Opinion ID: 1969802
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: 74, a.78, b.17, d.6-8, d.10-11)

Text: The trial court held a pretrial suppression hearing to determine the admissibility of the contents of the seized envelope, including the audio tape. A crucial issue was whether the initial seizure of the envelopes by Mohel was proper. The State attempted to show that the envelopes were in plain view when Mohel saw them, and that their evidentiary importance was apparent to the officers based on the writing on the outside of the letter addressed to Dougherty. Defendant challenged the State's version of the facts, claiming that the mail receptacle into which Marshall had placed the envelopes was a closed box with a slot, and that the officers could not have seen the envelopes inside the box. The warrantless seizure of the envelopes, according to defendant, violated his Fourth Amendment rights and the evidence they contained should have been suppressed. Mohel and Zillah Hahn, the front desk manager of the motel, testified for the State that the motel's mail depository was `an open box that sat up on the counter' at the front desk. Id. at 64-65, 586 A. 2d 85. Another investigator at the scene described it as an open tray. Hahn testified that the motel later began using a closed box with a slot on the top to collect outgoing mail. Mohel and Investigator Edward Murphy revisited the motel in 1985 and the owner, Henry Tajfel, retrieved the tray described by Mohel from a storage shed. Both the tray and the box that replaced it were admitted into evidence at the suppression hearing. Defendant presented the testimony of Paul Rokoczy, the night manager who was on duty on the night of September 27th. Rokoczy testified that the closed box with the slot was the only mailbox that the motel had ever used. The mailman also testified. He stated that he had been delivering mail to the motel since 1978, that he had never seen the open tray, and that the closed box was the only depository he had ever used. Defendant also testified that the closed box was the one he had used on September 27. On cross-examination, Rokoczy admitted that Marshall may have placed his two envelopes on top of the mailbox. Investigator Murphy testified that Rokoczy had told him that the envelope with the tape would not fit through the slot. Lieutenant James Churchill testified that he had experimented with the closed box and the audio tape, and found that neither the original package nor the tape by itself would fit through the slot in the closed box. The trial court resolved the conflict in the testimony in favor of the State. The court found that the open tray retrieved from the storage shed by Tajfel, or one very similar to it, was the one into which Marshall had placed the envelope containing the audio tape. The record shows that the court attached little weight to the testimony of the motel employees, relying instead on the testimony of the investigators because of their greater opportunity and motive to observe what type of mail receptacle had actually been used by Marshall. In particular, Rokoczy was found not to be a credible witness. This Court upheld the trial court's factual determination, finding that it was amply supported by the evidence in the record. Id. at 66, 586 A. 2d 85. Defendant's challenge to those determinations centers on two police memoranda, prepared in connection with the investigation, that the State failed to disclose in response to defendant's discovery requests. One was written by Ocean County Police Chief P.J. Herbert, who was the officer in charge of the scene at the motel. Herbert left the motel before the events that give rise to defendant's claims took place. Thus his memorandum contains no evidence relevant to the legal issues raised by the petition and it need not be considered further. The second was prepared by Investigator Murphy on August 23, 1985. It is addressed to Assistant Prosecutor Kelly and summarizes additional investigation undertaken by Murphy and Mohel. The existence of Murphy's memorandum was discovered by defense counsel during cross-examination of Mohel at the suppression hearing. The prosecutor refused to produce the memorandum, claiming that it was protected by the work-product doctrine. The trial court conducted an in camera review and agreed with the State's position. The memorandum was supplied to counsel on post-conviction relief pursuant to court order in July 1993, and the PCR court acknowledged that its prior ruling at trial was erroneous. The Murphy memorandum recounts the visit to the motel by Murphy and Mohel on August 21, 1985, to collect evidence about the type of mail receptacle that was in use on the night Marshall's letters were seized. The officers first interviewed Zillah Hahn who indicated that the current mailbox was the closed box with the slot to insert mail. Hahn stated that the box had been built and installed by the owner of the motel, and that prior to the installation of that box a tray was used. Hahn could not say when the box replaced the tray. According to the memorandum, Murphy and Mohel returned to speak with the owner, Tajfel, the next day. Tajfel told the officers that the closed box was put into use approximately two years previously, one year before the night Marshall attempted to mail his letters. Tajfel told the officers that, before the box had been put into use, a tray