Opinion ID: 1910282
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Use of F.B.I. Conviction Record

Text: Appellant asserts a fourth error by contending that the trial court should not have permitted the use of a record of his previous crimes compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to prove aggravating circumstances. He argues that the authentic individual court records alone constitute the proper record. We summarily dismissed the identical complaint in his first trial, Commonwealth v. Jasper, 526 Pa. 497, 510, n. 4, 587 A.2d 705, 712 n. 4 (1991). The prior criminal record was introduced at the penalty phase by a special agent of the F.B.I., Robert Booth, who testified from a document prepared by the Bureau's Identification Division (T.T., 3/20/88, p. 890). The document is furnished for Official Use Only and is regulated by law. Every criminal's arrest by whatever authority is reported to the Bureau's central repository by photograph, fingerprints, aliases, and type of crime. Each file is assigned a federal number. While Appellant challenges the reliability of the rap sheet or crimney as it is commonly labelled, he does not dispute the accuracy of the record. The issue, of course, is whether the F.B.I. record qualifies as a Business Record under 42 Pa.C.S. § 6108(b): § 6108. Business records (a) Short title of section.  This section shall be known and may be cited as the Uniform Business Records as Evidence Act. (b) General Rule.  A record of an act, condition or event shall, insofar as relevant, be competent evidence if the custodian or other qualified witness testifies to its identity and the mode of its preparation, and if it was made in the regular course of business at or near the time of the act, condition or event, and if, in the opinion of the tribunal, the sources of information, method and time of preparation were such as to justify its admission. (c) Definition.  As used in this section business includes every kind of business, profession, occupation, calling, or operation of institutions whether carried on for profit or not. Appellant insists that the F.B.I. compilation fails to satisfy (b) because there was no evidence as to how the information was assembled, the sources of the information, the method of preparation, and whether the information was prepared at or near the moment when the data were received (Brief, p. 23). He concludes that the document was untrustworthy as a business record in overcoming the hearsay rule. The trial judge ruled the testimony to be admissible on three grounds. First, this document is an official business record, kept in the ordinary course of the business of the F.B.I. (Trial court opinion, p. 32). Second, more accurately according to the court is its admissibility under 42 Pa.C.S. § 6109, the Uniform Photographic Copies of Business and Public Records as Evidence Act, which sanctions the admissibility of accurately reproduced copies of original records, citing for additional authority on this point to McCormick, Evidence (3rd Ed.1984) at p. 713. (Trial court opinion, pp. 29-32). Third, the court pointed out that the prosecution did offer the testimony of the Clerk of Quarter Sessions in Philadelphia to prove Appellant's prior conviction for murder in the first degree in 1986. In this last regard, the trial court opinion (at p. 28, n. 6) notes that the Appellant himself put into evidence his own imprisonment in a federal conviction. On these bases, the court held that we decline to require a prosecutor to bring in clerks and official court records from all over the country (Trial court opinion, p. 33). We conclude that the evidence was introduced as a business record offering competent proof of the matters asserted in them. Agent Booth testified that the record was compiled in the regular course of business by a law enforcement authority. There is nothing on the record to demonstrate to any degree that the F.B.I. document was unreliable regarding the sources of information and method and time of preparation so as to make the information inadmissible. Providing that the evidence meets the standards of the Act and is otherwise admissible, the trial court has discretionary power as to the acceptability of business records. Henderson v. Zubik, 390 Pa. 521, 136 A.2d 124 (1957). On point, moreover, is our opinion in Commonwealth v. Graver, 461 Pa. 131, 334 A.2d 667 (1975), which decided that permanent police logs compiled from police reports are business records and properly admissible by a record custodian who lacked knowledge of the criminal acts or who placed them in the log: Appellant is simply incorrect in his contention that the custodian did not know what information the maker had, where he got such information and the circumstances under which it was made. Indeed the custodian testified from the logs which recorded the sources of the information, what those sources knew and what action they took, and that the log was compiled each day from daily police reports. 461 Pa. at 139, 334 A.2d at 672. This applies directly to the instant case, as does the following statement from McCormick, supra, at p. 874 (footnotes omitted): Under the common law exception, the entries were required to be original entries and not mere transcribed records or copies. This was based on the assumption that the original entries were more likely to be accurate than subsequent copies or transcriptions. In business practice, however, it is customary for daily transactions such as sales or services rendered to be noted upon slips, memorandum books or the like by the person most directly concerned, and for someone else to collect these memoranda and from them make entries into a permanent book such as a journal or ledger. In these cases, the entries in the permanent record sufficiently comply with the requirement of originality. They would certainly be admissible if the slips or memoranda disappeared, and should, it seems, be admissible as the original permanent entry without proof as to the unavailability of the tentative memoranda. We find no merit to Appellant's claim of error on this issue. Finally, under our statutory duty to review death cases to determine whether the imposed sentence of death is excessive or disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases, according to 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(h)(3)(iii), we have conducted an evaluation of all convictions of murder of the first degree prosecuted under the Act of September 13, 1978, P.L. 756, No. 141, 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711. We have reviewed the data and information pertaining to similar cases that have been compiled by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts (AOPC) pursuant to this Court's directive as enumerated in Commonwealth v. Frey, 504 Pa. 428, 475 A.2d 700 (1984). We find that the sentence of death is not excessive or disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases, 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(h)(3)(iii). We also find that the evidence supports the finding of an aggravating circumstance specified in subsection (d), 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(h)(3)(ii), and that the sentence was not the product of passion, prejudice or any other arbitrary factor, 42 Pa.C.S. § 9711(h)(3)(i). The judgment of sentence is affirmed. [7] CAPPY, J., files a concurring opinion in which NIX, C.J., joins.