Opinion ID: 2266414
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the declaration against penal interest exception

Text: In Laumer v. United States, 409 A.2d 190 (D.C.1979) (en banc), this court adopted the declaration against penal interest exception to the hearsay rule. We held that a statement tending to expose the declarant to criminal liability and offered as tending to exculpate the accused is admissible when the declarant is unavailable and corroborating circumstances clearly indicate the trustworthiness of the statement. Id. at 199 (emphasis in original). We adopt[ed] the test contained in Fed.R.Evid. 804(b)(3), id., and later adhered to that approach for purposes of determining the admissibility of declarations against penal interest by another offered to inculpate, as well as [to] exculpate, defendants. Lyons v. United States, 514 A.2d 423, 428 (D.C.1986). Laumer and Lyons, however, did not decide whether all of a statement containing a declaration against penal interest is admissible. Laumer, 409 A.2d at 203 (emphasis added) (noting disagreement among authorities regarding whether collateral or exculpatory portions are admissible). The Supreme Court recently had occasion to address this issue in Williamson, supra . There, the police found cocaine during a consensual search of Harris' car. During subsequent custodial interrogation, Harris made several statements to an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) which implicated him and his co-conspirator, Williamson. At Williamson's trial for, inter alia, conspiracy to possess cocaine with intent to distribute it, the district court permitted the DEA agent to testify to Harris' confession in its entirety. ___ U.S. at ___-___, 114 S.Ct. at 2433-34. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, 981 F.2d 1262 (1992), but the Supreme Court reversed this ruling on the ground that [t]he fact that a person is making a broadly self-inculpatory confession does not make more credible the confession's non-self-inculpatory parts. ___ U.S. at ___, 114 S.Ct. at 2435. [5] [T]he most faithful reading of Rule 804(b)(3) is that it does not allow admission of non-self-inculpatory statements, even if they are made within a broader narrative that is generally self-inculpatory. Id. Although Williamson made it clear that non-self-inculpatory declarations are not admissible under Rule 804(b)(3), the majority opinion is arguably somewhat ambiguous as to whether references to the criminal conduct of a third party can ever be self-inculpatory as to the declarant. [6] The parties agree, [7] howeverand we now holdthat Justice O'Connor's majority opinion in Williamson did not announce a categorical rule that incriminating references to a person other than the declarant can never be self-inculpatory. In the first place, Justice O'Connor observed that [t]here are many circumstances in which Rule 804(b)(3) does allow the admission of statements that inculpate a criminal defendant. Even the confessions of arrested accomplices may be admissible if they are truly self-inculpatory, rather than merely attempts to shift blame or curry favor. Id. at ___, 114 S.Ct. at 2436. Moreover, the Court adopted a contextual approach, rather than a bright line rule, for determining whether a statement is inculpatory as to the declarant. Id. ([W]hether a statement is self-inculpatory or not can only be determined by viewing it in context.). As Justice O'Connor further noted, [t]he question under Rule 804(b)(3) is always whether the statement was sufficiently against the declarant's penal interest that a reasonable person in the declarant's position would not have made the statement unless believing it to be true, and this question can only be answered in light of all the surrounding circumstances. Id. at ___, 114 S.Ct. at 2437 (footnote omitted). Finally, the Court remanded the case with directions to conduct a fact-intensive inquiry and to determine whether each of the statements in Harris' confession was truly self-inculpatory based on a careful examination of all the circumstances surrounding the criminal activity involved. Id. (O'Connor, J., joined by Scalia, J., concurring). A remand in Williamson would have been unnecessary if the Court had intended to announce a per se rule requiring redaction from the declarant's statement of all references to the criminal conduct of a third party. [8] Although we hold that Williamson does not require automatic exclusion of inculpatory references to a third party which are made within a broader self-inculpatory statement, we recognize that such references are suspect at best. One of the most effective ways to lie is to mix falsehood with truth, especially truth that seems particularly persuasive because of its self-inculpatory nature. ___ U.S. at ___, 114 S.Ct. at 2435. References to a third party are not self-inculpatory, for example, if they are merely attempts to shift blame or curry favor. Id. at ___, 114 S.Ct. at 2436; see also id. at ___-___, 114 S.Ct. at 2439-40 (Ginsburg, J., joined by Blackmun, Stevens, and Souter, JJ., concurring) (concluding that all of Harris' statements were inadmissible under Rule 804(b)(3) because [t]hey project an image of a person not acting against his penal interest, but striving mightily to shift principal responsibility to someone else). It would perhaps be fair to say that a portion of a statement inculpating another person is seldom against the declarant's penal interest, but seldom is not the same as never.
Although Hammond apparently agrees with our reading of Williamson, he disputes the government's contention that the trial judge interpreted Williamson as establishing a per se rule. According to Hammond, rather than automatically eliminating inculpatory references to third parties, the trial judge analyzed each individual statement and excluded only those portions as to which corroborating circumstances did not clearly indicate their trustworthiness. In his view, the trial judge redacted only those portions which attributed blame to co-defendants and therefore lacked the special guarantees of trustworthiness inherent in true statements against penal interest. The trial judge never stated in so many words that Williamson established a categorical rule of exclusion, but her comments come very close indeed to such a rule, and she never disavowed it. Our review of the record persuades us that she viewed Williamson as precluding, effectively and more or less automatically, the admission, under the declaration against penal interest exception, of any part of a declarant's statement which refers to the criminal conduct of a third party. Before she ruled on the individual proffered statements, the trial judge engaged in a lengthy discussion with the prosecutor regarding the proper interpretation of Williamson. She told the prosecutor: You are saying that ... if it's a self-inculpatory statement and it inculpates others, that it comes in.... That's not what [Justice] O'Connor says. She further stated that [t]he question that I had in your interpretation of self-inculpatory is that self-inculpatory can include other people doing things that are criminal, and I'm saying to you that I disagree with that. Subsequently, in redacting from Sweet's statement to a civilian witness the portions implicating Wright and Pleasant, the judge explained: We're not getting into an issue in terms of just how reliable it is. The whole point of it is that he is implicating somebody else, and it goes beyond the ruling that I've made. The judge also stated: This isn't an issue in terms of whether independently it's reliable. I think, unlike other issues ... where we've gotten into a specific discussion of the reliability because we viewed it as being self-inculpatory and it doesn't inculpate anybody else, we are now talking about where you are inculpating other people, and we are back to my ruling in Williamson. A fair reading of the transcript as a whole, and of these passages in particular, provides no assurance that the judge was engaging in the fact-intensive inquiry required under Williamson to determine whether the inculpatory references to other individuals were also sufficiently against the declarant's penal interest. Rather, the judge appears to have read Williamson to require the automatic redaction from each proffered statement of any reference to the criminal conduct of a third party. Accordingly, in conformity with Williamson, we remand the case to the trial court with directions that the judge determine whether each of the statements, and each of the incriminating references to one or more third parties, was truly self-inculpatory as to the declarant. So ordered. [9]