps (though I doubt it) it is even a fair procedure; but it is assuredly not a procedure permitted by the Constitution. Id. at 861, 110 S.Ct. at 3171-72 (Scalia, J., dissenting). Later in the dissent, Justice Scalia recognized that children's testimony often may be unreliable and he cited an injustice that occurred in Jordan, Minnesota, when false accusations by children affected many innocent people: Some studies show that children are substantially more vulnerable to suggestion than adults, and often unable to separate recollected fantasy (or suggestion) from reality. See Lindsay & Johnson, Reality Monitoring and Suggestibility: Children's Ability to Discriminate Among Memories From Different Sources, in Children's Eyewitness Memory 92 (S. Ceci, M. Toglia, & D. Ross eds. 1987); Feher, The Alleged Molestation Victim, The Rules of Evidence, and the Constitution: Should Children Really Be Seen and Not Heard?, 14 Am.J.Crim.L. 227, 230-233 (1987); Christiansen, The Testimony of Child Witnesses: Fact, Fantasy, and the Influence of Pretrial Interviews, 62 Wash.L.Rev. 705, 708-711 (1987). The injustice their erroneous testimony can produce is evidenced by the tragic Scott County investigations of 1983-1984, which disrupted the lives of many (as far as we know) innocent people in the small town of Jordan, Minnesota. At one stage those investigations were pursuing allegations by at least eight children of multiple murders, but the prosecutions actually initiated charged only sexual abuse. Specifically, 24 adults were charged with molesting 37 children. In the course of the investigations, 25 children were placed in foster homes. Of the 24 indicted defendants, one pleaded guilty, two were acquitted at trial, and the charges against the remaining 21 were voluntarily dismissed. Id. at 868, 110 S.Ct. at 3175 (Scalia, J., dissenting). The concerns expressed by Justice Scalia seem especially appropriate when applied to the instant case. Patricia's baby sitters were convicted of assaulting her without ever being in the same room with her once their baby sitting services ended, or were they afforded the opportunity to cross-examine her at trial. We conclude that the district court erred by making a blanket reliability ruling concerning Patricia's hearsay statements. First, the ruling did not consider the reliability of each statement or series of statements individually. Second, the burden of proof was placed on the defense, which was required to show that the statements were unreliable, rather than on the State, which should have been required to establish that the statements were affirmatively reliable. Third, the district court applied the wrong standard when determining reliability; to wit, failing to affirmatively determine that Patricia's hearsay statements were reliable. In reviewing the record, we cannot affirmatively say that Patricia's hearsay statements are reliable. Therefore, these hearsay statements should not have been received into evidence, and without them, the convictions based on such evidence cannot stand.