Opinion ID: 2545831
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Cross-examination of a Prosecution Rebuttal Witness

Text: At the penalty phase, defendant presented a substantial case in mitigation. Dr. Arthur Kowell, a neurologist, testified that the Nicolet BEAM machine showed an abnormality in defendant's middle-left posterior temporal lobe. A BEAM test on defendant's son Richard detected a similar abnormality in the same area of Richard's brain. Magnetic resonance imaging or MRI scans showed that defendant also had a tumor at the base of his skull, near the brain center for impulse control. According to Dr. Robert Bittle, a psychiatrist, defendant's BEAM results indicated both brain damage and organic dysfunction. He stated that damage to an individual's left temporal lobe may cause sudden mood shifts and aggressive, violent, destructive outbursts. Dr. Donald Lunde, a Stanford University professor of clinical psychiatry, concluded that defendant was raised in a dysfunctional family in which his mother, Geraldine Sapp, was the dominant figure. Geraldine had various problems, including psychiatric for which she was prescribed powerful antipsychotic drugs. She was inappropriately punitive, beating her children with a belt even for small infractions. Psychologist Dr. Gretchen White expressed her opinion that defendant had grown up in an atmosphere which ... consistently and systematically undermined the civilizing influences of authority and societal figures. His mother had uncontrollable fits of anger. His oldest brother, Wayne, was in prison while defendant was growing up. And a first cousin was on death row. Psychologist Dr. Stephen Pittell, the director of three Bay Area drug research and treatment centers, testified as an expert on the effects of substance abuse on the central nervous system. From interviews with defendant and his longtime friends, Dr. Pittell learned that defendant had since age 13 consumed an extraordinary quantity and variety of controlled substances including marijuana, LSD, heroin, sedatives, valium, Seconal, methamphetamine, cocaine, and sleeping pills. Dr. Pittell considered defendant to be in the top 5 percent of Bay Area drug abusers. Defendant's friends confirmed that defendant would typically ingest one-half gram of methamphetamine six or seven times during an evening. This amounted to 3000 milligrams or 15 times what is normally lethal. Methamphetamine apparently had a calming effect on defendant, who took it to counteract feelings of anger. Dr. Pittell concluded it worked on defendant in much the same way that Ritalin (a drug closely related to methamphetamine) tends to calm hyperactive children. Psychologist Dr. David Stein, who administered psychological tests to defendant, concluded that defendant suffers from a poor self-image and creates heroic and grandiose kinds of fantasies to make himself feel better. The prosecution, on rebuttal, sought to discredit the defense evidence. One rebuttal witnesses, Dr. Paul Berg, a psychologist, testified that he had reviewed various documents, including the tapes of defendant's confessions in this case, his juvenile court records, the probation report prepared in the felony case of reckless burning of a dwelling, and the psychological evaluations of defendant. Berg had also reviewed the transcripts of the defense penalty phase evidence. In his review of these materials, Dr. Berg saw nothing to suggest that family dysfunction or brain abnormalities would explain defendant's criminal behavior. Instead Berg concluded defendant manifested an antisocial personality disorder, which was characterized by the lack of any restraints from societal prohibitions. The defense sought to cross-examine Dr. Berg about charges of Medi-Cal fraud brought against him, some four years before the penalty phase trial, but then dismissed. As defense counsel explained, Berg had been the subject of a complaint brought by the Attorney General alleging 43 counts of Medi-Cal fraud dating from 1982 to 1987. When Berg prevailed in his suppression motion, the Attorney General refiled the complaint but moved to dismiss it after determining that the remaining evidence was insufficient. Defense counsel argued that the jury in this case had the right to know that Dr. Berg was dishonest. He pointed out that in a recent juvenile court matter a deputy public defender had been allowed to cross-examine Dr. Berg about the conduct underlying the charges. Counsel stated: She asked him, as I would intend to do, if in fact he had committed Medi-Cal fraud.... [ถ] [After additional questioning] Dr. Berg took the Fifth Amendment and his previous testimony on direct [examination was] stricken. The trial court, relying on Evidence Code section 352, ruled the proposed cross-examination on a collateral matter to be more prejudicial than probative, noting that it would consume too much time and would divert[ ] the jury from its primary purpose of deciding the appropriate penalty in this case.
