Opinion ID: 2625875
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Exclusion of Evidence of Police Dispatch Tape

Text: Defendant sought to introduce a copy of parts of the Pasadena police dispatch tape for the late afternoon and evening of November 3, 1980. On the tape, according to a transcript in the record, the police dispatcher is heard to discuss, briefly and sporadically with various police officers and records personnel, an investigation she had apparently been asked to make into recent motor vehicle collisions in Pasadena. [15] In one discussion the dispatcher suggests to a Lieutenant Roberts that with Prentice Snow in custody she thought maybe we didn't need the visor. Roberts corrects her: We need everything we can get on this one. Earlier on the tape the dispatcher mentions to another officer that at Roberts's request she has been looking for something in revab in connection with a suspect in custody from Walnut. At another point she inquires of a department administrator whether an accident at Lincoln and Walnut two days earlier involved a motorcycle. Told it did, she asks whether the motorcyclist was wearing a helmet. Told he was not, she thanks the administrator and ends the conversation. The prosecution police witnesses had testified that the bubble shield that bore defendant's fingerprint was found in a Pasadena street around 12:40 p.m., shortly after Roll's death. Interpreting the dispatch tape excerpts as showing that the police were still in search of a visor, or face shield, much later in the day, the defense argued at the hearing on admissibility of the tape that the dispatch tape impeaches the prosecution witnesses and tends to show the existence of a police conspiracy to manufacture evidence against defendant. The prosecutor objected to the tape as irrelevant hearsay. After listening to the tape, the court stated that it had heard no reference to a bubble shield or visor. Interpreting the dispatcher's remarks about defendant's case as simply her impressions, the court excluded the tape as irrelevant. We agree with the trial court that the tape was irrelevant. Nothing said on the tape indicates the existence of a conspiracy to frame defendant. The dispatcher apparently knew little or nothing about the Roll murder investigationuntil told by officers in the taped conversations, for example, she did not know who the suspected killer was or that he was in custody. Her remarks on tape are, as the trial court said, merely her impressions and not evidence of a police plan. Moreover, neither she nor any of the officers to whom she speaks discuss any plan to manufacture evidence against defendant. The defense theory of relevance is apparently that discussion of a visor and a motorcycle accident in the late afternoon or evening of November 3 contradicts police testimony that the bubble shield introduced at trial was recovered in the early afternoon, and hence tends to show that testimony to be false and that the police intended to find an unrelated bubble shield and somehow link it to defendant. Even setting aside some obvious questions regarding the plausibility of the defense theory, [16] the tape is equally or more consistent with an innocent explanation than with the alleged conspiracy. Because the bubble shield had been found in a street some distance from the crime scene, it was possible that it had been deposited there as the result of a prior motorcycle accident and had nothing to do with Koll's killer. The investigating officers would logically want to exclude that possibility by determining that there had been no such accident in the vicinity in the recent past. If any inference may be made from the tape, that appears the most reasonable. More to the point, the defense offered, and offers, no coherent factual theory for conspiratorial use of a later-recovered visor. Defendant himself testified, at both his trials, that the bubble shield introduced at trial bore his fingerprint because he pushed at it when it was thrust at him during the afternoon court session on November 3. The defense further presented testimony of an attorney trying another case on that day that a helmet with a bubble shield was brought into his courtroom during the afternoon session. But if, as defendant asserts, the tape shows that into the evening of November 3 the police were still looking for a bubble shield with which to frame him, how could they have already obtained his fingerprint on one at midafternoon? Whether taken on its own, therefore, or viewed in the context of all the trial evidence, the tape had no tendency in reason (Evid.Code, § 210) to show a police conspiracy to manufacture evidence against defendant. For the same reason, the tape's exclusion did not deprive defendant of his constitutional rights, and any error in excluding it would be considered harmless under any standard.