Opinion ID: 2
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Admission of police booking sheet

Text: Dowdell claims that the booking sheet from his July 16, 2001 arrest was inadmissible hearsay. Normally, an otherwise hearsay public record is admissible so long as it sets forth matters observed pursuant to duty imposed by law as to which matters there was a duty to report. Fed. R. Evid. 803(8)(B). However, under what is sometimes called the law enforcement exception, Rule 803(8)(B) retains the hearsay prohibition in criminal cases for any matters observed by police officers and other law enforcement personnel. Id. We have interpreted this rule to mean that, as a general matter, police reports are inadmissible in a criminal case when offered by the prosecution. -44- United States v. Arias-Santana, 964 F.2d 1262, 1264 (1st Cir. 1992). The Rule on its face seems equally applicable to the observations contained in a booking sheet. Nevertheless, the district court held that the law enforcement exception was not meant to encompass routine, non-adversarial documents, and on that basis found the booking sheet admissible. Although our review of rulings admitting or excluding evidence is typically for abuse of discretion, our review of the district court's interpretation of a rule of evidence is de novo. United States v. DeCologero, 530 F.3d 36, 58 (1st Cir. 2008). We have yet to consider whether the law enforcement exception applies to an ostensibly objective, non-adversarial document such as a booking sheet. On two previous occasions, however, we have at least hinted that it should not. First, in United States v. Union Nacional de Trabajadores, 576 F.2d 388 (1st Cir. 1978), we held admissible a copy of a U.S. marshal's return despite its genesis at the hands of law enforcement personnel. We reasoned that [t]here is nothing to indicate that Congress meant to cut back upon the common law rule respecting sheriff's returns. A sheriff or marshal reporting the service of process is not reporting in the capacity of a police observer at the scene of a crime, nor is he ordinarily connected with the case in a law enforcement capacity. The adversarial circumstances which might render a law enforcement officer's observations unreliable are unlikely, therefore, to be present. -45- Id. at 391. Then, in United States v. Trenkler, 61 F.3d 45 (1st Cir. 1995), we cited United States v. Brown, 9 F.3d 907, 911-12 (11th Cir. 1993), in dicta for the proposition that Rule 803(8) does not necessarily prohibit the use of police records prepared in a routine non-adversarial setting that do not result from subjective investigation and evaluation. Trenkler, 61 F.3d at 59. Drawing a line at routine, non-adversarial documents would best comport with the purpose for which Congress originally approved the exception. The Rule's enactment history indicates that the reason for this exclusion is that observations by police officers at the scene of the crime or the apprehension of the defendant are not as reliable as observations by public officials in other cases because of the adversarial nature of the confrontation between the police and the defendant in criminal cases. S. Rep. No. 1277, 93d Con., 2d Sess., reprinted in (1974) U.S.C.C.A.N. 7051, 7064. Congress was generally concerned about prosecutors attempting to prove their cases in chief simply by putting into evidence police officers' reports of their contemporaneous observations of crime. United States v. Grady, 544 F.2d 598, 604 (2d Cir. 1976). Recognizing this intent, those circuits to have considered the issue have all found that the limitation in Rule 803(8)(B) does not exclude routine observations that are inherently -46- non-adversarial.17 See, e.g., United States v. Harris, 557 F.3d 938, 941 (8th Cir. 2009) (admitting testimony regarding the contents of a probation file because while the rule does prohibit the admission of records that contain opinions or conclusions resulting from criminal investigations, it does not bar the admission of records concerning routine and unambiguous factual matters); United States v. Weiland, 420 F.3d 1062, 1074–75 (9th Cir. 2005) (admitting Department of Corrections' packet containing fingerprints and photographs of defendant because they are records of routine and nonadversarial matters rather than police officers' reports of their contemporaneous observations of crime that might be biased by the adversarial nature of the report) (internal quotation marks omitted); Brown, 9 F.3d at 911-12 (admitting property receipt prepared during booking for firearm because the police custodian in the instant case had no incentive to do anything other than mechanically record the relevant 17 Dowdell argues that there is actually a circuit split on this issue, citing to the Second Circuit's decision in United States v. Oates, 560 F.2d 45 (2d Cir. 1977). Oates, however, was concerned not so much with what constitutes a report as with who constitute law enforcement personnel, holding that the term encompassed chemists working in the U.S. customs service. Here, there is no dispute that the police officers who drew up the booking sheet were within the class of actors envisioned by Rule 803(8)(B). Less clear is whether the documents