Court Opinion

ID: 9483865
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:33:26.826501+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:52.618682
License: Public Domain

*1465EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
with whom BAUER, Chief Judge, joins, concurring.
I join the court’s opinion, which leaves open the question whether United States v. Salerno, — U.S. -, 112 S.Ct. 2503, 120 L.Ed.2d 255 (1992), requires a fresh look at the introduction .of grand jury testimony under Fed.R.Evid. 804(b)(5).
Rule 804(b)(1) provides that statements of an unavailable declarant are admissible, despite the hearsay rule, when the statements are:
Testimony given as a witness at another hearing of the same or a different proceeding, or in a deposition taken in compliance with law in the course of the same or another proceeding, if the party against whom the testimony is now offered ... had an opportunity and similar motive to develop the testimony by direct, cross, or redirect examination.
Defendants in criminal cases are not represented before the grand jury, and hence lack an “opportunity” to develop the witness’ testimony by direct or cross examination. Grand jury testimony is accordingly inadmissible under Rule 804(b)(1) against a defendant in a criminal case.
Bypassing Rule 804(b)(1), the district judge relied on Rule 804(b)(5), one of the residual exceptions to the hearsay rule, which says that a court may admit:
A statement not specifically covered by any of the foregoing exceptions but having equivalent circumstantial guarantees of trustworthiness, if the court determines that (A) the statement is offered as evidence of a material fact; (B) the statement is more probative on the point for which it is offered than any other evidence which the proponent can procure through reasonable efforts; and (C) the general purposes of these rules and the interests of justice will best. be served by admission of the statement into evidence.
Roger Elayyan testified before the grand jury but was out of the country during defendants’ trial. The district judge permitted the prosecutor to use a transcript of Elayyan’s testimony as substantive evidence. The court today holds that Elayyan’s statement was inadmissible because not sufficiently trustworthy. That conclusion enables the court to avoid the question whether Rule 804(b)(5) applies to grand jury testimony in the first place.
United States v. Boulahanis, 677 F.2d 586, 588-89 (7th Cir.1982), holds that it does. See also United States v. Snyder, 872 F.2d 1351, 1354 (7th Cir.1989) (invoking Boulahanis without further analysis of the Rules of Evidence and moving on to address potential constitutional obstacles); United States v. Guinan, 836 F.2d 350 (7th Cir.1988) (same). But Boulahanis does not mention the introductory language limiting Rule 804(b)(5) to “[a] statement not specifically covered by any of the foregoing exceptions”. Although Boulahanis assumed that Rule 804(b)(1) does not even apply to grand jury testimony, so clear is the inadmissibility of such testimony against the defendant under its standards, we know from Salerno that Rule 804(b)(1) indeed “applies.” Prior testimony of every description is “specifically covered by” Rule 804(b)(1). Boulahanis treats Rule 804(b)(5) as if it began: “A statement not specifically admissible under any of the foregoing exceptions ...”. Evidence that flunks an express condition of a rule can come in anyway. Rule 804(b)(5) reads more naturally if we understand the introductory clause to mean that evidence of a kind specifically addressed (“covered”) by one of the four other subsections must satisfy the conditions laid down for its admission, and that other kinds of evidence *1466not covered (because the drafters could not be exhaustive) are admissible if the evidence is approximately as reliable as evidence that would be admissible under the specific subsections.
Some rules take the form: “Evidence is always admissible if conditions A and B hold; if these conditions do not hold, then it is admissible if the court believes that the benefits of using the evidence exceed any shortcomings.” Consider how Rule 609 treats prior convictions offered to impeach a defendant: a conviction may be used automatically if it involves dishonesty or false statement, and otherwise the judge balances probative and prejudicial effects. This is how the court of appeals treated Rule 804(b)(1) in Salerno. Defendants in a criminal case sought to introduce the grand jury testimony of a person who, having invoked the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination, was “unavailable” to them at trial. The prosecution, the “party against whom the testimony [was] offered,” objected, observing that although it had the “opportunity” to examine the witness before the grand jury, it lacked a motive “similar” to that at trial, where it would be deprived of the opportunity to cross-examine the witness. The court of appeals dispensed with the “similar motive” portion of the rule on equitable grounds and held the testimony admissible. 937 F.2d 797, 805-08, modified, 952 F.2d 623 (2d Cir.1991). The Supreme Court reversed, concluding that the Rule must be applied as written. Consistent application of the textualist approach implies taking the introduction to Rule 804(b)(5) equally seriously.
In Salerno the United States persuaded the Supreme Court that to introduce prior testimony by an unavailable declarant the proponent of the evidence must satisfy the conditions in Rule 804(b)(1). In our case the United States, concededly unable to satisfy the conditions in Rule 804(b)(1), contends that the judge may admit the evidence anyway after ascertaining that the testimony was trustworthy. I doubt that the Solicitor General took Salerno to the Supreme Court in order to change the citation of authority from Rule 804(b)(1) to Rule 804(b)(5) while leaving the result untouched, or that the Court thought that its opinion would do nothing beyond correcting a typographical error.
True, Salerno does not discuss Rule 804(b)(5); neither side suggested that the grand jury testimony would be admissible under that Rule. The district judge had held that the testimony in question did not satisfy the “trustworthiness” requirement, which appears in Rule 804(b)(5) but not in Rule 804(b)(1). Salerno therefore does not discuss whether resort to that subsection is appropriate when testimony appears to be more reliable. It would be ironic, though, if the upshot of Salerno were that only the prosecutor may employ grand jury testimony in criminal cases. Any asymmetry should run the other way: the confrontation clause of the sixth amendment protects defendants, not prosecutors, from out-of-court statements. Although historical exceptions to the hearsay rule do not violate the confrontation clause, new exceptions must overcome a presumption against them. White v. Illinois, — U.S. -, 112 S.Ct. 736, 116 L.Ed.2d 848 (1992).
Trial by affidavit was the bugbear that led to the confrontation clause; trial by grand jury testimony is not far removed. Grand jury testimony, like an affidavit, is one-sided, an ex parte narration over which the prosecutor has ample control. To avoid the introduction of unilateral narrations, Rule 804(b)(1) provides that prior testimony is admissible only if the party against whom the evidence is offered had both opportunity to examine the declarant and motive to do so. That the testimony has indicia of trustworthiness cannot be controlling; many affidavits appear to be trustworthy. A defendant’s entitlement to confront the witnesses against him is not limited to confronting apparently-untrustworthy witnesses. Confrontation is valuable in large measure because it may establish that what seems to be accurate is misleading or deceitful or rests on inadequate foundation. Conditions on the use of Rule 804(b)(1) ensure that the defendant retains the right of confrontation in circumstances that lie at the core of the constitu*1467tional guarantee. Temptation to get ’round this limitation by moving to Rule 804(b)(5) and slighting its introductory language should be resisted.