Court Opinion

ID: 9492337
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:38:42.512635+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:15.372485
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
Amerson was convicted of unlawful possession of a quarter of an ounce of crack cocaine with intent to distribute it and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Given the length of the sentence, we should review the rulings of the district judge with more than the usual care to make sure that an innocent man has not been convicted. I do not doubt that my colleagues have tried conscientiously to do this, but I am not persuaded that the conviction can stand.
The Peoria police raided a second-floor apartment that they suspected was a crack house. In one room they found Timothy Heard, who as they entered broke a window with his fist. The police testified that they found a small container of crack on the floor of the room. They waited in the apartment and several customers for crack showed up, one of whom they arrested. Night fell. There was a knock on the front door. It was Robert Amerson. A voice within called, ‘Who is it?” and Amer-son answered, “It’s Rob. Open the door.” One of the crack dealers who was being detained in the house by the police shouted, “Rob, it’s the police.” Immediately the police yanked the door open and as they did so — according to the testimony of the three officers who were in the front room of the apartment — Amerson tossed a plastic bag over his shoulder. The police testified that they found the bag, containing small “rocks” of crack cocaine, on the ground in front of the building but that they found nothing but shards of glass on the ground below the window that Heard had broken. Amerson denied having had or tossed any crack.
Amerson wanted to call Heard as a witness. Heard refused on Fifth Amendment grounds, but he signed an affidavit in which he said that on the night of the raid he had “heard police enter the apartment. Being in possession of two packages of cocaine I ran to the back bedroom and attempted to dispose of them. One landed inside. Later one was found outside. Robert Amerson was un[a]ware of any of this, for he was not yet present, but was later charged.” At first the judge was willing to allow all but the last sentence of the affidavit to be admitted into evidence as a declaration against penal interest. Fed.R.Evid. 804(b)(3). But later he *691changed his mind, saying only that there was insufficient corroboration. This must be reckoned, on the record as it was developed (or rather left undeveloped) in the district court, a clear and prejudicial error.
Rule 804(b)(3) makes statements against penal interest offered to exculpate a criminal defendant inadmissible “unless corroborating circumstances dearly indicate the trustworthiness of the statement” (emphasis added), and it is on the precise meaning of the italicized adverb that the soundness of the district judge’s ruling depends. At common law, declarations against penal, as distinct from financial, interest were not an exception to the hearsay rule, and while the distinction was criticized, Donnelly v. United States, 228 U.S. 243, 277-78, 33 S.Ct. 449, 57 L.Ed. 820 (1913) (Holmes, J, dissenting), it had some basis in the fact that “most instances of evidence of statements against penal interests proffered by an accused in a criminal ease involve statements allegedly made to the accused or by one prison inmate to another — situations fraught with the possibility of contrivance or of unfounded braggadocio.” Peter W. Tague, “Perils of the Rulemaking Process: The Development, Application and Unconstitutionality of Rule 804(b)(3)’s Penal Interest Exception,” 69 Geo. L.J. 851, 869 (1981) (quoting Department of Justice official); see also United States v. Silverstein, 732 F.2d 1338, 1346-47 (7th Cir.1984). The possibility is especially great because “one criminal can make out-of-court statements exculpating another and then rather easily claim the privilege [against compulsory self-incrimination] when the government seeks to cross-examine him to discredit the statement.” United States v. Mackey, 117 F.3d 24, 29 (1st Cir.1997). Hence the requirement that to be admissible a statement against penal interest be clearly corroborated.
