Opinion ID: 2326713
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Pierre Swails

Text: On April 3, 2008six days before trial commencedthe court held a hearing on the defense motion to suppress the club-photo identifications of appellant on the ground of suggestivity. During that hearing, Detective Whalen, one of the detectives who participated in the photo identification procedures, testified about witnesses who viewed the club photographs but did not identify appellant. The prosecutor told the court that the name of one of the witnesses was Pierre Swails, and explained that, without disclosing Swails's name, the government had provided a redacted write-up of a detective's interview with Swails as part of the February 2007 discovery packet. The prosecutor also read aloud a portion of a letter that the government had sent to the defense on March 12, 2008, in which the government had referred to Swails, again without disclosing his name. The March 12, 2008 letter included the following statements: Another witness, who will testify at trial, was shown multiple club photographs and could not identify the shooter for sure, but pointed at two males and said it sort of looks like one of these guys. Apparently, no photo viewing sheet was prepared for this witness. It is not known which club photo the witness was looking at, nor is it known which two males the witness was pointing out, though the witness did give an oral statement to police ..., already provided in discovery, that the shooter was wearing a gray North Face coat (like the one seized from Mr. Mackabee) and that the witness saw a black male pull out a handgun and shoot the girl. Upon hearing Detective Whalen's testimony and the prosecutor's remarks, appellant's defense counsel realized for the first time that witness Swails not only had failed to single appellant out from among the club group photos, but had pointed to two other men shown in one of the group photographs as resembling the shooter. Defense counsel told the court that she had previously assumed that the guy had pointed out a picture of my client and a picture of someone else. But now it comes to light that he picked out two other people. Telling the court that this is not just a failure to identify, but an identification of two other people, defense counsel challenged the government's failure to provide this information earlier as a Brady violation. The court heard testimony and arguments on the issue at the April 7, 2008 proceeding. At the April 7 hearing, Detective Whalen further testified that Government Exhibit 5 was the photograph containing the two men that Swails chose, and that the two men at the opposite ends of the photo were the two men he said sort of look[ed] like the shooter. Whalen's testimony made apparent that the prosecutor had been incorrect in stating, in the March 12 letter, that [i]t is not known which club photo the witness was looking at, nor is it known which two males the witness was pointing out. Thereupon, defense counsel requested a sanction for the government's Brady violation or at least a one- or two-day continuance so that she could locate Swails. [20] The trial court questioned whether the information constituted exculpatory Brady information and characterized it as a mere failure to identify. The court denied defense counsel's request for sanctions or for a continuance but ordered the government to disclose Swails's contact information to the defense. The next day (one day before trial), defense counsel reported that she had been unable to locate Swails using the contact information provided by the government and that the government also could not find him. Defense counsel renewed her request for a continuance, which the trial court denied. Swails did not testify at trial, and, as appellant's brief decries, the jury never heard evidence that a witness who saw the shooting did not identify Mr. Mackabee as the shooter. On appeal, appellant renews his claim that the government violated Brady by failing to make timely disclosures about Swails, and argues that the government's conduct cost [him] the opportunity to present Mr. Swail's exculpatory testimony at trial, and to investigate the two men he identified as the likely shooter in support of a potential third-party perpetrator defense. Appellant also asserts that Swails's testimony would have critically bolstered the credibility of Mr. Green's description of the perpetrator as someone other than [appellant]. Appellant's Brady claim related to Swails presents questions of both whether the evidence was exculpatory, and whether the evidence was suppressed. We begin our analysis by observing that Swails's failure to identify appellant from the club photographs was not itself exculpatory. See Johnson v. United States, 544 A.2d 270, 275 (D.C.1988) (mere failure of a witness to make an identification is not exculpatory); see also Davis v. United States, 735 A.2d 467, 476 n. 14 (D.C.1999) (failure to identify not exculpatory); United States v. Rezaq, 156 F.R.D. 514, 518 (D.D.C. 1994), vacated in part, 899 F.Supp. 697 (D.D.C.1995) (witness's remark that he was unable to finger defendant is neutral, not exculpatory). What appellant asserts was exculpatory (the government asserts that it was merely marginally favorable and of little exculpatory value) is that Swails pointed to two other individuals in the photographs, saying that the shooter sort of looks like one of these guys, while not pointing to appellant. We can assume without further discussion that this quasi-identification was truly exculpatorycertainly, it was evidence of a kind that would suggest to any prosecutor that the defense would want to know about it, [21] a test that we have called an eminently sensible standard for whether evidence is exculpatory [22] because the dispositive issue is whether it was material. As already discussed, for the materiality test to be met, prejudice must