Opinion ID: 445460
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Kay Dickson's Testimony.

Text: 85 Buhajla also complains that the district court erroneously prevented his first witness, Kay Dickson, from testifying that Buhajla told her in the presence of six other people that a King Air was stored on his property in early February of 1983. The court sustained the Government's hearsay objection to this testimony. Buhajla argues that, since the out-of-court statement he made to Kay Dickson was not offered for the truth of the matter asserted, it did not constitute hearsay. We agree. 86 Hearsay, of course, is defined as a statement, other than one made by the declarant while testifying at the trial or hearing, offered in evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted. Fed.R.Evid. 801(c). Kay Dickson's testimony was not offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted by Buhajla--that a King Air was stored on his property. Rather, it was offered to support an inference of innocence: a man with guilty knowledge is not likely to advertise his possession of stolen property. 87 It is axiomatic that verbal conduct which is assertive but offered as a basis for inferring something other than the matter asserted is excluded from the federal definition of hearsay. Fed.R.Evid. 801(a) advisory committee note (1975). In United States v. Parry, 649 F.2d 292 (5th Cir.1981), for example, defendant was charged with acting as an intermediary in drug sales between undercover agents and third parties. He claimed, however, that he had acted on the good faith belief that he was assisting the undercover agents in their investigation. To bolster his theory of the case, defendant offered his mother's testimony that he told her that the telephone calls he had been receiving were from a narcotics agent with whom he was working. We held that the testimony was erroneously excluded on hearsay grounds: 88 As Parry explained to the district court, this statement was not offered to prove that the caller was a narcotics agent or that Parry was working with the agent, but to establish that Parry had knowledge of the agent's identity when he spoke. In other words, Parry offered the statement as the basis for a circumstantial inference by the jury that, if this statement was in fact made--a question which the in-court witness would testify to while under oath, before the jury, and subject to cross-examination--then Parry probably knew of the agent's identity. Using an out-of-court utterance as circumstantial evidence of the declarant's knowledge of the existence of some fact, rather than as testimonial evidence of the truth of the matter asserted, does not offend the hearsay rule. 89 Id. at 295 (emphasis supplied). Here, Dickson's testimony was offered as circumstantial evidence of the declarant's ignorance of some fact. Since the statement was offered simply to support an inference which the jury might reasonably have drawn regardless of the truth of the assertion, we think it was clearly not hearsay. 90 We are convinced, however, that exclusion of Kay Dickson's testimony was harmless error. In the past, we have applied both the harmless beyond a reasonable doubt standard of Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967), and the substantial influence standard of Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 66 S.Ct. 1239, 90 L.Ed. 1557 (1946), to erroneous hearsay rulings. Compare United States v. Martinez, 588 F.2d 495, 499 (5th Cir.1979) with United States v. Parry, 649 F.2d at 296. The error here was harmless under either standard. 91 Although Kay Dickson was not allowed to testify about Buhajla's public avowals with respect to the King Air, Buhajla himself testified about a conversation he had with Kay Dickson during which several people heard him state that a King Air was parked on his property. It is true that exclusion of Dickson's testimony deprived Buhajla of evidence corroborating this specific aspect of his own testimony. The point of this evidence, however, was simply to demonstrate that Buhajla publicly acknowledged the King Air's presence on his property; the fact that Buhajla's statement was made to Kay Dickson was not itself significant to the defense. Leon Bibbins testified without objection that Buhajla was proud that he had a King Air that landed at this short strip and that Bibbins was around many, many times when he talked about it. Record Vol. XXV at 3348. It appears, therefore, that evidence with the same exculpatory value as Kay Dickson's excluded testimony was presented to the jury. The jury obviously refused to draw the inference of ignorance that, according to Buhajla, follows from this evidence. In light of the direct testimony that Buhajla was paid $1000 a day to store the plane and that he originally told investigators, until he was shown photographs indicating the opposite, that there had never been a King Air on his property, we are convinced that Kay Dickson's testimony would not have tipped the balance in Buhajla's favor. Cf. United States v. Gonzalez, 700 F.2d 196, 202 (5th Cir.1983) (harmless error to exclude evidence of out-of-court corroborating statement where trial testimony to same effect was rejected as unbelievable). 92