Opinion ID: 182274
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Restrictions on the Presentation of Evidence

Text: The petitioner argues that the trial court imposed arbitrary and disproportionate restrictions on his right to present relevant evidence in his defense. First, he suggests that the exclusion of Smith's statement on hearsay grounds was disproportionate to the ends that [the hearsay rule is] asserted to promote, see Holmes, 547 U.S. at 321, 126 S.Ct. 1727, because the statement bears particular indicia of reliability that mitigated traditional hearsay concerns. Second, he suggests that critical defense evidence was arbitrarily excluded when the trial court exceeded the scope of its pre-trial ruling and sustained objections to questions by defense counsel about whether Officer Gouveia initiated his investigation of Bettencourt following a police interview of Smith, whether Officer Gouveia considered Smith a suspect, and whether Officer Smith interviewed or had occasion to show photographs to Smith. The petitioner argues that the answers to these questions did not depend on the truth of Smith's out-of-court statement, and were admissible under state law as evidence of the police investigation (or lack thereof) into Bettencourt as an alternative suspect. See generally Commonwealth v. Cordle, 404 Mass. 733, 537 N.E.2d 130, 137 (1989). Smith's post-arrest statement implicating Bettencourt in the assault is prototypical hearsay evidence. See Fed.R.Evid. 801(c). With rare exception, a trial court's exclusion of hearsay evidence does not offend the Constitution. See Montana v. Egelhoff, 518 U.S. 37, 42, 116 S.Ct. 2013, 135 L.Ed.2d 361 (1996) (plurality opinion) (describing the hearsay rule as familiar and unquestionably constitutional); Chambers, 410 U.S. at 298, 93 S.Ct. 1038 (The hearsay rule, which has long been recognized and respected by virtually every State, is based on experience and grounded in the notion that untrustworthy evidence should not be presented to the triers of fact.). The Appeals Court was presented with, and expressly rejected, the petitioner's argument that the statement bore particular indicia of reliability. On direct appeal, the petitioner asserted that Smith's statement was reliable because it was self-incriminatory, see generally Chambers, 410 U.S. at 300-01, 93 S.Ct. 1038, and because it tended to show that another person committed the crime, see generally Commonwealth v. O'Brien, 432 Mass. 578, 736 N.E.2d 841, 851 (2000) (explaining that, under Massachusetts law, hearsay evidence may be admitted, in the judge's discretion, to show that a third party might have committed the crime). The Appeals Court concluded that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in excluding Smith's statement because the statement was not in a very real sense self-incriminatory (since it was not made by Bettencourt and denied both Smith and Bettencourt's participation in the assault) and because it did not contain sufficiently substantial connecting links between Bettencourt and the assault. See Brown, 2006 WL 3392089, at - (internal quotation marks omitted). We see nothing unreasonable about the Appeals Court's determination that the hearsay rule was properly applied to exclude Smith's statement. Turning to the other limitations placed on the petitioner's cross-examination of Officer Smith and Officer Gouveia regarding their investigation of Bettencourt, we disagree with the petitioner's contention that the Appeals Court unreasonably failed to find that the restrictions imposed in his case arbitrarily infringed on his ability to present a complete defense. Even assuming that some of the excluded testimony was otherwise proper and admissible for a non-hearsay purpose, which we need not decide, we have been clear that not every ad hoc mistake in applying state evidence rules ... should be called a violation of due process; otherwise every significant state court error in excluding evidence offered by the defendant would be a basis for undoing the conviction. Fortini v. Murphy, 257 F.3d 39, 47 (1st Cir.2001). As we have noted elsewhere, the Supreme Court has rarely overturned state convictions because evidence was excluded and has in recent years made clear that only in extreme cases will such claims succeed. O'Brien, 453 F.3d at 20 (alterations omitted) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Ellsworth v. Warden, 333 F.3d 1, 7 (1st Cir.2003) (en banc) (describing constitutional challenges to restrictions on cross-examination as tenable only where the restriction is manifestly unreasonable or overbroad). Provided that a defendant retains an adequate opportunity to present his theory of the case, the Supreme Court has made clear that a defendant's right to present relevant evidence `may, in appropriate cases, bow to accommodate other legitimate interests in the criminal trial process.' Lucas, 500 U.S. at 149, 111 S.Ct. 1743 (quoting Rock v. Arkansas, 483 U.S. 44, 55, 107 S.Ct. 2704, 97 L.Ed.2d 37 (1987)). As the Appeals Court recognized, despite the exclusion of Smith's statement by the trial court, the petitioner was permitted to establish through his cross-examination of Officer Gouveia that Bettencourt's name had surfaced during the police investigation of the assault, that Officer Gouveia had attempted to locate Bettencourt, and that Bettencourt better fit Lynch's physical description of his assailant. The defendant was also provided a full opportunity to cross-examine Lynch, the Commonwealth's most important witness, and declined to exercise his right to call Smith as a witness to his own statements. In light of these substantial other opportunities to call the jury's attention to the likelihood that Bettencourt was the true culprit and that the police investigation of Bettencourt was suspect, we cannot say on this record that the Appeals Court's conclusion that the petitioner was not prejudiced by the preclusion of additional testimony from the officers regarding the police investigation of Bettencourt was an unreasonable application of clearly established law on the right to present a defense. Affirmed.