Opinion ID: 2327039
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Defense Witness's Fifth Amendment Privilege

Text: Appellants argue that the trial court violated their Sixth Amendment right to present a defense when it upheld a defense witness's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. One of appellants' theories proposed at trial was that someone else had shot and killed Newton and injured the others, in retaliation for a previous shooting. According to the defense theory, Roy Tolbert had shot at a car with two people from a rival group, known as the Alabama Avenue Crew, six weeks prior to the shooting in this case. In support of their theory, appellants proffered that Michael Raymond would testify that in the fall of 1994, he was riding in a car with two members of the Alabama Avenue Crew when Tolbert shot at them. Appellants asserted that Raymond and his fellow passengers would have been aware of the well-known association in the drug trade between Newton and Tolbert, leading members of the Alabama Avenue Crew to shoot Newton to get even. At trial Raymond asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege, stating that he had a pending case involving drug distribution and that he also was an identified target of an ongoing federal investigation involving the Alabama Avenue Crew, the Simple City Crew and related drug activity in the area. Raymond argued that the testimony appellants wanted to elicit from him would link him to people and places that could incriminate him in aspects of the government's ongoing investigation. Before trial, the court recognized the relevance and importance of the proffered testimony, see Winfield v. United States, 676 A.2d 1 (D.C. 1996), but it disallowed any questioning of Raymond as violative of his Fifth Amendment privilege when the issue surfaced at trial. The trial court considered the possibility of limiting the scope of Raymond's questioning, but concluded that it could not see how [it] could narrow it down to preclude the possibility that these people [in the car] are not involved in the . . . investigation because otherwise it does provide [a link] between Raymond and the subject of the federal investigation. Appellants argue that the trial court erred in granting a blanket Fifth Amendment privilege to Raymond and that it failed to analyze the conflict between appellants' Sixth Amendment right to present a defense and Raymond's Fifth Amendment privilege. They assert that, as a result, this court should remand for a new trial with the Carter procedure in place, referring to our en banc opinion in ( George ) Carter v. United States, 684 A.2d 331, 344-45 (D.C.1996), which provides a process by which the trial court determines the possibility of future prosecution of a proffered defense witness and evaluates the importance of the proffered testimony to the defense against the government's willingness (or lack thereof) to grant immunity to the witness when such immunity is sought by the defense. We find no such error. Because of the ongoing government investigation, prosecution against Raymond was a possibility. The trial court considered limiting Raymond's testimony, but reached the conclusion that anything Raymond had to say useful to the defense would provide a link to the subject of the government's on-going investigation, which already identified him as a target. Although normally a witness's Fifth Amendment privilege is to be asserted and determined on a question-by-question basis, see Littlejohn v. United States, 705 A.2d 1077, 1083 (D.C.1997) (citations omitted), given the information provided to the trial court as to the nature of the testimony appellants sought from Raymond and the scope of the government's then-pending investigation, we conclude that the trial court did not commit error in granting a blanket Fifth Amendment privilege because there was no relevant non-inculpatory testimony that Raymond could have provided on appellants' behalf. See id. Furthermore, we reject appellants' argument that the case should be remanded based on our decision in Carter. Appellants did not request immunity for Raymond pre-trial as required by Carter, see 684 A.2d at 345 (requiring that request for immunity be made pre-trial; [o]nly for good cause shown should this pre-trial procedural requirement be altered) and, as a result, the remedy sought by appellants is not available.