Opinion ID: 1162168
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: inadmissibility of coconspirators' declarations

Text: Both Leach and Lorraine Kramer claim that the coconspirator exception to the hearsay rule (Evid. Code, § 1223) was improperly invoked to admit against each of them evidence of the extrajudicial declarations of their ostensible coconspirators. Leach complains of the admission against him of the tape recordings of Edith and Lorraine Kramer's conversations with the undercover deputy sheriff. Lorraine Kramer objects to the admission against her of Hagler's testimony reciting Leach's jailhouse narrative of the facts of the murder conspiracy.
The gravamen of these objections is that any conspiracy which might have existed between the Kramers and Leach was solely a conspiracy to commit the murder of Howard Kramer, and so ended with the successful perpetration of that murder. All the parties to this appeal appear to agree that the controlling law on the time of termination of murder-for-hire conspiracies is set forth in People v. Saling (1972) 7 Cal.3d 844, 851-853 [103 Cal. Rptr. 698, 500 P.2d 610]. We share the parties' views on the pertinence of Saling and accordingly preface our discussion of the issues jointly raised by Saling and the instant case with a detailed explication of the facts of Saling and the views expressed therein as to the proper scope of Evidence Code section 1223, California's codification of the long-established coconspirator exception to the hearsay rule under the common law of evidence. [7] (See generally 4 Wigmore, Evidence (Chadbourne rev. 1972) § 1079, pp. 180-186; Levie, Hearsay and Conspiracy (1954) 52 Mich.L.Rev. 1159, 1161-1164.)
In Saling the defendant had been hired by Murphy (see People v. Murphy (1972) 8 Cal.3d 349 [105 Cal. Rptr. 138, 503 P.2d 594]) to assist in the murder of Murphy's wife. The principal witness against Saling was Jerry Carnes. Carnes testified that he had been approached by Murphy with an offer of money if he would rough up a recalcitrant debtor of Murphy. Carnes did not accept the offer but agreed to try and find someone who would accommodate Murphy. Carnes accordingly broached the offer to Saling, and subsequently took Saling to Murphy's house to introduce the two men. The pair discussed the job in the presence of Carnes. They agreed to a fee of $1,000, with $300 or $500 to be paid in advance. [8] In a later conversation with Murphy, Carnes learned that the planned battery would involve staging a hit and run accident while the victim was helping Murphy change a flat tire. Carnes was to participate in the scheme as a false witness. On the day of the murder Carnes, Saling and Murphy had jointly reconnoitered the scene of the planned accident. That night Carnes parked his car in the arranged location. He saw Murphy drive past, accompanied by a female. Carnes waited another 45 minutes for Saling to appear. During this period Murphy and the woman drove past several times in both directions. Upset by his realization that the victim was to be a woman, Carnes finally decided to abandon the enterprise. After traveling some distance he encountered Saling driving towards the scene of the crime accompanied by Jurgenson, whose car Saling was driving. Saling disclosed that his delay in arriving had been caused by his being stopped by a policeman. Carnes then drove back to the spot where he had been waiting, followed by Saling. Murphy was no longer in the vicinity. Saling said he would find Murphy later, and Carnes left the area. Three days later Carnes learned from a friend that Murphy's wife had been murdered on the night of the supposed battery of a debtor. Carnes thereupon went to Saling's home, where he encountered Jurgenson. Carnes sought an explanation for the murder of Murphy's wife. Jurgenson replied that the true nature of the job had been discussed in Carnes' absence. Jurgenson went on, at Carnes' urging, to describe the details of the murder, and over objection Carnes was allowed to repeat this narrative at Saling's trial. A fortnight or so after Jurgenson's narration, Jerry Carnes' brother Richard was used by Murphy as an intermediary to transmit $200 in cash to Jerry Carnes and $500 in cash to Saling. Shortly after this, through the assistance of the Carnes brothers, the police obtained tape recordings of conversations between Murphy and the Carnes brothers, each of which contained statements highly incriminating of Saling.
