Court Opinion

ID: 9582886
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:32:25.380466+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:38:42.760661
License: Public Domain

Poff, J.,
dissenting.
I would reverse the judgment. The Commonwealth failed to discharge its burden of proving prior inaccessibility.
At the time the parties rested, two items of evidence tending to show prior accessibility had been adduced, one by the defendant and the other by the Commonwealth. I agree that the trial court was justified in discarding the former as unreliable. But the latter, the testimony of the victim of the two criminal offenses, was altogether reliable.
In Turner v. Commonwealth, 218 Va. 141, 235 S.E.2d 357 (1977), cited by the majority, the defendant claimed that the Commonwealth had failed to exclude a reasonable hypothesis of prior accessibility. Rejecting that claim, we held that, in order to satisfy the standard of reasonableness, the hypothesis must “flow from the evidence itself, and not from the imagination of defendant’s counsel.” Id. at 148, 235 S.E.2d at 361. Here, defendant’s hypothesis, though based in part upon his own self-serving, self-contradictory testimony, was supported by the uncontradicted testimony of the principal prosecution witness. Surely, such evidence satisfies the Turner test and activates the Commonwealth’s “duty to negate” the hypothesis. Id. at 149.