Opinion ID: 2785252
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The People’s Direct Case

Text: The People’s case was almost entirely circumstantial.12 District Attorney Fitzpatrick, who tried the case himself, presented Rivas as an obsessive, jilted 11Calle was later indicted and convicted on federal charges of obstruction of justice and mail fraud unrelated to his representation of Rivas. He was disbarred from the practice of law in New York State nine years after Rivas’s trial. See In re Calle, 301 A.D.2d 218, 749 N.Y.S.2d 528 (1st Dep’t 2002). 12Several of Rivas’s fingerprints had been found on items in Hill’s house, including a bottle of wine. However, the prosecution acknowledged at trial that Rivas had been in the apartment many times before, including in the week prior to Hill’s death. 18 lover who harassed Hill following their breakup and was pushed over the edge when he learned that Hill was planning to take a trip to the Bahamas alone. Trial Tr. at 1127–28. As Fitzpatrick summarized: ‚Hector Rivas stalked this woman [for] two and a half months, and finally strangled her and killed her in a jealous rage on March the 27th of 1987.‛ Id. at 1069. Trial testimony and exhibits supported at least part of this theory. Friends of Hill testified that Rivas persisted in contacting Hill on a regular basis, even after she had made clear that she did not want to continue or revive their relationship. In addition, the prosecution introduced dozens of notes, cards, and letters that Rivas had written to Hill in the months between their breakup and her death. See id. at 1092–97. Police investigators also testified regarding Rivas’s strange behavior when he was first questioned, including his lack of reaction when he was told that Hill had died. Id. at 247. Several witnesses testified regarding Rivas’s whereabouts on Friday, March 27, 1987, the alleged date of the murder. Taken together, the testimony of these witnesses suggested that there may have been a window of time during which Rivas could have gone to Hill’s house and strangled her while en route from Coleman’s in Syracuse to Albert’s in Cazenovia, about thirty minutes away. Prosecution witnesses testified that Rivas left Coleman’s at around 9:00 or 9:30 p.m. and did not arrive at Albert’s until sometime between 11:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. Id. at 461–63, 439–40, 849. One witness, a clerk at a liquor store near Hill’s apartment, testified that he saw Rivas enter the store between 9:30 19 and 10:00 p.m. Id. at 496–99. Two witnesses testified that they observed Rivas smoking a cigarette in his car, which was parked outside Hill’s house, sometime between 11:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. that night—around the time that the prosecution theorized Hill was murdered. Id. at 533–34, 936–37.13 Beyond making the case that Rivas had motive and the opportunity to murder Hill on Friday night, Fitzpatrick deftly turned Rivas’s alibi for Saturday against him. Through witness testimony and in his opening and summation, Fitzpatrick suggested that Rivas had contrived to be seen by many people at all hours of the day Saturday and into Sunday morning, so that he would have an alibi in the event that police focused on Saturday evening as the time of death. See, e.g., id. at 1084, 1124. For example, Elizabeth Lewis, one of Hill’s friends, testified that Rivas sought her out at a party Saturday evening and remarked that ‚i+t’s too bad Valerie’s not feeling well, that she can’t be here tonight.‛ Id. at 780. The implication, according to the prosecution, was that Rivas wanted to plant the idea in Lewis’s mind that Hill was alive on Saturday evening, 13 One of these witnesses, Hill’s upstairs neighbor, was in fact called by Rivas as a defense witness, apparently because she had initially told police that she had seen Hill in their shared basement on Saturday morning, March 28. However, under cross examination by Fitzpatrick, she readily conceded that she was mistaken in her initial statement to police and had in fact seen Hill on Friday morning, March 27. Trial Tr. 928–29, 932. 20 knowing that he was at that very moment cementing his alibi. See id. at 1124.14 Similarly, Fitzpatrick emphasized a seemingly exculpatory item of evidence: a Stephen King novel that Hill had checked out from the Cazenovia Public Library, and which a witness had seen in the back seat of Hill’s car on Friday afternoon. See id. at 190–91. The book was returned to the library’s drop box sometime between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, suggesting that Hill (the most likely person to have returned it) was alive at least as late as Saturday afternoon. But Fitzpatrick theorized that it was Rivas who returned the book, hoping that it would cause investigators to believe that Hill was not killed on Friday night, when his alibi was relatively weaker. Id. at 54–55, 1085.15 14 Lewis did not testify that Rivas claimed to have spoken to Hill on Saturday. However, it was her sense, six years later, that he was trying to convey the impression that he had. This purported plan backfired, because Lewis—unlike Rivas—knew that Hill was planning to be out of town that weekend. Rivas’s comment therefore struck her as odd. Trial Tr. [at] 780. 15 As Rivas pointed out in his state collateral motion, however, Hill had requested the book through an interlibrary loan and all of the markings on the book indicated it was from a different library, in Utica. Thus, Rivas (belatedly) argued, only Hill would have known to return it to Cazenovia library and not the original library. Furthermore, although the prosecution’s fingerprint expert examined the book and found three prints that he could not identify, he apparently did not recover any of Rivas’s prints from the book. See Trial Tr. at 588. 21 Finally, [Fitzpatrick] elicited testimony from Joe Fields, an acquaintance of Rivas, who encountered him at Albert’s bar approximately three weeks after the murder. Rivas had been drinking heavily and was crying over Hill’s death. According to Fields, at a moment when Rivas did not know that Fields was in earshot, he said to himself, ‚Valerie, Valerie, I didn’t mean to do it.‛ Id. at 817–18.