had been used to collect outgoing mail. Tajfel contacted a friend who had constructed the box for him. That person confirmed Tajfel's recollection that the box had been made about two years previously. Tajfel was able to locate the tray, and the officers took possession of it. The officers also interviewed Rokoczy, who told them that the box had been in use on the night that Marshall was at the motel. Rokoczy recalled that Marshall had placed his letters on top of the box because they were too thick to fit through the slot. Rokoczy also stated that he had initially picked up the letters and handed them to Mohel after Marshall had placed them on the box. After defendant received the disputed memoranda in 1993, he sent his own investigator to the Best Western motel to interview Tajfel. The defense investigator learned from Tajfel that the box builder, Ben Bogart, was a former employee, but that Tajfel believed that Bogart was deceased. Tajfel no longer remembered the details of his conversation with the investigators in 1985, but he recalled that he had answered their questions truthfully at the time. Defendant's trial counsel certified to the PCR court that if he had been permitted to see the Murphy memorandum he would have interviewed Tajfel and the box builder and produced them as witnesses at the suppression hearing. Defendant claims that the failure to turn over the memoranda constituted a violation of the State's duty under Brady, supra, to provide to defendant material, exculpatory evidence. Whether evidence is material and thus subject to disclosure under the Brady rule is a mixed question of law and fact. United States v. Pelullo, 14 F. 3d 881, 886 (3d Cir.1994); United States v. Perdomo, 929 F. 2d 967, 969 (3d Cir.1991); Carter v. Rafferty, 826 F. 2d 1299, 1306 (3d Cir.1987), cert. denied, 484 U.S. 1011, 108 S.Ct. 711, 98 L.Ed. 2d 661 (1988). The lower court's decision in deciding what legal standard governs a Brady claim is reviewed de novo. Pelullo, supra, 14 F. 3d at 886. If the correct standard is applied, the court's factual determination will be reversed only if clearly erroneous. Ibid. The sole issue is whether the evidence provided by the memoranda was material for purposes of the Brady rule. In the typical case, the trial court must weigh the probable impact of the withheld evidence on the jury's determination of guilt to determine whether it was material under Brady. As the Third Circuit has noted in the context of a direct appeal, the trial court's weighing of the evidence merits deference ... especially given the difficulty inherent in measuring the effect of a non-disclosure on the course of a lengthy trial covering many witnesses and exhibits. United States v. Price, 13 F. 3d 711, 722 (3d Cir.), cert. denied, 511 U.S. 1096, 114 S.Ct. 1863, 128 L.Ed. 2d 485 (1994). In this case, however, the evidence at issue is relevant to a collateral issue raised in a suppression hearing: whether Marshall's envelopes were in plain view and thus properly seized by the police. The finder of fact was the trial judge, not a jury. The same judge decided the Brady claim raised in the petition for PCR. We are thus faced with an unusual situation in which the original finder of fact has the opportunity to rule on the materiality of the withheld information, and thus whether there was a reasonable probability that, had the [suppressed] evidence been disclosed to the defense, the result of the proceeding would have been different. Knight, supra, 145 N.J. at 244, 678 A. 2d 642 (1996) (quoting Bagley, supra, 473 U.S. at 682, 105 S.Ct. at 3383, 87 L.Ed. 2d at 494 (1985)). We believe that the PCR court's finding that the withheld information would not have changed its original determination is entitled to special weight in those circumstances. Defendant would have us find that, because the trial judge ruled against him in the first proceeding, he has exhibited bias and should be disqualified from ruling on any claims concerning the suicide tape on PCR review. Defendant points to the court's ruling on the status of the Murphy memorandum as work-product and the court's refusal to give credence to defendant's attempts to impeach Churchill's testimony as evidence of the court's bias. However, bias is not established by the fact that a litigant is disappointed in a court's ruling on an issue. Beyond that argument, defendant makes no showing of bias on the part of the trial court, and we therefore reject that claim. On post-conviction relief, the court again reviewed the Murphy memorandum. It found that the statements of Hahn and Rokoczy were consistent with their testimony at trial. Assuming that the testimony of Tajfel and Bogart would have been consistent with the statements recorded in the memorandum, the court found that the memorandum would have been merely cumulative, and less specific than the testimony of the defense witnesses who did testify. Accordingly, the PCR court found that [t]he evidence at the suppression hearing clearly led to the conclusion ... that [the tray] was the mail receptacle present and nothing contained in the memorandum of August 23, 1985, had the capacity to have affected that determination. Regarding defendant's argument that disclosure of the memorandum would have led to additional, favorable evidence from Tajfel, the court stated that Tajfel's testimony could not have conceivably changed the result of the hearing. We