Opinion ID: 2924322
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Spoliation Instructions

Text: The Estate believed that the defendants were responsible for the unavailability of evidence that might have supported its case—more complete logs and recordings of police radio transmissions and the clothing that Carlson was wearing when he died. It asked the district court to instruct the jury to assume that the missing evidence would have supported the Estate’s theory of the case against Jetter. “[A]n adverse inference for evidence spoliation is appropriate if the [d]efendants knew the evidence was relevant to some issue at trial and their culpable conduct resulted in its loss or destruction.” Adkins v. Wolever (Adkins II), 692 F.3d 499, 504 (6th Cir. 2012) (quoting Beaven v. United States Dep’t of Justice, 622 F.3d 540, 553 (6th Cir. 2010)). “It is within a district court’s inherent power to exercise broad discretion in imposing sanctions based on spoliated evidence.” Adkins v. Wolever (Adkins I), 554 F.3d 650, 653 (6th Cir. 2009). If the district court had concluded that Jetter’s conduct caused the loss of any relevant evidence, it could have imposed sanctions, including instructing the jury to assume that the spoliated evidence supported the Estate’s theory of the case. The Estate argues that the district court erred by declining to issue such an instruction regarding the communication records and the clothing. Beginning with the communications records, the Estate argued that the logs and recordings maintained by the 911 system were altered or incomplete and that the defendants withheld and then destroyed relevant recordings from that evening. Uncontroverted testimony from the 911 Director indicated that neither Jetter nor even the 911 dispatchers who log the communications could have altered the logs. The testimony indicated that the “gaps” in the No. 13-2643 Carlson v. Fewins, et al. Page 14 911 transcripts during the operation that seemed suspicious to the Estate were caused by the officers on the scene using a local frequency not monitored by the 911 dispatchers, a standard practice. The Director also testified that she provided the Estate with copies of all requested recordings and only destroyed the backups more than a year later when the department updated its equipment. Turning to the missing blood-stained clothing, the Estate argued that Jetter was present in the morgue where the clothing disappeared and could have removed evidence that might have contradicted his testimony that Carlson was raising his rifle when Jetter shot him. The Estate had no direct witnesses to the shooting to contradict the officers’ accounts of Carlson leaning out the window, shouldering the rifle, and fingering the trigger. Instead, they presented a blood spatter analyst who testified that the bullet entered Carlson’s head inside the house: seven to thirteen inches inside the window and between five feet, eight inches and six feet above the floor. That witness also testified that the blood spatter patterns on Carlson’s rifle suggested that it was “in a lower position than shouldered” and Carlson’s finger was not on the trigger. The same witness testified about Carlson’s shirt, which went missing sometime around the time of his postmortem exam. The Estate’s expert described a decedent’s clothing as “one of the most basic pieces of evidence to submit in a situation like this.” She explained that analyzing blood spatter and unstained regions on the shirt would have allowed a more precise and confident reconstruction of how Carlson and his rifle were positioned when he was shot. The Medical Examiner who conducted Carlson’s postmortem exam also testified. He testified that he and his assistant removed Carlson’s clothing, bagged it, and placed the bag “on top of the body bag and . . . into the [morgue] refrigerator.” That clothing was missing when Carlson’s body was removed from the morgue. While the Medical Examiner initially signed an affidavit indicating that Jetter was present during the examination, he recanted that statement at trial. The district court offered independent reasons for rejecting the two proposed spoliation instructions: no communication records appeared to have gone missing, and Jetter did not seem to have been responsible for the disappearance of Carlson’s clothing. These conclusions are adequately supported by the record. While the Estate points to gaps in the communication records as evidence of skulduggery, uncontroverted testimony indicated that those gaps reflect No. 13-2643 Carlson v. Fewins, et al. Page 15 the routine use of short-range, unmonitored frequencies for on-site communications. Likewise, the affidavit the Estate uses to argue that Jetter was present during the autopsy was repudiated by the affiant, the Medical Examiner, in testimony in front of the district court. Accordingly, the district court did not abuse its discretion by denying the request for spoliation instructions against Jetter. We affirm the trial court’s decision regarding those instructions.