Opinion ID: 216020
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Wood's Videotaped Statement Was an Important Piece of Evidence

Text: As Appellee conceded at oral argument, Wood's videotaped statement was a significant piece of evidence. The prosecution's heavy reliance on the videotape during summation exposed its central role in persuading the jury to convict, and our review confirms its importance. While not a true confession, Wood's statement contained many highly-damaging admissions that plainly bore on issues central to the jury's decision. In it, Wood acknowledged his presence at the scene of the crime and conceded that he identified Hall to Harry and Damion as the sucker Bernard was having problems with. In the words of Wood's prosecutor, that's a biggie. Wood further admitted to giving Harry $20 when [he] had the money as well as a bag of weed and a couple of dollars one evening at Hildago's store. Certainly, Wood's admission that, after the murder, he gave money and drugs to the shooter would be critical to the jury's determination of whether Wood hired Harry to kill Hall in the first place. It is no wonder, then, that the jury asked to view the videotaped statement during its deliberations. Furthermore, as Appellee conceded at oral argument, Wood's statement locked [him] into an implausible and highly incriminating depiction of the shooting. This created two problems for the defense: first, it forced Wood to defend a plainly absurd version of events, and second, by confirming much of Harry's and Bernard's testimony, Wood's own statement crippled defense counsel's ability to argue that Harry and Bernard should not be believed. Wood's videotaped statement strains credibility. In it, he purports to have simply stumbled upon Hall outside the travel agency, though he explains neither his own presence there nor the remarkable coincidence of meeting Harry at a nearby gas station. What's more, Wood denies any hard feelings towards Hall, despite claiming to believe that Hall sexually harassed Bernard, his girlfriend at the time, and had her arrested for grand larceny. Nevertheless, he admits to identifying Hall to Harry as the sucker Bernard had a problem with. And, although Wood claims to barely know Harry, Wood insists that that statement alone prompted Harry, on his own motion, to kill. In addition to locking Wood into a dubious version of events, the statement significantly bolstered the prosecution's case. Because Wood never admitted to hiring Harry to kill Hall, the central question for the jury was whether to credit Harry's testimony on that issue, despite his otherwise suspect character. Harry's trial testimony is not intrinsically persuasive, and it was only one of the four different versions of events that he gave to the police. Yet Wood's statement essentially confirmed every aspect of Harry's story, save the critical detail of Wood's solicitation of the murder. The statement was thus devastating to the defense argument that Harry was an irresponsible fabricator. The prosecutor clearly understood that Wood's statement was a powerful weapon in persuading the jury to credit Harry's trial testimony. As a result, his summation led with and focused on the videotaped statement. [12] In fact, the first twenty of the summation's fifty pages are dedicated almost exclusively to the statement, and to the role the prosecutor hoped it would play in the jury's deliberations. See Zappulla, 391 F.3d at 471 (recognizing that the prosecution knows intimately the strengths and weaknesses of its case, and relying on fact that the prosecutor found the erroneously admitted evidence to be important in its harmlessness calculation). The prosecutor began his summation by telling the jury that understanding the case as a whole . . . starts with . . . the statement of Mr. Wood. (emphasis added.) He then proceeded to systematically link each assertion Wood made to the testimony of Harry and Bernard. For example, after reminding the jury that Harry testified to driving with Wood to the travel agency in a green Lexus, meeting Damion, and watching Hall enter the store with another individual, the prosecutor stated: Is [Harry] lying about any of those things? No. Mr. Wood admits each and every one of those things happened. Mr. Wood admits to knowing [Harry]. He admits to bringing [Harry] to that store after they met up at the gas station. Again, Mr. Harry, is he a liar? Is he making this up? No, it's confirmed by [Wood]. Using Wood's own words, the prosecutor buttressed the claims of his witnesses. In fact, he explicitly argued this point to the jury: Now, [Wood's statement] is[] not a confession. He doesn't say I committed murder. He doesn't say I paid Rasheen Harry to kill . . . Carlyle [ sic ] Hall. Far from it. It's not a confession. But, what it is . . . is a series of very interesting admissions, if you will, statements of fact that he says that should have sounded very, very familiar to you from the testimony of Rasheen Harry and the testimony of Nisha Bernard. Why is that important, ladies and gentlemen? Because one of the things the Judge is going to tell you about as to whether you believe a person or not is not just what their background is, but it's whether their statements are corroborated by other facts. Harry and Bernard are believable, the prosecutor argued, precisely because Wood said they were. We do not suggest that the prosecutor improperly emphasized Wood's statement to the jury. Quite the opposite: since the statement was admitted into evidence, the prosecutor had every right to rely on it in summation, and like a skilled advocate he focused the jury's attention on the strengths of his case. In so doing, however, he revealed his belief about the impact Wood's statement would have on the jury. That the prosecutor found Wood's statement so significant confirms our belief that it was, in fact, central to the prosecution's case. See Satterwhite v. Texas, 486 U.S. 249, 260, 108 S.Ct. 1792, 100 L.Ed.2d 284 (1988) (focusing, in part, on significant weight prosecution's summation placed on wrongfully admitted testimony in determining harmlessness). Any experienced trial lawyer would understand that a case that is close with only the testimony of Harry and Bernard becomes much stronger when Wood's statement is added. That is undoubtedly why the prosecutor gave the statement such a prominent place in his closing argument. Appellee argues that Wood's statement was entirely cumulative because the factual statements it contained were repetitive of Bernard's and Harry's testimony, and therefore contends that its admission at trial was harmless. To characterize this statement as cumulative would give that term an excessively broad and unrealistic meaning. The question is not whether the content of an erroneously admitted statement was otherwise before the jury, but whether the erroneously admitted evidence filled . . . a missing link in the government's case. Zappulla, 391 F.3d at 472. Here, the statement did not simply confirm facts that were decisively proven by other evidence. Rather, it went to the heart of the central, hotly disputed issue in the case: whether the jury should believe Harry's account of the crime. The prosecution's case was based on the testimony of two questionable witnesses: Harry, the admitted shooter, testifying to secure a lighter sentence, and Bernard, Wood's former girlfriend, who testified in the face of a potential prosecution for credit card fraud and possible deportation. The critical question for the jury was whether these witnesses were credible. The prosecution benefitted greatly by corroborating their testimony with independent evidence, from Wood's own mouth, of Wood's involvement in the murder. By reinforcing Harry's and Bernard's version of events, Wood's statement solved the credibility problem. The prosecutor honed in on this point when he urged the jury to make credibility determinations based on whether the testimony was corroborated by other facts. The other facts to which he directed the jury were those contained in Wood's statement, which was the only evidence the prosecutor relied on to support Harry's and Bernard's testimony. In a case such as this one, where guilt rests on witness credibility, key evidence affecting credibility is not merely corroborative or cumulative: by permitting the jury to credit otherwise suspect testimony, it provides a key link in the prosecution's case.