Defendant now contends that the trial court abused its discretion in disallowing the proposed cross-examination, and that its ruling violated defendant's constitutional rights to confront and cross-examine a witness against him. (U.S. Const, 6th Amend.; Cal. Const, art. I, ง 15.) We reject these contentions. As we explained in People v. Wheeler (1992) 4 Cal.4th 284, 14 Cal.Rptr.2d 418, 841 P.2d 938 (Wheeler) : The voters [in enacting Proposition 8] have decreed at the least that in proper cases ... conduct involving moral turpitude should be admissible to impeach a criminal witness. [H] [But Proposition 8's] section 28(d) does preserve the trial court's discretion to exclude evidence whose probative value is substantially outweighed by its potential for prejudice, confusion, or undue consumption of time. (Evid.Code, ง 352.) (Id. at p. 295, 14 Cal.Rptr.2d 418, 841 P.2d 938.) The statute empowers courts to prevent criminal trials from degenerating into nitpicking wars of attrition over collateral credibility issues.... [ถ] ... Moreover, impeachment evidence other than felony convictions entails problems of proof, unfair surprise, and moral turpitude evaluation which felony convictions do not present. Hence, courts may and should consider with particular care whether the admission of such evidence might involve undue time, confusion, or prejudice which outweighs its probative value. (Id. at pp. 296-297, 14 Cal.Rptr.2d 418, 841 P.2d 938.) Although Wheeler, supra, 4 Cal.4th 284, 14 Cal.Rptr.2d 418, 841 P.2d 938 allows for impeaching a witness in a criminal case with evidence of moral turpitude, it cautions that trial Courts should consider with particular care whether to allow such evidence. (Id. at p. 296, 14 Cal. Rptr.2d 418, 841 P.2d 938.) Here, the trial court acted within its discretion in precluding defense cross-examination of Dr. Berg about Medi Cal claims that he submitted years before petitioner's trial and that were never proven to be fraudulent. Defendant asserts that even if proper under state law, the trial court's ruling violated his federal constitutional right to confront a witness testifying against him. We disagree. The federal Constitution's confrontation right is not absolute; it leaves room for trial courts to impose reasonable limits on a defense counsel's cross-examination of a witness. ( Delaware v. Van Arsdall (1986) 475 U.S. 673, 679, 106 S.Ct. 1431, 89 L.Ed.2d 674; People v. Box (2000) 23 Cal.4th 1153, 1203, 99 Cal.Rptr.2d 69, 5 P.3d 130.) We discern no violation of defendant's right to confront and cross-examine Dr. Berg in the trial court's ruling here. Whether Dr. Berg had or had not filed false claims with Medi Cal was, at most, nominally relevant to the subject matter of his testimony: expert opinion that defendant's criminal behavior was attributable to antisocial personality disorder, not brain abnormalities or family dysfunction. Lindh v. Murphy (7th Cir.1997) 124 F.3d 899, cited by defendant, fails to support his claim of federal constitutional error. In that case, a divided federal appeals court granted habeas corpus relief to a defendant who at the mental state phase of his Wisconsin murder trial was precluded from cross-examining a prosecution expert witness about potential sources of bias. The witness, a psychiatrist, testified that the defendant was not suffering from any mental disease when he killed his two victims. At the time of that testimony, the expert witness had felony charges pending against him that could have resulted in the loss of his medical license. As the federal appeals court explained: [The psychiatrist] may have believed that testimony helping the prosecution in this case, which achieved notoriety throughout Wisconsin, would aid his cause, if only because it was bound to come to the attention of the judge who presided in the prosecution against him. ( Id. at p. 901.) Even then, the federal appeals court majority considered the confrontation clause question to be close. ( Lindh v. Murphy, supra, 124 F.3d at p. 901.) It granted relief to the defendant only because of prosecution evidence that the psychiatrist held particularly high stature in his profession, leaving the jury to view him and his testimony in a rosy glow. ( Ibid. ) Here, defendant points to similar evidence of Dr. Berg's high standing as a psychologist. But the evidence also shows that Dr. Berg was not the subject of any criminal prosecution when he testified in this case, and thus unlike the expert witness in Lindh lacked any personal incentive to slant his testimony to aid his cause. Here, the Attorney General had long since obtained a dismissal of the charges against Dr. Berg for lack of evidentiary support; because the evidence necessary to those charges had earlier been suppressed, there was no likelihood of their being refiled. There is another reason why Lindh v. Murphy, supra, 124 F.3d 899, does not assist defendant here. There, central to the court's decision to grant defendant Lindh relief was its conclusion that the state court [proceedings to determine Lindh's mental state when he pulled the trigger were not strictly `sentencing' but rather were closely associated with the issue of guilt or innocence. (Id. at p. 900.) A