The declarations of both Jurgenson and Murphy implicating Saling had occurred out of court and evidence of their content was offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted, i.e., that Saling had participated in the murder of Murphy's wife. This evidence was accordingly hearsay. (Evid. Code, § 1200.) Having disposed of the contention that Jurgenson's declaration was an adoptive admission of Saling (Evid. Code, § 1221; 7 Cal.3d at pp. 849-850, fn. 6), we treated the admissibility of this evidence as being governed exclusively by the coconspirator exception. First, [9] we rejected the contention that two conspiracies were involved, one to murder Murphy's wife, the other to obtain the proceeds of various insurance policies on the victim's life. We found that there was lacking in the record the requisite independent evidence to establish prima facie the existence of an insurance conspiracy. [10] Thus the dispositive question regarding the admissibility of evidence of the declarations became the time of the termination of the conspiracy to murder Murphy's wife. We recognized that [i]t has long been the law in this state that a conspirator's statements are admissible against his coconspirator only when made during the conspiracy and in furtherance thereof, and that [t]he conspiracy usually comes to an end when the substantive crime for which the coconspirators are being tried is either attained or defeated. However, since [p]articular circumstances may well disclose a situation where the conspiracy will be deemed to have extended beyond the substantive crime to activities contemplated and undertaken by the conspirators in pursuance of the objectives of the conspiracy, we decided that it was for the trier of fact  considering the unique circumstances and the nature and purpose of the conspiracy of each case  to determine precisely when the conspiracy has ended. (7 Cal.3d at p. 852.) Since we found it clearly established that the money offered by Murphy for killing his wife motivated [Saling] and Jerry Carnes to participate in the plan, and that the transfer of the money was one of [the conspiracy's] main objectives as far as [Saling] and Carnes were concerned, (id.) we decided that the jury could properly have found that the conspiracy to murder Murphy's wife had not terminated until the time of payment of Saling and Carnes. Since payment to either [Saling] or Carnes had not yet occurred by the time of the conversation between Carnes and Jurgenson only three days after the murder, Jurgenson's statements to Carnes were admissible as being made during the conspiracy. (Id.) However, since the recorded conversations of Murphy with the Carnes brothers were clearly made not only after Catherine Murphy had been killed but also after payment had been made to [Saling] and Jerry Carnes, we ruled that evidence of these statements was inadmissible because they had not been made during any activity in pursuance of any significant objective of the conspiracy. ( Id., at p. 853.) In this respect, we expressly adopted the holding of Krulewitch v. United States (1949) 336 U.S. 440, 443 [93 L.Ed. 790, 794, 69 S.Ct. 716], that conspiracies are not to be deemed still operative merely because the conspirators act in concert to avoid detection and punishment. (7 Cal.3d at p. 853.)
In light of the misunderstanding of Saling apparent in the rulings in this case by both the trial court and the Court of Appeal, two aspects of Saling demand special emphasis. First, Saling did not purport to declare that all conspiracies in which one conspirator is hired by another are to be deemed as a matter of law to continue until the hireling is paid to his satisfaction. Second, Saling was in no way contrary to the explicit language of Evidence Code section 1223 and its three-fold requirement of independent proof of preliminary facts. (See ante, fn. 10.) Our ruling in Saling that evidence of Jurgenson's declaration was admissible under the coconspirator exception was premised on the particular circumstances of that case and had not one but three essential factual elements. To be sure, one element was that neither Carnes, the testifying witness, nor Saling, the defendant against whom the evidence was offered, had been paid in full at the time of Jurgenson's declaration. However, our holding was also expressly premised on the facts that Murphy's offer of money had been the motivation for the participation of both Saling and Carnes, and that the declaration had occurred only three days after the murder. (7 Cal.3d at p. 852.) Nor did we intimate in any way that the particular circumstances which might keep a conspiracy alive after the commission of the crime which was its principal objective could be gleaned from the very evidence of a coconspirator's statement sought to be so admitted under the coconspirator exception. In Saling there was ample independent proof of the continuing nature of the conspiracy in question to establish preliminarily to any substantive consideration of the content of the proffered evidence of the declaration that the evidence was admissible under section 1223. Not only did one of the conspirators testify in court to the nature of and participants in the conspiracy, but also a non-conspirator testified to having witnessed previous associations of the conspirators and to having personally transmitted money from one conspirator to two others after the homicide contemplated by the conspiracy had been accomplished. Thus there was plentiful but nonetheless independent evidence in Saling that the conspirators had still been acting in concert at the time of the post-homicide, prepayment declaration of which evidence was therein deemed admissible.
