Opinion ID: 1355268
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Suppression of Exculpatory Grand Jury Testimony

Text: McFall contends that the district court erred in not admitting a transcript of Sawyer's grand jury testimony, and that the error was prejudicial because the testimony offered a first-person account of the key events at issue in Count 14 that contradicts the testimony of the government's primary witness. The court cited two alternative bases for excluding the grand jury testimony: (1) the transcript amounted to inadmissible hearsay; and (2) the transcript would unfairly prejudice the government because the jury would not be informed of Sawyer's indictment on perjury charges or his guilty plea to the crime of honest services mail fraud, a felony. We review the district court's evidentiary rulings for abuse of discretion. Hoffman v. Constr. Prot. Servs., Inc., 541 F.3d 1175, 1178 (9th Cir.2008). McFall was initially indicted in October 2002. Sawyer, at that point uncharged, appeared before a grand jury on November 13, 2002. His testimony resulted in a 120-page transcript, a substantial portion of which is devoted to the events underlying the charges in Count 14 ( i.e., the scheme to extort money from Digital Angel). Sawyer was indicted more than a year later, in December 2003. An independent review of Sawyer's grand jury testimony makes clear that the transcript's exclusion prejudiced McFall at trial. Levy, the Digital Angel lobbyist, testified that Sawyer made extortionate threats on McFall's behalf during a telephone conversation to which Levy and Sawyer were the only parties. Sawyer testified that the notion that he and McFall conspired to deny state grant funds to Digital Angel unless the company paid a consulting fee to McFall's daughterthe crux of the charge against McFallwas ridiculous. According to one of the prosecutor's notes, Sawyer stuck to this version of events in his post-plea debriefing. As a result of the grand jury testimony's exclusion (and Sawyer's Fifth Amendment invocation at McFall's trial), the jury heard only two versions of the disputed eventsLevy's and McFall's. Sawyer's excluded grand jury testimony would have largely corroborated McFall's account. Even so, Sawyer's grand jury testimony represents an out of court statement offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted, and as such is hearsay. See Fed.R.Evid. 801(c). At trial, McFall invoked the hearsay exception laid out in Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(1), which allows admission of the former testimony of an unavailable witness. See Fed. R.Evid. 804(a). The exception provides: Testimony given as a witness at another hearing of the same or a different proceeding, or in a deposition taken in compliance with law in the course of the same or another proceeding [is admissible], if the party against whom the testimony is now offered ... had an opportunity and similar motive to develop the testimony by direct, cross, or redirect examination. Fed.R.Evid. 804(b)(1). It is clear that Sawyer, having invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify after being subpoenaed by McFall, was unavailable as a witness, at least to McFall. See Padilla v. Terhune, 309 F.3d 614, 618 (9th Cir.2002). Further, the Rule 804(b)(1) hearsay exception can, in some circumstances, encompass grand jury testimony. See, e.g., United States v. Salerno, 505 U.S. 317, 325, 112 S.Ct. 2503, 120 L.Ed.2d 255 (1992); United States v. Lester, 749 F.2d 1288, 1301 (9th Cir.1984). The question is whether the government's motive in examining Sawyer before the grand jury was sufficiently similar to what its motive would be in challenging his testimony at McFall's trial. Prosecutors need not have pursued every opportunity to question Sawyer before the grand jury; the exception requires only that they possessed the motive to do so. See United States v. Geiger, 263 F.3d 1034, 1039 (9th Cir.2001). In Salerno, the Supreme Court considered the admissibility of grand jury testimony under Rule 804(b)(1). The Court held that Rule 804(b)(1)'s similar motive prong is a fact-intensive one, dependent on the particular circumstances of the case. Salerno, 505 U.S. at 325, 112 S.Ct. 2503; Geiger, 263 F.3d at 1038 (The `similar motive' requirement is inherently factual and depends, at least in part, on the operative facts and legal issues and on the context of the proceeding.). The district court concluded that the government's motivation in examining Sawyer before the grand jury was not at all similar to its hypothetical motivation in examining him at McFall's trial. The court stated the following subsidiary findings in support of its conclusion: [A]t the time Mr. Sawyer was before the Grand Jury, it was a fact-finding investigation. It was not an adversarial proceeding, notwithstanding the fact that the government's attorneys did in fact question Mr. Sawyer before the Grand Jury. Two, the Court makes a factual finding that Mr. Sawyer was not a suspect at the time of his testimony. It was over a year later that he was actually indicted.... The Court makes a further factual finding that the motive for obtaining Mr. Sawyer's testimony before the Grand Jury was completely different from what it would be today. Five, the Court makes a further finding that Mr. Sawyer is in fact a person who has entered a plea of guilty to a felony, which would not be able to be brought before the jury at this time if his testimony were simply read to the jury. And the final factual finding is that Mr. Sawyer, his testimony at the time that he was before the Grand Jury, is now at least the subject of an indictment for his own perjury before that very Grand Jury. As a threshold matter, we must determine at what level of generality the government's respective motives should be compared, an issue that has divided the circuits. See 2 MCCORMICK ON EVID. § 304 (6th ed.2006) (noting that the circuits appear to be in disagreement over whether in typical grand jury situations exculpatory testimony meets Rule 804(b)(1)'s similar motive requirement). In United States v. Miller, 904 F.2d 65, 68 (D.C.Cir.1990), the D.C. Circuit compared the government's respective motives at a high level of generality. The Miller Court concluded that [b]efore the grand jury and at trial the testimony of an unavailable co-conspirator was to be directed to the same issuethe guilt or innocence of the defendants, and thus, the government's motives were sufficiently similar. Id.; accord United States