Opinion ID: 2257538
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Prejudice to the Defendant From Failure to Admit Brown's Plea and Proffer.

Text: As discussed above, if the court finds error or abuse of discretion in the rulings, it must then determine whether the mistakes constituted significant prejudice so as to have denied the appellant a fair trial. [32] We hold that the trial judge's refusal to admit Brown's proffered guilty plea and statements constituted prejudice so significant that it denied Linda a fair trial. As noted, Mellisa's testimony was the linchpin of the State's case. She provided the State with all of the evidence necessary to convict her mother. Surely Mellisa's testimony, if not contradicted by any other eyewitness, would strongly influence a jury, since Mellisa was implicating her own mother in two intentional murders. By the same logic, any facts that would test Mellisa's credibility could also significantly impact the outcome of the case. Because Brown's proffered statement gave Mellisa a motive to lie, that statement should have been admitted to impeach Mellisa's credibility. Because it was not, the jury's inability to assess Brown's proffered statements to support his plea, and the inconsistencies they created for the State's case, denied her a fair trial. Moreover, the State's tactics exacerbated the prejudice to Linda. The State accepted Brown's plea in April of 2003. Six months later, in October of 2003, the State accepted Mellisa's plea  a time that the State concedes its prosecutors believed Brown was lying. [33] At the time that Mellisa entered her guilty plea  six months before Linda's trial  the State's prosecutors could have notified the defense and the trial judge of their ethical dilemma, but they did not. Instead, the State included Brown on its potential witness list for voir dire twelve days before opening statements, and waited until four days before the scheduled opening statements before disclosing the ethical dilemma. The dissent seems to suggest that Linda's plight at this point is no different than that of any codefendant who the State and Superior Court agree to try first. We disagree. Here, both of Linda's codefendants pleaded guilty and were not going to have a trial because each had made a deal in open court to testify truthfully against Linda. When the prosecutors' stated they would not be calling Brown, the trial judge sua sponte should have asked, are you revoking Brown's plea agreement? If not, I will sentence Brown now and the defense can call Brown. Defense counsel had no ethical dilemma because they were not presenting Brown's statements for their truth  just the opposite. Defense counsel wanted to show Brown's version's inconsistency with Mellisa's version and demonstrate that neither were credible. This case is, we think, unique because the trial judge allowed the State's tactical trial decisions to control Brown's sentencing date  whether the State called him or not  which in turn gave the State control over Brown's availability to both the State and to the defense. [34] Any experienced trial attorney would quickly grasp the significant prejudice resulting from the State's timing. Defense counsel reasonably believed that the State would call both Brown and Mellisa to testify in accordance with the terms of their respective public plea agreements and the State's representations to the Superior Court at the time of the pleas, and in reliance on that belief, defense counsel based their theory of Linda's defense on the inconsistencies between Brown's and Mellisa's proffers. The State's strategy of waiting until the thirteenth hour to disclose its ethical dilemma forced defense counsel to reformulate their entire trial strategy which they had spent six months preparing, four days before opening statements. Brown became unavailable to the defendant because Linda called him as a witness and he asserted his Fifth Amendment right. But Brown was always available to the State. The State had entered into an agreement with Brown that required Brown to testify if called by the State as a witness at the trial. If the State pursued its agreement to call Brown, he would have been required to testify pursuant to his plea agreement. If Brown refused to testify for the State and thereby breached the plea agreement, the State could have revoked its plea agreement with Brown. In this case, Brown remained unavailable to the defense because the State did not decide to honor its plea agreement with Brown until after Charbonneau's trial, even though the State had already concluded Brown's statements at the time of the plea agreement were untruthful. If the State had immediately announced that it was not calling Brown as a witness but was nevertheless going to honor his plea agreement, Brown could have been sentenced promptly and would then have been available to testify for the defense at trial because Brown would no longer have been able to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify. Consequently, the State's unilateral decisions not to call Brown as a witness and not to make a decision about honoring Brown's plea agreement until after Charbonneau's trial resulted in Brown's unavailability as a witness for the defense. [35] Not surprisingly, defense counsels' motion in limine sought relief from the trial judge, most relevantly, an order admitting Brown's plea and proffer in order to impeach Mellisa and create reasonable doubt about the State's case. By denying that requested relief, the trial judge forced Linda to go to trial without the benefit of the strategy her counsel had spent months developing. For these reasons, the trial judge's erroneous exclusion of Brown's proffered statements denied Linda her right to a fair trial. [36] As earlier discussed, the crux of the defense strategy, which Linda's defense counsel spent months preparing, was to cross-examine Brown and Mellisa to highlight to the jury the inconsistencies between the stories of both witnesses. Defense counsel believed that those inconsistencies might show that both witnesses were lying and create a reasonable doubt in the jurors' minds about the extent of Linda's involvement. Defense counsel would also have been able to argue that the State had no firm view how the murders occurred because its own witnesses had given different accounts of the murders. Put simply, the defense could have argued that the State had no coherent theory about Linda's involvement. The State's chosen tactic  waiting until only four days before opening statements to announce that the prosecution would not be calling Brown  eviscerated that defense strategy and, because of its timing, did so unfairly. As previously held, the trial judge should not have allowed that to occur, but failing that, should have granted the relief Linda had requested in her motion in limine to preserve her ability to conduct a defense.