In the law of evidence, corroboration of testimony just means that there is some evidence besides the testimony itself to .indicate that the testimony is trustworthy — not that it is necessarily true, but (when it is a hearsay statement) that it is sufficiently worthy of belief to have value as evidence despite the impossibility of subjecting the declarant to the fires of cross-examination. See, e.g., United States v. Petty, 132 F.3d 373, 380 (7th Cir.1997). For the corroboration to “clearly” indicate the trustworthiness (though, again, not necessarily the truth) of the out-of-court statement requires a more probing inquiry, for example into the motive of the declarant to lie. See, e.g., United States v. Garcia, 986 F.2d 1135, 1140-41 (7th Cir.1993); United States v. Butler, 71 F.3d 243, 253-54 (7th Cir.1995); United States v. Nagib, 56 F.3d 798, 805 (7th Cir.1995); United States v. Garcia, 897 F.2d 1413, 1420-21 (7th Cir.1990); United States v. Silverstein, supra, 732 F.2d at 1346-47; United States v. Price, 134 F.3d 340, 348 (6th Cir.1998); United States v. Mackey, supra, 117 F.3d at 29; United States v. Koskerides, 877 F.2d 1129, 1135-36 (2d Cir.1989); see generally American Bar Association, Section of Litigation, Emerging Problems under the Federal Rules of Evidence 343-46 (3d ed.1998). As the example of motive shows, deciding whether the corroborating evidence clearly indicates the trustworthiness of the corroborated statement requires (despite the wording of the rule) consideration not only of the corroborating evidence itself (here a broken window, as we are about to see), but also of “the circumstances in which the statements were made,” United States v. Barone, 114 F.3d 1284, 1300 (1st Cir.1997), that is, other indications of its trustworthiness or lack thereof, United States v. Silverstein, supra, 732 F.2d at 1347 (7th Cir.1984); United States v. Mackey, supra, 117 F.3d at 29, such as the competence and incentives of the declarant. See, e.g., American Automotive Accessories v. Fishman, 175 F.3d 534, 541-42 (7th Cir.1999); United States v. Hall, 165 F.3d 1095, 1110-13 (7th Cir.1999); United States v. Maliszewski, 161 F.3d 992, 1009 (6th Cir.1998); cf. Idaho v. Wright, 497 U.S. 805, 821-22, 110 S.Ct. 3139, 111 L.Ed.2d 638 (1990).
*692Corroboration was supplied by the broken window, which indicated that Heard had wanted to throw incriminating evidence out of the apartment, cf. United States v. Keltner, 147 F.3d 662, 670-71 (8th Cir.1998), and by testimony of Sharon Parker (itself hearsay, but admissible on the issue of the admissibility of Heard’s affidavit, Fed.R.Evid. 104(a)) that Heard had had more than one packet of cocaine with him, though only one was found in the room, suggesting that at least one other had made it out the window. The government does not deny that Heard broke the window when he heard the police enter the apartment. According to the police, he did not succeed in throwing any crack out the window; the crack fell on the floor. But it was merely their word against his and Parker’s. Although one officer testified that the crack allegedly thrown by Amer-son was found at the front of the apartment, another officer, the evidence custodian, placed it only about 19 feet in a straight line from the window in the back bedroom; Heard could have hurled it that far. It is apparent from the majority opinion that my colleagues credit the police testimony over that of the criminals; but that is not our job; the issue is the admissibility, not the weight, of Heard’s affidavit.
Turning to the critical issue (emphasized for example in our recent Fishman opinion) of motive, I point out that no reason has been given why Heard, whose affidavit could be used to convict him of possession with intent to distribute of almost five times as much crack cocaine as the police claim that he had, would admit to that possession if it were untrue. Even if the increment in the amount possessed would not affect his sentence (an issue not discussed by the parties), it would ice the case against him, since it is a confession, which is stronger evidence than the word of the police. And even if he refused to repeat his admission at his trial, on Fifth Amendment grounds, his affidavit, which is sworn, could be used to convict him. So his statement exculpating Amerson was really and substantially against his penal interest. There is no indication that he and Amerson are friends or relatives, or that he gave the affidavit in response to a threat, or that he was paid for it, or that he would rather gum up the works of the criminal justice system than minimize his own chances of being locked up for the next 15 years, or that he was trying to curry favor with the police or prosecutors, or that he wished to distance himself from Amerson, even at the cost of taking all the blame himself, in order to avoid being charged with conspiracy. Cf. Williamson v. United States, 512 U.S. 594, 603, 114 S.Ct. 2431, 129 L.Ed.2d 476 (1994).