are satisfied that the standard of materiality applied by the PCR court was at least as protective of defendant's right under Brady, supra, to disclosure of the memo as the standard set forth in Bagley, supra, and Knight, supra . The lower court made clear that there was no chance that the result would have been different had defendant had access to the memorandum, and certainly not a reasonable probability that he would have prevailed at the suppression hearing. The factual component of the judge's finding  that he would not have ruled differently had defendant had access to the withheld information  is not clearly erroneous. At the suppression hearing, the court found that the conflicting evidence could support the conclusion that the motel's use of the tray and the mailbox could have overlapped, and that both might have been present at the front desk at the same time. Therefore, even if Bogart were available, the best defendant could hope for would be that Bogart would testify authoritatively that he had built the slotted box for Tajfel before the night of September 27, 1984. That testimony would not directly contradict the testimony that Marshall had placed his letters into a tray. Defendant contends that he has also been deprived of Tajfel's testimony, because he no longer remembers the relevant details. However, like the hypothetical testimony of Bogart, even if Tajfel had testified that the box was placed in service before Marshall's stay at the Best Western, that testimony would have merely duplicated other testimony, and it would have been contradicted by other evidence that the trial court found to be credible. Justice Handler's dissenting opinion asserts that the only witnesses who consistently professed that the mail receptacle was an open tray were the two officers who had seized the tape. Post at 346, 690 A. 2d at 130. That assertion ignores Zillah Hahn's trial testimony that the mail depository on the night in question had been an open box. That testimony was not contradicted by the Murphy memorandum, which states only that Hahn could not recall the date when the tray was replaced by the mailbox. That same assertion understates the significance of the Murphy memorandum's detailed reference to Paul Rakoczy's recollection that the letters were on top of the mailbox because they were too thick to fit into the mail slot and that to his best recollection he actually picked up the letters and handed them to Investigator Mohel. Finally, defendant has failed to undermine the testimony of Lieutenant Churchill, who stated that neither the envelope as it was retrieved from the motel with the tape and the letter inside, nor the tape by itself would fit through the slot in the closed mailbox. Defendant claims that Churchill wrongly performed his experiment with the tape inside its plastic cover, thus increasing its width so that it would not fit through the slot. Marshall testified that he had put the tape in the envelope without a cover, and defendant notes that the police inventory of the envelope did not mention a cover. However, Churchill testified concerning the chain of possession of the envelope and its contents, and stated that when he tried to fit it through the mail box's slot the envelope was exactly as it had been retrieved from the motel. The trial court was entitled to disbelieve Marshall's testimony that there had been no cover on the tape and to conclude that the cover had been omitted from the police inventory. Churchill's testimony further undermines defendant's claim that the withheld memorandum was material for Brady purposes. Accordingly, we uphold the ruling of the PCR court that the failure to turn over the memoranda did not violate defendant's Brady rights, on the ground that the withheld evidence was not material. Our finding on the Brady issue causes several of defendant's other claims to fall as well. Defendant claims that the failure to turn over the memoranda constituted substantive violations of his rights under the Fourth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution, and Article I, Paragraphs 1, 7, 10, and 12 of the New Jersey Constitution. Assuming that the failure to turn over the memoranda constituted a direct violation of those constitutional provisions, our conclusion that disclosing the memoranda would not have materially influenced the outcome of the suppression hearing indicates that those alleged violations would have been harmless. Defendant also claims that his counsel was ineffective when he failed to have the Murphy memorandum held as an exhibit for appellate review of the trial court's decision that the memorandum was privileged work-product. That failure prejudiced defendant, he claims, because, if the work-product ruling had been reversed on direct appeal, defendant could have interviewed Tajfel when his memory was fresher and Bogart was still alive. This claim also fails on the ground that the lost testimony would not have affected the outcome of the hearing. Finally, two of defendant's claims that fall within this category assert that the cumulative effect of the other violations entitles him to relief. In view of the lack of merit in the underlying allegations, we reject defendant's cumulative claims. 2. Claims Based on Evidence Relevant to Whether the Tape Should Have Been Suppressed on the Ground That It Was Subject to the Attorney-Client Communication Privilege