v. Foster, 128 F.3d 949, 957 (6th Cir.1997) (citing Miller with approval). McFall's trial counsel made a similar argument before the district court, contending that the government's primary goal in questioning Sawyer before the grand jury was to incriminate McFall. At trial, the government's motivation would, of course, have been the same. In United States v. DiNapoli, 8 F.3d 909 (2d Cir.1993) (en banc), in contrast, the Second Circuit required comparison of motives at a fine-grained level of particularity. [10] See id. at 912 ([W]e do not accept the proposition ... that the test of similar motive is simply whether at the two proceedings the questioner takes the same side of the same issue.); see id. (stating that the proper test for similarity of motive is whether the questioner had a substantially similar degree of interest in prevailing on the related issues at both proceedings) (emphasis added); accord United States v. Omar, 104 F.3d 519, 522-24 (1st Cir.1997) (concluding that the government will rarely have a similar motive in questioning a witness before a grand jury as it would have at trial). The DiNapoli Court focused on three factors that distinguished the government's degree of motivation in examining the witness before the grand jury from its motivation at trial. 8 F.3d at 915. First, at the time of the grand jury testimony, the defendants in DiNapoli had already been indicted, and thus the government did not necessarily have a strong incentive to pursue testimony that would incriminate them. Id. Second, the grand jurors, as a group, had already indicated to the prosecutor that they did not believe the witnesses' testimony, diminishing the need to pursue impeaching lines of questioning. Id. Finally, the court concluded that prosecutors had declined to impeach some of the statements before the grand jury that they knew to be false in order to avoid disclosing secret evidence ( i.e., facts gleaned from undisclosed wiretaps and informers). Id. The government's motivation in questioning Sawyer before the grand jury was likely not as intense as it would have been at trial, both because it had already indicted McFall, and because the standard of proof for obtaining a conviction is much higher than the standard for securing an indictment. See id. at 913. We cannot agree, however, with the Second Circuit's gloss on Rule 804(b)(1). As one of the dissenters in DiNapoli (an en banc decision) noted, the requirement of similar intensity of motivation conflicts with the rule's plain language, which requires similar but not identical motivation. Id. at 916 (Pratt, J., dissenting); Geiger, 263 F.3d at 1038 (`Similar motive' does not mean `identical motive.') (quoting Salerno, 505 U.S. at 326, 112 S.Ct. 2503 (Blackmun, J., concurring)); see also Salerno, 505 U.S. at 328-29, 112 S.Ct. 2503 (Stevens, J., dissenting) ([A] party has a motive to cross-examine any witness who, in her estimation, is giving false or inaccurate testimony about a fact that is material to the legal question at issue in the proceeding.). On balance, we agree with the D.C. Circuit's elaboration of the similar motive test and conclude that the government's fundamental objective in questioning Sawyer before the grand jury was to draw out testimony that would support its theory that McFall conspired with Sawyer to commit extortionthe same motive it possessed at trial. That motive may not have been as intense before the grand jury, but Rule 804(b)(1) does not require an identical quantum of motivation. Although McFall had already been indicted when Sawyer appeared before the grand jury, prosecutors did not obtain the final superseding indictment (which brought the total number of counts against McFall to twenty) until September 9, 2004, almost two years after Sawyer appeared before the grand jury. Moreover, Count 14 is a conspiracy charge, and thus depends on proof that McFall and Sawyer cooperated in a scheme to extort money from Digital Angel, providing prosecutors with ample incentive to develop testimony that would incriminate McFall. The district court, therefore, erred in concluding that the government's respective motives were completely different, and the exclusion of Sawyer's grand jury testimony as hear-say amounted to an abuse of discretion. The district court's alternative Rule 403 basis for excluding the evidence also amounts to an abuse of discretion. See Fed.R.Evid. 403 ([E]vidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, or misleading the jury, or by considerations of undue delay, waste of time, or needless presentation of cumulative evidence.). First, the district court appears to have given no consideration to the probative value of Sawyer's testimony, a crucial element of the balancing test that Rule 403 requires. See Old Chief v. United States, 519 U.S. 172, 182-83, 117 S.Ct. 644, 136 L.Ed.2d 574 (1997). Second, the district court erroneously concluded that evidence that Sawyer had been indicted for perjury and that he pleaded guilty to the crime of honest services mail fraud would be inadmissible at trial. Evidence that Sawyer perjured himself (along with evidence of his felony mail fraud conviction) could have been admitted at trial to impeach the credibility of his grand jury testimony pursuant to FRE 806. United States v. Becerra, 992 F.2d 960, 965 (9th Cir.1993) (Federal Rule of Evidence 806 permits attacks on the credibility of the declarant of a hearsay statement as if the declarant had testified.). Moreover, the unique circumstances of this case present an additional reason why the district court's refusal to permit McFall to introduce Sawyer's grand jury testimony was an abuse of discretion. Under Sawyer's plea agreement, the government had the right to require Sawyer to testify pursuant to the agreement's cooperation clause. Thus, Sawyer was unavailable only to the defendant, McFall. Once Sawyer's grand jury testimony was read to the jury, the government could have called Sawyer in its rebuttal case to testify and pursued whatever line of impeachment or any other legitimate line of questioning it desired. [11] In sum, the probative value of the grand jury testimony was very high, and the potential for unfair prejudice, given the government's ability to impeach under Rule 806 or even to call Sawyer as a witness, was substantially lower than the district court presumed. The district court thus abused its discretion in excluding Sawyer's grand jury testimony as unduly prejudicial under Rule 403. We reverse the Count 14 conviction.