have ensued [23] from the non-disclosure. That is, there must be a reasonable probability that, had the evidence been disclosed, the result of the proceeding would have been different. Cone, 129 S.Ct. at 1783. Here, these criteria are not met, and thus we are not persuaded that the government suppressed material information. To begin with, we cannot conclude that prejudice ensued from the government's delay in providing more information about Swails because the February 2007 discovery package provided the defense with investigatory leads as to Swails. One of the documents in the package was a Complainant Witness Statement taken by Officer Bryan Kasul on January 20, 2007, stating that the witness (who, prosecutors confirmed at the April 7 hearing, was Swails) was in the club performing on stage with a band and at some point saw a black male, who wore a gray North Face coat, pull out a handgun and shoot the gun. Thus, even before the government disclosed Swails's identity, defense counsel had information that he was a member of the band 3D (i.e., Three Dimension Band, the band that was playing at the club on the night of the shooting). [24] In addition, Detective Waid's redacted report of the interview with Swails contains the unredacted information Peace-a-holics, so the defense had this information about Swails's affiliation as well. And, indeed, defense counsel told the court that when she received the discovery packet from the government, she tried to find the witness through contact with Peace-a-holics, but was unsuccessful. [25] As already noted, the club was closed shortly after the murder, cutting off one point of access to witnesses, and possibly contributing to defense counsel's inability to find Swails when she received the February 2007 discovery package. It appears that this, rather than the timing of the disclosure of identifying information about Swails, was a principal cause of why neither side was able to find him to testify at trial. Cf. Curry v. United States, 658 A.2d 193, 198 (D.C.1995) (upholding trial court finding that, because witness Jones probably would not have been located even if the defense had learned of his statement at or about the time the indictment was returned and because it would have been extremely difficult to locate him even at that time, defendant was not prejudiced by government's late disclosure of Jones's exculpatory statement). [26] Further, appellant's challenge rests in large measure on the possibility that, through fuller and earlier disclosure, the defense team might have spoken with Swails, might have been able to locate the two men who sort of look like the shooter, and might have uncovered information to undermine the government's theory that appellant was the assailant. [27] But it is not enough for appellant to describe a mere possibility that [the] undisclosed information might have helped the defense, or might have affected the outcome of the trial. [28] For several reasons, he has not shown a reasonable probability of a different result had the disclosure occurred earlier. Strickler, 527 U.S. at 291, 119 S.Ct. 1936 (emphasis in the original). For one thing, as the trial judge observed, there was not any other evidence that anybody else picked either of those two people (that Swails picked) as the man with the gun (and there is no evidence that either of them was in the club on the night of the shooting). For another, appellant's argument that Swails's testimony would have bolstered Green's testimony and would have directly challenge[d] Mr. Caldwell's identification of Mackabee as the shooter involves little more than speculation. Green thought the shooter stood at least six feet tall and weighed 200 to 250 pounds, while Swails told police that the shooter resembled two men who (as observed by the trial judge) appear[ed] to be about 5 feet 10 inches and whose thin build more closely resembled that of appellant in the club photo than that of the much larger Caldwell. [29] In addition, like other eyewitnesses to events in the club (Caldwell, Dobbins, Saunders, and Atkinson, [30] all of whom told police that appellant was wearing a gray coat), Swails told police that the shooter was wearing a gray North Face coat (and police seized a black-and-gray North Face jacket from appellant's home after the murder). Cf. Cotton v. United States, 388 A.2d 865, 873 (D.C.1978) (The remote possibility that the evidence which the government failed to produce might have been favorable to the defense is not, by itself, sufficient to invoke the principles of Brady.  (quoting March v. United States, 362 A.2d 691, 703 (D.C.1976))). Finally, we are not persuaded that the information about Swails's having selected the images of two other men from a group photograph, while not identifying appellant from a similar group photograph, could reasonably be taken to put the whole case in such a different light as to undermine confidence in the verdict. Strickler, 527 U.S. at 290, 119 S.Ct. 1936 (quoting Kyles, 514 U.S. at 435, 115 S.Ct. 1555). The potential impeachment that appellant claims would have been possible with Swails's testimony has to be viewed in the context of all the evidence at trial, which included appellant's motive to get back at the individual at the club who had mistreated Atkinson; the testimony of Dobbins and Saunders, identifying appellant as the person they saw enter the club immediately before the shooting, after refusing to be searched and threatening them, and then saw leave within seconds after the shooting, with a gun in his hand; Caldwell's identification that appellant was the shooter; and the similarity between the North Face coat several witnesses said the shooter wore and the one found in appellant's home. In short, the evidence that appellant was the shooter was strong (if not overwhelming), and the matters discussed above do not undermine our confidence in the outcome of appellant's trial.