Opinion ID: 693376
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Admission of Allegedly Irrelevant and Prejudicial Evidence

Text: 21
22 Generally, in order to preserve an evidentiary claim for appeal, a party must make a timely objection at trial. Fed.R.Evid. 103(a)(1). To be timely, an objection ... must be 'made as soon as the ground of it is known, or reasonably should have been known to the objector.'  Hutchinson v. Groskin, 927 F.2d 722, 725 (2d Cir.1991) (quoting United States v. Check, 582 F.2d 668, 676 (2d Cir.1978)); see also United States v. Pujana-Mena, 949 F.2d 24, 33 (2d Cir.1991) (discussing considerations in determining timeliness of trial objections). Ruotolo concedes that his counsel took no exception whatsoever to the allegedly prejudicial testimony at trial. He contends, however, that this point was properly preserved for appellate review by virtue of his pre-trial motion for severance. In that motion, which Ruotolo filed in October 1988, he argued that: (1) only three of the fourteen counts in the indictment involved allegations against him; (2) as a result, most of the evidence that the government would produce at trial would be irrelevant with respect to the charges against him; and (3) such evidence would have a spillover effect and thereby unjustly tar him in the eyes of the jury. On that basis, Ruotolo requested the district court to sever his trial from that of his co-defendants. Because Ruotolo's co-defendants all pleaded guilty before trial, however, the district court denied his motion as moot. 23 Having flagged for the district court the potential for unfair contamination by evidentiary fallout (albeit, three years before trial and in the quite different context of a severance motion), Ruotolo maintains that he preserved his appellate claim as a matter of law. This argument shows stretchmarks. In effect, Ruotolo asks us to treat his motion for severance as a motion in limine to preclude the introduction of arguably irrelevant and prejudicial evidence. But even if we were to view his severance motion in that light, the circumstances of this case would require us to find that Ruotolo had failed to preserve his objection. 24 In cases involving the admission of relevant yet potentially prejudicial testimony, we have held that defendants may not rely upon an in limine objection to preserve their claim for appeal. See United States v. Weichert, 783 F.2d 23, 25 (2d Cir.) (per curiam), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 831, 107 S.Ct. 117, 93 L.Ed.2d 64 (1986). Because an appellate court [cannot] review a trial court's balancing of probative value and prejudice without reference to the witness's actual testimony, a defendant must both confront and challenge an adverse evidentiary decision at trial  'to raise and preserve for review' the correctness of this ruling. Id. (quoting Luce v. United States, 469 U.S. 38, 43, 105 S.Ct. 460, 464, 83 L.Ed.2d 443 (1984)); see also United States v. Griffin, 818 F.2d 97, 105 (1st Cir.) (holding that to raise and preserve for review the claim of improperly constructing the rule 403 balance, a party must obtain the order admitting or excluding the controversial evidence in the actual setting of the trial), cert. denied, 484 U.S. 844, 108 S.Ct. 137, 98 L.Ed.2d 94 (1987). 25 Here, however, the claim is that the evidence was totally irrelevant. And with respect to evidentiary questions that are not contextually bound, courts have held that a 26 motion in limine may preserve an objection when the issue (1) is fairly presented to the district court, (2) is the type of issue that can be finally decided in a pre-trial hearing, and (3) is ruled upon without equivocation by the trial judge. 27 United States v. Mejia-Alarcon, 995 F.2d 982, 986 (10th Cir.) (holding that in limine motion preserved defendant's objection to admissibility of prior crime conviction under Fed.R.Evid. 609(a)(2)) (citing cases from the Third, Eighth and Ninth Circuits), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 114 S.Ct. 334, 126 L.Ed.2d 279 (1993); cf. Ginett v. Computer Task Group, Inc., 11 F.3d 359, 361 (2d Cir.1993) (pre-trial in limine motion preserved objection to jury instruction where objecting party clearly set forth his position in the motion and after being fully apprised of the party's position, the district court flatly rejected it). 28 But even treating the present case as falling within this second category of in limine motions does not help Ruotolo's claim. As noted above, because all of Ruotolo's co-defendants pleaded guilty prior to trial, the district court denied his motion for severance as moot and thus never reached the merits. Because the evidentiary issue was not ruled upon without equivocation by the trial judge, Ruotolo failed to meet the third requirement for properly preserving his claim through an in limine motion. After the district court dismissed Ruotolo's severance motion as moot, he did not attempt to present even obliquely a specific relevancy objection for the court's consideration. Perforce, the district court's pre-trial ruling on this issue was not unequivocal--it was non-existent.