Before ruling Heard’s affidavit inadmissible, the district judge should have explored the circumstances surrounding its creation. On the present, incomplete record, Heard’s affidavit seems about as trustworthy as other forms of hearsay that are admitted under one or more of the multitudinous exceptions to the hearsay rule. The district judge thought otherwise, but as he did not explain his thinking process, and specifically did not point to anything in the record that might support his conclusion, we should not give it controlling weight. District judges are granted a wide discretion in ruling on issues of evidence, but deferential does not mean abject — appellate courts do sometimes reverse rulings on evidence, see, e.g., Old Chief v. United States, 519 U.S. 172, 117 S.Ct. 644, 136 L.Ed.2d 574 (1997); United States v. Nagib, supra, 56 F.3d at 805; United States v. Garcia, supra, 986 F.2d at 1142; Tanner v. Westbrook, 174 F.3d 542, 548-49 (5th Cir.1999); United States v. Brooks, 145 F.3d 446, 454-55 (1st Cir.1998); Gregg v. Allstate Ins. Co., 126 F.3d 1080, 1082 (8th Cir.1997)-and deference is never properly given to rulings the grounds of which are not explained, Foman v. Davis, 371 U.S. 178, 182, 83 S.Ct. 227, 9 L.Ed.2d 222 (1962); Carr v. O’Leary, 167 F.3d 1124, 1127 (7th Cir.1999); PMC v. Sherwin-Williams Co., 151 F.3d 610, 620 (7th Cir.1998); United States *693v. Beasley, 809 F.2d 1273 (7th Cir.1987), unless the grounds are obvious.
Without Heard’s affidavit, it was Arner-son’s word against that of three police officers. These are long odds, since Amer-son had a criminal record that could be used to impeach his credibility. Heard’s affidavit would have shortened the odds a bit. A person who is trying to avoid a 15-year sentence is entitled to that bit. It is not unknown for police to lie in order to get a conviction. See, e.g., Myron W. Or-field, Jr., Comment, “The Exclusionary Rule and Deterrence: An Empirical Study of Chicago Narcotics Officers,” 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1016 (1987). It is not uncommon for police to make a mistake. They may have made one here. (For that matter, they may have lied.) It may have been dark when they opened the door to Amer-son (it was night, and whether the motion-detector light with which the building was equipped was on or off is hotly contested) and they may have mistaken an excited gesture with empty hands for the throwing of a package of crack no bigger than a golf ball. The veracity of the police testimony is undermined by the prosecutor’s insistence (based on I know not what) that Amerson carried the crack in his hand from his car, which he had parked on the street in front of the apartment building. I should think it more likely that a crack dealer would carry the package of crack in his pocket (if as in this case it would fit in a pocket) until he got inside the house, rather than risk being seen with it in his hand, or dropping it, or not having the free use of both his hands.
Even though the exclusion of Heard’s affidavit put Amerson way behind the eight ball, the prosecutor was sufficiently nervous that in closing argument he asked the jury to believe the police over Amerson because “What you’ve got here are vice and narcotics officers — experienced drug enforcement officers whose job is to arrest dope peddlers_ Those officers all indicated that it was part of their duties to rid our streets of cocaine.” The judge sustained the defendant’s objections to these statements, and I don’t think he was required to do more. E.g., United States v. Owens, 145 F.3d 923, 929 (7th Cir.1998); United States v. Richardson, 130 F.3d 765, 779 (7th Cir.1997). But at the oral argument of the appeal the prosecutor admitted to us that he considers police testimony to be presumptively credible, and there is little doubt that this was the message that the quoted statements conveyed to the jury. This innuendo, which has the effect of asking the jury to believe the police just because they are the police, highlights the importance of allowing Am-erson to use Heard’s affidavit to redress if only slightly the balance of believability between him and the police in the eyes of the jury. I think it is possible that he would have been acquitted had the affidavit been admitted; I even think it is possible, albeit not highly likely, that he is not guilty, that he is a victim of police fabrication or error. If as I believe it was error to exclude Heard’s affidavit, it was reversible error and he is entitled to a new trial. The government does not even argue harmless error.