Opinion ID: 1968592
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Postconviction Record

Text: Gerald contended in his postconviction application that the prosecution had misrepresented the actual conditions of Gilbert's protected-witness police-custody confinement and that the state had failed to disclose all the rewards and inducements promised and provided in exchange for Gilbert's testimony. A Superior Court justice, at the conclusion of the hearing on Gerald's postconviction application, rejected Gerald's contention that the state had failed to disclose all of the rewards and inducements promised to Gilbert in exchange for his testimony. The hearing justice found that the post-conviction-hearing evidence did not support any conclusion that the prosecution knowingly, or otherwise, withheld or concealed its true sentencing agreement with Gilbert or that the prosecution knew that Peter Gilbert perjured himself at these trials when he testified as to the sentence the state had promised him in return for his cooperation as a witness. The hearing justice did find, however, that Gilbert's testimony effectively served to conceal from Gerald and his trial counsel certain details of the conditions of his police-custody confinement that could have been construed by the trial jury as revealing a more lenient manner of custodial confinement than portrayed by Gilbert in his testimony to the jury and that as a result Gerald was denied a fair trial in violation of his right to due process. The postconviction hearing justice's decision to vacate Gerald's jury-trial conviction that had been previously affirmed by this Court appears to be grounded upon a single portion of Gilbert's trial testimony that the hearing justice found to be both incomplete and misleading with regard to Gilbert's description of the nature of his police-custody confinement as a protected state's witness in several high-profile criminal cases about to be tried. We note from the hearing justice's decision that portion of Gilbert's jury-trial testimony and the justice's conclusion therefrom: In the Valente murder trial Peter Gilbert substantially parroted his earlier testimony about his custody during direct examination: Q. Would you explain the circumstances of your custody as this time? A. My family is kept in a undisclosed location in protection custody. Myself, I'm in a lockup situation, in the custody of the Providence Police Department. I have a 24-hour guard, seven days a week. Q. And describe the facility that you're in? A. I live in what could be described as a cellblock area. Bars on the window, there are three locked doors, successive locked doors, with a armed guard, and I have no access to the outside world or anything like that. Q. How many rooms do you stay in?
Q. What do you have in those rooms: A. Basic furniture; a couch, a chair, a bed, a dresser for clothes. I have my own television, my own VCR which was my property; basic cooking utensils, a couple of pots and utensils, a refrigerator.    Q. And during the time that you are how do you describe it, in a custody situation? How did you describe your confinement? A. I'm locked up. Q. In that three-room setting? A. I'm in a cellblock. Q. A three-room cellblock. A. A three-room cellblock with a couch and some chairs. A. Please. Q. With a couch? A. I have got a couch, a chair, a bed. Q. TV and VCR? A. The same thing they get, minus the couch. Q. The inmates get VCRs? A. I know they have color TV. Q. I'm asking about VCRs? A. I don't know about that. Q. You have your own stove and refrigerator? A. Yeah, that was in the apartment. Q. Would you agree that that is a rather generous result from your point of view? A. Mr. Anderson. I could tell you this, in two years I haven't had one night's sleep in two years. I'm right there where they lock all the drugs up, all the drug addicts up, so if that's unusual Q. Let me put it this way, 10 years under those conditions, would you agree, is fairly generous given the charges pending against you? A. I don't think the conditions I live under are generous at all; far from generous. Q. More generous than 20 years? A. Well, timewise. I'm talking about the circumstances.    On a brief redirect examination: Q. During the testimony you said you were out25 to 50 times you had been out to eat. A. That was an approximation I gave in testimony. They keep going back to it. Q. Any of those times you went out alone? A. Never, police offers (sic) all the time. Q. You were never in the situation alone? A. I have an armed guard 24 hours a day.    All of this testimony conceals that from the Gasbarro robbery trial to the Valente murder trial Peter Gilbert had spent his time in Florida and in congenial hotels and that he relaxed learning to sky-dive. Our de novo review of Gilbert's trial testimony along with the pertinent trial and postconviction-hearing transcripts and case files leads us to conclude that the hearing justice, in passing upon Gilbert's credibility as a witness, erroneously considered the omitted details in Gilbert's recounting of the nature of his police custody as a monolithic whole rather than for their potential realistic value to the trial jury. In light of the actual facts that Gilbert related to the trial jury concerning the murder of young Valente, which details Gilbert testified were told him by Gerald, we find that Gilbert's credibility with regard to those particular facts would not in any reasonable manner have been in the slightest way affected or impeached. The hearing justice in his decision appears to have misconceived and misconstrued the real nature of the particular facts as related by Gilbert concerning the murder of Valente. Those facts accurately described the motive that Gerald and his juvenile accomplice, Dionne, had for killing young Valente. They described in accurate exact minute detail the parts of Valente's body that had been savagely beaten, the fact that Valente was alive and making sounds when his body was tossed into the Narragansett Bay, and that young Valente, because of an earlier automobile-accident injury, had had a plastic plate surgically implanted in his forehead. They also described the portion of the Jamestown Bridge from which Valente's body was tossed. If one bears in mind that Gilbert at the time of the Valente murder, was confined in a Florida prison, there is no conceivable way in which he could have learned of those minute, intimate, covert, and for no other ears or eyes crime-commission details unless he was actually present at the murder scene or had learned of them from the actual murderer. Although Gilbert was in Florida and not present at the murder scene, Gerald was, and for that single reason Gerald was able to relate to Gilbert, why, when, where, and how the murder took place. The very intimate, particularized nature of the murder details related by Gerald could only be known to the perpetrator, and those details actually needed no real corroboration because they were self-corroborating. However, the trial jury did have before it testimony and evidence corroborating those details from the State Medical Examiner, whose testimony established as true Gilbert's account of where young Valente had been beaten, Gilbert's testimony that Valente was alive when thrown from the Jamestown Bridge, and Gilbert's testimony that Valente previously had had a plastic plate surgically implanted in his head following an automobile collision injury. The trial testimony from the Jamestown police concerning where Valente's body was found also served to corroborate Gilbert's testimony that Valente had been tossed from the Jamestown Bridge into the Narragansett Bay. The hearing justice's finding that the trial jury, if it had known that Gilbert while in police protective custody had spent some time visiting with his wife and children in Florida, had been taken to hotels on some occasions to meet with state prosecutors in preparing for various trials, and had taken skydiving lessons, would have rejected Gilbert's detailed account of the Valente murder as related to him by Gerald is clearly erroneous.