29 As an alternative approach, Ruotolo claims that the district court committed plain error in allowing the cooperating witnesses' testimony regarding their post-August 1984 criminal activities to go to the jury, and we should therefore address Ruotolo's complaint despite his failure to object at trial. The governing rule provides that [p]lain errors or defects affecting substantial rights may be noticed although they were not brought to the attention of the court. Fed.R.Crim.P. 52(b). To receive our attention though, [t]he error must be 'so plain [that] the trial judge and prosecutor were derelict in countenancing it, even absent the defendant's timely assistance in detecting it.'  United States v. Shaoul, 41 F.3d 811, 817 (2d Cir.1994) (quoting United States v. Frady, 456 U.S. 152, 163, 102 S.Ct. 1584, 1592, 71 L.Ed.2d 816 (1982)) (internal quotation omitted). 30 In United States v. Olano, --- U.S. ----, 113 S.Ct. 1770, 123 L.Ed.2d 508 (1993), the Supreme Court set forth the applicable framework for appellate plain error review. We have stated that under Olano, 31 [r]ule 52(b) places three limits on appellate authority to review errors not preserved at trial. First, there must be error, or deviation from a legal rule which has not been waived. Second, the error must be plain, which at a minimum means clear under current law. Third, the plain error must, as the text of Rule 52(b) indicates, affect[ ] substantial rights, which normally requires a showing of prejudice. 32 United States v. Viola, 35 F.3d 37, 41 (2d Cir.1994) (citations omitted), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 115 S.Ct. 1270, 131 L.Ed.2d 148 (1995). 33 Olano carefully distinguished the concept of waiver from that of forfeiture. The Court stated that [w]hereas forfeiture is the failure to make the timely assertion of the right, waiver is the 'intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right.'  --- U.S. at ----, 113 S.Ct. at 1777 (quoting Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 458, 464, 58 S.Ct. 1019, 1023, 82 L.Ed. 1461 (1938)). Thus, forfeiture does not preclude appellate consideration of a claim in the presence of plain error, whereas waiver necessarily extinguishes the claim altogether. Id. at ----, 113 S.Ct. at 1777. 34 Courts have not always verbally adhered to the distinction when speaking about a claim of plain error that arises out of a party's failure to assert an evidentiary objection. Thus, they often refer to a party as having waived an objection when, in fact, they mean that the party has only forfeited the objection. But the substantive distinction remains both clear and crucial. If a party's failure to take an evidentiary exception is simply a matter of oversight, then such oversight qualifies as a correctable forfeiture for the purposes of plain error analysis. If, however, the party consciously refrains from objecting as a tactical matter, then that action constitutes a true waiver, which will negate even plain error review. See, e.g., United States v. Coonan, 938 F.2d 1553, 1561 (2d Cir.1991) (where defendant unsuccessfully attempted to distance himself from the type of violence and brutality that signified gang membership and strategically welcomed the admission of macabre details of the gang's violent activities prior to his joining, he waived appellate review of any plain error claim), cert. denied, 503 U.S. 941, 112 S.Ct. 1486, 117 L.Ed.2d 628 (1992); United States v. Weiss, 930 F.2d 185, 198 (2d Cir.) (defendant who withdrew trial objection to the exclusion of documents for tactical purposes waived his right to appeal the district court's exclusion), cert. denied, 502 U.S. 842, 112 S.Ct. 133, 116 L.Ed.2d 100 (1991); cf. United States v. Wynn, 845 F.2d 1439, 1443 (7th Cir.1988) (defendant's strategic decision not to object under Rule 404(b) to the introduction of witness testimony to support his theory that he was simply the innocent victim of a frame-up makes a finding of plain error unlikely). 35 The distinction between forfeiture and waiver brings our plain error analysis to a grinding halt. 3 It is apparent that Ruotolo's failure to object at trial to the challenged testimony was a strategic choice. From start to finish, the theory of Ruotolo's defense was that he was an innocent victim of false accusations made by unsavory drug runners who desperately wanted to curry favor with the government. The record shows that, beginning with his lawyer's opening statement, Ruotolo argued to the jury that Kon was not worthy of belief because he was both a murderer and responsible for illegally importing an enormous amount of drugs into the country. In fact, as a means of undermining Kon's credibility, Ruotolo's counsel on cross-examination questioned Kon extensively about all of the heroin shipments that Kon had arranged and the total amount of proceeds that he had collected. This line of questioning was in no way limited to activity that occurred during the time when Ruotolo was allegedly involved in the conspiracy--that is, prior to August 1984. 36 Moreover, just prior to trial, Ruotolo vigorously objected to the admission of background evidence regarding his own alleged criminal activities, which supposedly occurred before he joined the heroin conspiracy. He objected to this evidence on the grounds that it was irrelevant and prejudicial. This manifest pre-trial concern to guard against unfair prejudice through one type of irrelevant evidence strongly suggests to us that Ruotolo's trial lawyer did not simply fall asleep at the wheel when another type of irrelevant evidence was presented at trial. Indeed, given the sheer quantity of unchallenged yet allegedly prejudicial testimony of this latter sort that is in the trial record, Ruotolo's lawyer would have had to have suffered from aggravated narcolepsy for us to believe that his failure to object did not reflect a clear and conscious tactical decision. We conclude that Ruotolo waived his right to appeal from the district court's admission of the challenged testimony. See Coonan, 938 F.2d at 1561; Weiss, 930 F.2d at 198.