were within the class of evidence. On this point, even the Second Circuit has acknowledged that the Rule's language is not absolute. See Grady, 544 F.2d at 604; United States v. Feliz, 467 F.3d 227, 236–37 (2d Cir. 2006) (autopsy reports prepared by medical examiner's office admissible because they were routinely created and did not constitute police observations). -47- information on the property receipt); United States v. Quezada, 754 F.2d 1190, 1193–94 (5th Cir. 1985) (admitting an INS form indicating arrest and deportation because officials' only motivation was to mechanically register an unambiguous factual matter); United States v. Orozco, 590 F.2d 789, 793–94 (9th Cir. 1979) (finding no error in admission of Customs Service computer cards of license numbers of cars crossing the border since the simple recordation of license numbers . . . is not of the adversarial confrontation nature which might cloud [an officer's] perception); Grady, 544 F.2d at 604 (permitting admission of serial number and receipt of weapons because they did not concern observations . . . of the appellants' commission of crimes, but rather were strictly routine records). Dowdell argues that this construction violates the Rule's plain language, which seems to bar categorically the prosecution's introduction of any and all documents prepared by the police. This much may be true. Yet, the alternative would violate the rule's plain purpose, and [i]t is a well-established canon of statutory construction that a court should go beyond the literal language of a statute if reliance on that language would defeat the plain purpose of the statute. Bob Jones Univ. v. United States, 461 U.S. 574, 586 (1983). Given the clear intent that undergirded the passage of Rule 803(8), we decline to give it a literal, unqualified meaning. See United States v. Smith, 521 F.2d 957, 968 -48- n.24 (D.C. Cir. 1975) (refusing to construe 803(8)(B) according to its literal meaning because it should be read[] in accordance with the obvious intent of Congress); see also United States v. PaganSantini, 451 F.3d 258, 264 (1st Cir. 2006) (referring to Rule 803(8) as no model of lucid drafting). Instead, we join the other circuits in concluding that ministerial, non-adversarial information is admissible under Rule 803(8)(B), notwithstanding its documentation at the hands of law enforcement personnel. With this interpretation of Rule 803(8)(B) in place, we now must consider whether a booking sheet would violate it. In an unpublished decision, a panel of the Fifth Circuit answered this precise question in the negative, summarily finding that booking information [i]s taken in a routine, nonadversarial setting. United States v. Haughton, 235 Fed. App'x 254, 2007 WL 2186250, at  (5th Cir. Jul. 30 2007). We agree. The rote recitation of biographical information in a booking sheet ordinarily does not implicate the same potential perception biases that a subjective narrative of an investigation or an alleged offense might. A booking sheet does not recount the work that led to an arrest so much as the mere fact that an arrest occurred. As a result, unlike the investigative reports that lie at the heart of the law enforcement exception, booking sheets raise little concern that suspicion of guilt will function as proof of guilt. We think that a police booking sheet is in this respect analogous to the INS -49- warrant that was the subject of the Fifth Circuit's analysis in Quezada. The Quezada court upheld the admissibility of the warrant, which recounted the defendant's prior arrest and deportation,[d]ue to the lack of any motivation on the part of the recording official to do other than mechanically register an unambiguous factual matter. 754 F.2d at 1194. The same reasoning applies here. Dowdell asserts that, even if this much may be true in the abstract, the particular booking sheet admitted in his trial may have been prepared with an eye toward proving his identity and as such was excludable as indicat[ing] lack of trustworthiness. Fed. R. Evid. 803(8)(c). He offers no factual support for such a finding, instead indulging in a bare worst-case-scenario speculation that the booking officer might have colluded with Monteiro before completing the form. We need not tarry on this. An entirely conjectural and uncorroborated conspiracy theory does not transform an otherwise trustworthy document into an untrustworthy one.18 There was no abuse of discretion. 18 We note that other circuits have placed the burden of proving untrustworthiness under Rule 803(8) squarely on the shoulders of the party opposing admission. See, e.g., Boerner v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co., 394 F.3d 594, 600–01 (8th Cir. 2005); Bridgeway Corp. v. Citibank, 201 F.3d 134, 143–44 (2d Cir. 2000); Zeus Enterprises, Inc. v. Alphin Aircraft, Inc., 190 F.3d 238, 241 (4th Cir. 1999); Reynolds v. Green, 184 F.3d 589, 596 (6th Cir. 1999); United States v. Loyola-Dominguez, 125 F.3d 1315, 1318 (9th Cir. 1997); Graef v. Chemical Leaman Corp., 106 F.3d 112, 118 (5th Cir. 1997). We have not yet considered who should bear the burden in this context, although our default position seems to be that it would be the party seeking admission, United States v. Bartelho, -50-