(2) No remotely comparable independent evidence of the existence of a continuing conspiracy to effect payment to Leach at the time of his admissions, much less at the time of the Kramers' admissions, can be found in the record of this case. Although the trial court correctly observed that independent evidence of a continuing conspiracy was required by Saling, [11] such evidence is simply not to be found in this case. This is not to say that the trial court was incorrect in its finding that there had been a conspiracy to murder Howard Kramer (see ante, fn. 11); the circumstances of the murder and the evidence found on Leach at the time of his arrest were surely sufficient to make out a prima facie showing of a conspiracy. It is even arguable  although we do not decide this point  that this evidence of a conspiracy, in conjunction with the lack of any other apparent motive for Leach's participation, is sufficient to make out a prima facie showing that this was a murder-for-hire conspiracy involving some member of the Kramer household. But what Saling requires, and what is totally lacking in this case, is independent evidence that the conspiracy between Leach and the Kramers was still operative at the time of their respective admissions, notwithstanding the accomplishment of the primary objective of the conspiracy with the death of Howard Kramer. Despite an intimation to the contrary by the trial court (see ante, fn. 11), we find no support in the record for the proposition that the conspiracy between Leach and the Kramers had as a primary objective not only the murder of Howard Kramer but also the collection of insurance proceeds as a result of his death, and hence that the conspiracy was prolonged past the death of Howard Kramer not only for so long as Leach remained unpaid but also for so long as the insurance proceeds remained uncollected. Other than portions of the admissions of the Kramers and Leach, the only evidence in the record arguably relating to such an insurance conspiracy (see People v. Saling, supra, 7 Cal.3d at p. 854) consists of the pretrial testimony of the trust fund administrator for Howard Kramer's union listing the sums paid by his office to Edith Kramer upon Howard Kramer's death, and a more inclusive stipulation at trial itemizing by amount all monies in the nature of insurance received by Edith Kramer following her husband's death. We have heretofore held in Saling that the mere fact that the principal in a murder-for-hire plot was the beneficiary of insurance on the life of the victim falls short of establishing prima facie the existence of an insurance conspiracy concurrently with the murder conspiracy. Indeed, we held in Saling that even the fact that such insurance was fraudulently obtained through the beneficiary's forgery of the insured's application does not transform the fact that such insurance was in force at the time of the insured's murder into prima facie proof of an insurance conspiracy. (7 Cal.3d at pp. 854-855.) It necessarily follows from the reasoning of Saling that the same result must obtain when the record reflects in addition nothing more than that the insurance in force was in due course actually collected by the murderous beneficiary. To hold otherwise would have the artificial effect of making virtually every inter-spousal murder conspiracy a prima facie insurance conspiracy as well, since many spouses have some sort of reciprocal life insurance in force, if only as an incident of employment in the form of private pensions or social security benefits. A murderer playing the part of a bereaved spouse is hardly likely to refuse to accept the payment of such insurance notwithstanding that the collection of insurance proceeds may in no way have been the motive or objective of the murder conspiracy. Of course, as to the admissiblity against Leach of evidence of the declarations of the Kramers, and vice versa, the declarations of Leach and the Kramers respectively may also be considered in determining whether there is prima facie proof by independent evidence of an insurance conspiracy such as would bring the declarations within the coconspirator exception. The Kramers' admissions, however, discount entirely the idea of an insurance conspiracy. At one point, in fact, Lorraine Kramer was asked by the undercover agent: Did they pay double on it? She replied: No  well, see, we didn't do it for the money. That's the thing.... He was a psychopath, but he wasn't insane enough to commit him, and if we did, uh, if we did, he can get out in six months and shoot us all. She and her mother then elaborated on their mutual fear of their victim's violent nature. On Leach's part, his only mention of insurance to Hagler was confined to his description of his bargain with the Kramers as anticipating his being paid off in installments once the Kramers had collected their insurance proceeds. (See ante, p. 425.) This consciousness of the existence of the insurance and expectation of being paid out of its proceeds falls short of establishing, even prima facie, that the conspiracy between Leach and the Kramers was directed towards the successful collection of the insurance. The objective of the conspiracy was to kill Howard Kramer, not to collect insurance, and Leach cared not a whit whence his remuneration came, be it by insurance fraud, bank robbery, or dope peddling. We note that here no special statutes are involved, such as those making it a crime to commit arson with the intent to defraud an insurer (Pen. Code, §§ 450a, 548), and that the existence of a conspiracy is urged not for the purpose of imposing substantive liability but merely as a vehicle for using otherwise inadmissible hearsay evidence against a defendant. In such circumstances we see no basis for further breach of the general rule against the admission of hearsay evidence ( People v. Saling, supra, 7 Cal.3d at p. 853). We accordingly decline to treat a conspiracy to commit a particular criminal offense as necessarily entailing a second conspiracy to collect the insurance proceeds which will be paid as a matter of course upon the successful commission of the contemplated offense. [T]he looseness and pliability of the doctrine [of conspiracy] present inherent dangers which should be in the background of judicial thought wherever it is sought to extend the doctrine to meet the exigencies of a particular case. ( Krulewitch v. United States, supra, 336 U.S. 440, 449 [93 L.Ed. 790, 797] [concurring opn. of Jackson, J.]; cf. People v. Saling, supra, 7 Cal.3d at p. 853.) It should also be noted that even if the independent evidence heretofore discussed were sufficient to establish that the Kramers and Leach were party to an insurance conspiracy, that evidence would not suffice to admit, solely under the auspices of such insurance conspiracy, any proffered evidence of the extrajudicial declarations which occurred after the death of Howard Kramer. Although evidence was adduced below that the Kramers had received insurance proceeds, there was no evidence whatsoever as to when those proceeds had been received. The mere establishment of the existence of a conspiracy at some time prior to an extrajudicial declaration does not meet Evidence Code section 1223's requirement of prima facie proof by independent evidence that that conspiracy was still in existence at the time of the declaration of which evidence is proffered pursuant to the coconspirator exception. (See ante, fn. 10.) The putative insurance conspiracy would normally have terminated upon the receipt of the insurance proceeds, which may well have been months before Leach's admissions to Hagler. Thus even under the insurance conspiracy theory there would still be a need under Saling for independent evidence sufficient to establish, prima facie, the existence at the time of the declarations of continuing efforts by the conspirators qua conspirators  still acting in concert towards the common objective of carrying out their agreement as to payment, notwithstanding the prior attainment of their primary objective of killing Howard Kramer or collecting the proceeds of insurance on Howard Kramer's life. In light of the inconsistency between the record in this case and the ruling below that there was independent evidence that the conspiracy was still continuing when Leach began confiding in Hagler some six months after the murder, it appears that the trial court erroneously read Saling as holding that once there is independent evidence that one conspirator was induced to enter the conspiracy by a promise of payment, then as a matter of law the conspiracy is to be deemed continuing until such time as other evidence indicates payment has been received. Such a presumption that conspirators who stand in an unenforceable debtor-creditor relationship are going to be motivated by a continuing common desire to make a full and satisfactory accounting, and are going to act in concert towards this objective in continuation of their conspiracy to commit the crime for which payment was promised, belies common sense and adds but another layer of tarnish to the already dull finish of conspiracy doctrine. Save where efforts at a payoff are necessary to preserve the debtor's personal safety or to insure that the creditor does not bring about the detection of the conspiracy and the apprehension of the defaulting conspirators, it is commonplace for conspirators to forsake each other once the original substantive object of the conspiracy is achieved or abandoned. Such seems to have been the case with the Kramers and Leach. It is hardly surprising that there was no independent evidence that the conspiracy remained operative because of the continuing collective intention of the conspirators to effect payment, [12] since the evidence of the admissions themselves tends to establish that the conspiracy had terminated and that Leach was being left, in the timeless fashion of forsaken former conspirators, to twist slowly, slowly in the wind. [13] Hagler's testimony shows Leach to be of the opinion that he was being burnt, and therefore desperate enough to employ Hagler to coerce from his silent partners some compensation for his crime. The tape recordings of the Kramers' admissions confirm what was powerfully implicit in their lack of action to benefit Leach in the preceding 15 months: that they were far from anxious to implicate themselves by seeking to pay him off, and were seemingly content to abandon him altogether for as long as he remained incarcerated and unable to resort to extortion. In view of the lack of independent evidence, or indeed of any evidence, of the continuing nature of the conspiracy herein, there is a tangible factual distinction which removes the instant case from the ambit of Saling. Evidence of the admissions of Leach and the Kramers was accordingly not admissible under the aegis of the coconspirator exception. Whether it was admissible under another exception to the hearsay rule is a separate question to which we now turn.