contrary conclusion would have been fatal to defendant Lindh's confrontation clause claim because that circuit follows the rule that the federal Constitution's confrontation clause does not apply at sentencing, including the balancing phase of capital sentencing. ( Szabo v. Walls (7th Cir.2002) 313 F.3d 392, 397-399 [distinguishing two aspects of the Illinois capital scheme, the capital-eligibility phase from the sentence-selection or balancing phase, and concluding that the right to confrontation does not apply to the latter].) Even assuming that the Sixth Amendment to the federal Constitution protects the right to confront and cross-examine witnesses testifying at the penalty phase of a California capital trial and that this right was infringed by the restriction on defendant's cross-examination of prosecution rebuttal witness Dr. Berg, we conclude defendant suffered no possible prejudice. On rebuttal, the prosecution sought to undercut defense evidence attributing defendant's criminal behavior to psychological and neurological factors outside his control. In addition to Dr. Berg, two other prosecution witnesses testified to that effect: Dr. Douglas Goodin, a neurology professor, testified that the BEAM test results relied on in the defense case in mitigation were not reliable. The technology was considered by its inventor to be experimental. According to Dr. Goodin, the BEAM technology is additionally questionable because of problems with the statistics used in evaluating BEAM test results, which score an extremely high percentage of persons in the abnormal range. Dr. Goodin reviewed defense witness Dr. Kowell's BEAM test results for defendant and defendant's son Richard, and pronounced defendant's results as within the range of normal. Asked about Kowell's determination that Richard's BEAM mapping was virtually identical to defendant'sโimplying some genetic explanation for defendant's criminal behaviorโ Dr. Goodin responded, I think it's nonsense. Goodin testified that but for one insignificant point of overlap, the results for Richard and defendant were completely different. Furthermore, murder victim John Abono's wife, Cathy Nelson, provided rebuttal testimony that defendant had long ago bragged about having a mass in his head, which he anticipated could prove useful to defend a criminal charge. Thus, to a substantial extent, Dr. Berg's testimony was cumulative of the testimony of the other prosecution rebuttal witnesses. Defendant seeks to distinguish Dr. Berg's testimony from that of the two other prosecution rebuttal witnesses on the ground that only Dr. Berg discredited the entire defense case in mitigation, not just parts of it. Defendant argues that the testimony of Dr. Berg attributing defendant's murderous behavior to an antisocial personality rather than family dysfunction or brain abnormalities allowed the jury to reject the defense case in mitigation out of hand. As we explain, this argument fails. The penalty phase jury asked during deliberations to rehear defense evidence regarding the effect of head injuries, brain abnormalities, and psychological influences on defendant's behavior. And that jury took three full days to return its verdict. Thus, the record fails to support defendant's contention that the jury disregarded the defense case in mitigation. We also reject two related arguments made by defendant. He asserts that the prosecution improperly entertained inconsistent theories about Dr. Berg's behavior in this case and in the two cases the Attorney General brought against Dr. Berg for Medi Cal fraud. In the fraud cases, the Attorney General was obviously taking the position that Berg had fraudulently obtained public funds, whereas here the prosecutor, in opposing defendant's motion to cross-examine Berg about Medi Cal fraud, argued that Berg probably had done nothing wrong. Defendant likens this to a prosecutor who, to convict codefendants in separate trials, offers inconsistent theories and facts regarding the same crime. (See Thompson v. Calderon (9th Cir.1997) 120 F.3d 1045, 1058 (in bank), revd. on other grounds sub nom. Calderon v. Thompson (1998) 523 U.S. 538, 118 S.Ct. 1489, 140 L.Ed.2d 728.) We are not persuaded. Whatever similarity may exist between a prosecutor who argues inconsistent theories of individual culpability to obtain convictions of codefendants tried separately and a prosecutor who argues that the facts underlying a dismissed criminal case may ultimately prove more time consuming than probative for impeaching a witness, it does not assist defendant here. As we have already concluded, defendant suffered no possible prejudice from the court's allowing the jury to hear Dr. Berg's testimony without learning that Berg had been the subject of dismissed charges of Medi Cal fraud. Defendant also asserts that trial counsel was ineffective in failing to point out that the prosecutor was advancing a position inconsistent with the Attorney General's case against Dr. Berg and for not arguing that the evidence suppressed in the Attorney General's case against Dr. Berg would have been admissible in this case. These claims too fail for want of prejudice. ( Strickland v. Washington, supra, 466 U.S. at p. 669, 104 S.Ct. 2052.) [3]