Opinion ID: 77318
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Eduardo Javier Mejia Morales

Text: 22 Eduardo Javier Mejia Morales argues that the district court abused its discretion when it refused to allow the defense to cross-examine government witnesses about their membership in the Cuban government's Communist party as a means of showing the witnesses' motives and bias in testifying against the defendants. 5 He argues that the court violated his Sixth Amendment right to confront adverse witnesses by restricting the scope of cross-examination in a manner which prevented him from challenging the biases of the government's witnesses. 23 The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants an opportunity to impeach through cross-examination the testimony of adverse witnesses. United States v. Baptista-Rodriguez, 17 F.3d 1354, 1370 (11th Cir.1994). The right to full cross-examination increases in importance where the witness is a chief government witness. Baptista-Rodriguez, 17 F.3d at 1366. In evaluating a Confrontation Clause violation, we must keep in mind that [c]onfrontation means more than being allowed to confront the witness physically. Davis v. Alaska, 415 U.S. 308, 315, 94 S.Ct. 1105, 39 L.Ed.2d 347 (1974). The Court held in Davis that the Confrontation Clause requires a defendant to have some opportunity to show bias on the part of a prosecution witness. Id. 24 Nevertheless, the right to cross-examination is limited, as [t]rial judges retain wide latitude to impose reasonable limits on cross-examination based on concerns about, among other things, confusion of the issues or interrogation that is repetitive or only marginally relevant, and [s]uch restrictions are reviewed solely for abuse of discretion. Baptista-Rodriguez, 17 F.3d at 1370-71; De Lisi v. Crosby, 402 F.3d 1294, 1302-03 (11th Cir.2005). A defendant's confrontation rights are satisfied when the cross-examination permitted exposes the jury to facts sufficient to evaluate the credibility of the witness and enables defense counsel to establish a record from which he properly can argue why the witness is less than reliable. Baptista-Rodriguez, 17 F.3d at 1371. We must therefore review whether the district court permitted the defendants to establish a record from which they could challenge the credibility of the government's witnesses. 25 The defendants' theory of the case centered on the contention that the hijacking was an event staged with the participation of the aircraft's crew, and thus could not have constituted aircraft piracy; part of this theory explained that the crew could not openly participate in the staged hijacking because of potential repercussions from the Cuban government. The defendants thus sought to cross-examine the crew members who testified for the government in order to show that their testimony was biased and dictated by the Cuban government, including by Fidel Castro himself. 26 The district court summarized the defendants' theory of the case as follows: What you wish to inject, as I understand it through this series of questions, that they are coming here and not telling the truth. They are perjuring themselves because they want to curry favor with a Communist dictatorship and/or because a Communist dictatorship has told them to come here and perjure themselves. The district court on several occasions denied the defense the right to cross-examine witnesses on their allegiance to the Cuban government's Communist party as foundation to show a motive or bias to lie on the stand. The court explained that it was sustaining objections to the defendants' questions about witnesses' membership in the Communist party because he concluded that line of questioning was only for the purpose of prejudicing anti-Communist jury members against a Communist witness. 27 Nevertheless, the court permitted questions concerning: (1) whether Captain Sanchez received any benefit from the Cuban government or his employer as a result of the incident, (2) whether Captain Sanchez received any pictures with Fidel Castro, (3) whether Captain Sanchez was interviewed by Cuban security officers, (4) whether Captain Sanchez ever served in the Cuban military, (5) whether Captain Sanchez was threatened by anyone in Cuba into testifying against the Defendants, (6) whether Fidel Castro was present when Cuban security interviewed Captain Sanchez regarding the hijacking, (7) whether Hernandez-Garcia received any promotions as a result of his participation in the trial, (8) whether co-pilot Gustavo Adolfo Salas Cleger met with representatives of the Cuban government before testifying at trial, (9) whether Salas Cleger gave television interviews to high ranking officials of the Cuban government, including Fidel Castro, and (10) whether Salas Cleger was accompanied at trial by a representative of the Cuban government. 28 The question presented is thus whether the district court abused its discretion in prohibiting the defendants to question the government's witnesses about their membership in the Communist party, notwithstanding the other questions concerning bias that the court permitted the defense to ask. The defendants argue that the question is controlled by the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Abel, 469 U.S. 45, 105 S.Ct. 465, 83 L.Ed.2d 450 (1984), in which the Court held that a trial court properly admitted evidence pertaining to a defense witness's membership in the Aryan Brotherhood because [a] witness' and a party's common membership in an organization, even without proof that the witness or party has personally adopted its tenets, is certainly probative of bias. Id. at 52, 105 S.Ct. 465. The defendants argue that if membership in an organization may be relevant as evidence of the bias of a defense witness, it must also be relevant as evidence of the bias of a government witness, particularly because of the Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause concerns at stake. 29 We conclude, however, that Abel is distinguishable from the case at bar because the mere fact of membership in the Aryan Brotherhood necessarily implied a willingness to commit perjury on behalf of one of a witness's brothers; in other words, lying on behalf of a fellow member was one of the defining tenets of one's membership in the Brotherhood. See id. at 54, 105 S.Ct. 465 (The attributes of the Aryan Brotherhood—a secret prison sect sworn to perjury and self-protection—bore directly not only on the fact of bias but also on the source and strength of Mills' bias. The tenets of this group showed that Mills had a powerful motive to slant his testimony towards respondent, or even commit perjury outright.). The Court held that the nature of the Aryan Brotherhood organization made testimony regarding the witness's membership particularly probative; thus, the lower court in Abel did not abuse its discretion when it conducted the balancing inquiry, under Federal Rule of Evidence 403, between the probative and prejudicial qualities of the evidence at issue. 30 In this case, the witnesses' membership in the Communist party did not, by definition, impugn their credibility. Membership in a political party, by itself, does not necessarily signify anything about a person's truthfulness and is thus distinguishable from a secret prison sect sworn to perjury and self-protection. Id. at 54, 105 S.Ct. 465. Furthermore, the district court permitted the defendants to question the government's witnesses concerning their potential biases in terms of, inter alia, their meetings with Communist officials in Cuba, whether they felt pressured by the Cuban government to testify in a certain manner, and whether they received any benefits or promotions from the government in exchange for their testimony. In addition, the defendants cross-examined the government witnesses on the reason for there being sufficient fuel in the aircraft to reach Florida, the presence of nautical charts for South Florida on the aircraft, and alleged discrepancies between their testimony at trial and their statements as described in an FBI report. The defendants were not permitted to present a justification defense (i.e., that they were justified in hijacking the aircraft in order to come to the United States to escape a repressive regime), 6 but were permitted to expose[ ] the jury to facts sufficient to evaluate the credibility of the witness or to establish a record from which [they] properly [could] argue why the witness is less than reliable. Baptista-Rodriguez, 17 F.3d at 1370-71. Accordingly, having reviewed the record as a whole, we hold that the district court did not abuse its discretion in disallowing the questions directly inquiring into Communist party membership.