(3) California is one of the few American jurisdictions to heed the virtually unanimous advice of commentators (see, e.g., 5 Wigmore, Evidence (Chadbourne rev. 1974) § 1477, pp. 358-360; McCormick, Evidence (1954) § 255, pp. 549-550; Morgan, The Rationale of Vicarious Admissions (1929) 42 Harv.L.Rev. 461, 481) and code drafters (see Fed. Rules of Evid., rule 804(b)(4); National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Uniform Rules of Evidence (Pamphlet ed. 1953) rule 63(10); American Law Institute, Model Code of Evid. (1942) rule 509) by recognizing evidence of declarations against penal interest as an exception to the hearsay rule. (Evid. Code, § 1230; People v. Spriggs (1964) 60 Cal.2d 868, 875 [36 Cal. Rptr. 841, 389 P.2d 377].) [14] Moreover, under California law the declarant's assertion of the privilege against self-incrimination satisfies the unavailability requirement of the against-interest exception ( People v. Spriggs, supra, 60 Cal.2d at p. 875, fn. 3). The question thus arises whether the evidence of the respective declarations of Leach and Lorraine Kramer, which were indisputably adverse to their respective personal penal interests, was ipso facto reciprocally admissible against Lorraine Kramer and Leach notwithstanding the inapplicability of the coconspirator exception. Writing in 1928, Professor Morgan called for the admissibility of evidence of vicarious admissions to be evaluated in terms of their disserving nature as regards the interests of the declarants, and uncritically assumed that this would hasten the accomplishment of the end for which the courts appear to be striving in the conspiracy cases, for even where a conspirator's utterances are without the scope of his authority as a representative of his fellows, they are usually against his penal interest. ( Morgan, supra, 42 Harv.L.Rev. at p. 481.) Professor Morgan's handiwork, the Model Code of Evidence, was only slightly more reserved in its readiness to admit hearsay evidence of declarations incriminating defendants as well as declarants. The Model Code included declarations against penal interest within the against-interest exception and went on to declare that evidence of so much of a hearsay declaration is admissible as consists of a declaration against interest and such additional parts thereof, including matter incorporated by reference, as the judge finds to be so closely connected with the declaration against interest as to be equally trustworthy. (Model Code of Evid., supra, rule 509(2), p. 255; see also id., com., at p. 257.) Professor Wigmore's position was essentially the same as the Model Code's. (See 5 Wigmore, supra, § 1465, p. 341.) Scholarly assessment of collateral assertions within declarations against penal interest has grown more searching as the admissibility of evidence of such statements has gained currency in the case law. The modern view seems first to have been enunciated in a comprehensive article on declarations against interest which concluded from a review of civil decisions that [j]udicial explanation of the admissibility of collateral statements [was] practically nonexistent. (Jefferson, Declarations Against Interest: An Exception to the Hearsay Rule (1944) 58 Harv.L.Rev. 1, 59.) This article attacked the expressions of Professors Wigmore and Morgan that declarations against interest bespeak the declarants' trustworthy frames of mind, and suggested that evidence of any portions of declarations against interest  especially declarations against penal interest  not actually disserving to the declarant should be inadmissible. [15] The same conclusion has been reached by more recent analyses specifically concerned with the possible functional equivalency of declarations against penal interest and declarations of coconspirators as exceptions to the hearsay rule. (See Davenport, The Confrontation Clause and the Co-Conspirator Exception in Criminal Prosecutions: A Functional Analysis (1972) 85 Harv.L.Rev. 1378, 1396-1398; Note, Preserving the Right to Confrontation  A New Approach to Hearsay Evidence in Criminal Trials (1965) 113 U.Pa.L.Rev. 741, 755-756; Comment, The Hearsay Exception for Co-Conspirators' Declarations (1958) 25 U.Chi.L.Rev. 530, 540.) [16] The criticism of the Model Code's approach to collateral assertions within declarations against interest appears to have had an effect on the draftsmen of subsequent codes of evidence. California's own Evidence Code is silent on the subject both in text (see ante, fn. 14) and comments, in keeping with rule 63(10) of the Uniform Rules of Evidence and rule 804(b)(4) of the Federal Rules of Evidence. (But see the ambiguous advisory committee's note to rule 804(b)(4), Fed. Rules of Evid. [reprinted in 5 Wigmore, supra, § 1477, p. 361, fn. 7].) We agree with the cogent comment that [a]lthough it seems reasonable that no man would state a fact which might cause him to suffer financial loss or imprisonment, it is precisely the purpose of the Constitution  and, we might add, the hearsay rule  to protect defendants from statements of unreasonable men if there is to be no opportunity for cross-examination. (Note, supra, 113 U.Pa.L.Rev. at p. 753.) To paraphrase another commentator, it is no victory for common sense to make a belief that unreasonable men are notorious for their veracity the basis for law. (See Levie, supra, 52 Mich.L.Rev. at p. 1166.) In the absence of any legislative declaration to the contrary, we construe the exception to the hearsay rule relating to evidence of declarations against interest set forth in section 1230 of the Evidence Code to be inapplicable to evidence of any statement or portion of a statement not itself specifically disserving to the interests of the declarant. [17] There being no other arguable avenue of admissibility for evidence of the hearsay declarations of Leach and Lorraine Kramer against other than the respective declarant, it follows that the admission of evidence of these declarations at the joint trial of defendants Leach and Lorraine Kramer was erroneous.