Court Opinion

ID: 9494793
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:47:07.358329+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:37.151313
License: Public Domain

BRUNETTI, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I dissent because Wang’s statements do not bear sufficient indicia of reliability, and the California trial court’s exclusion of these statements as inadmissible hearsay did not deny Chia his due process rights under Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284, 93 S.Ct. 1038, 35 L.Ed.2d 297 (1973).
Having asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Wang was unavailable to serve as a witness in Chia’s trial. Thus, Chia sought to introduce hearsay statements made by Wang to the police, that were exculpatory in nature, as declarations against penal interest.1 See Cal. Evid.Code § 1230 (West 1999). The trial court determined that Wang’s statements did not fall within this hearsay exception, and that the exclusion of the statements did not deprive Chia of his due process rights under Chambers. In order to determine whether exclusion of the hearsay statements rendered Chia’s trial fundamentally unfair under Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, we must examine the statements themselves.
Co-conspirator Wang was first interviewed by the police on February 5, 1988 in the hospital emergency room prior to his undergoing surgery. Before receiving Wang’s statements, the police informed Wang that he was badly injured and could possibly die in surgery for his several gun*1042shot wounds. Wang stated that on February 1, 1988 he had entered into an agreement with Kow and Chen to steal $60,000 from some drug dealers. Wang admitted to shooting one of the agents and said that he did not know of anyone else involved in the actual shooting other than himself, Kow, and Chen.
A second statement was taken from Wang at 3:30 p.m. on February 5, 1988, after Wang survived the surgery. Wang told of a plan to “rip off’ drug dealers. He recounted in greater detail the shooting of the men in the Volvo (e.g., Kow shot Agent Montoya and grabbed the money bag and Wang shot Agents Seema and Martinez) and details of the attempt by Kow, Chen, and himself to escape in the Nissan, and their eventual capture. No mention of Chia was made at this time.
Due to a malfunction in the tape recorder during the second interview, a third interview was conducted on the evening of February 5, 1988. Wang provided a confession that was substantially similar to that obtained in the second interview. During the third interview, however, Wang was also asked about the black Mitsubishi seen by the police. Wang explained that the Mitsubishi belonged to his friend Michael Chia. Wang said that he told Chia about the plan, and that Chia warned him against involvement and of the possibility that Chen and Kow could turn on him and rip him off.
The fourth and most detailed statement made by Wang came on February 7, 1988, when Wang was interviewed by an FBI agent. Wang stated that Kow asked him a week before the incident to help him with a “rip off’ and the plan included the murder of the individuals to be robbed. Wang again said that he told his friend Chia about the plan and that Chia warned him against involvement for fear of being turned against by Kow and Chen. Chia nevertheless drove Wang in Chia’s Mitsubishi to Kow’s apartment on the night of February 4 so that Wang could deliver a gun and ammunition and to learn of the final plans. Chia and Wang later went to dinner at the 8000 Club and stayed the night at a friend’s house. The next morning, Chia dropped Wang off at Kow’s apartment.
Chen drove Kow and Wang to Tiny Naylor’s. While acting as a lookout in the restaurant parking lot, Wang saw Chia in the Mitsubishi driving around the lot. Wang explained that Chia was watching out for him and again told Wang not to do it. Wang told Chia to go home, but Chia stayed to watch out for Wang. Wang then recounted details of the “rip off,” escape, and capture.
The California Court of Appeal affirmed the trial court’s determination that the four statements did not fall within the statement against the penal interest provision of Cal. Evid.Code § 1230. Under California law, “a declaration against penal interest [is] admissible under Evidence Code section 1230 only as to those statements. which are specifically disserving to the interests of the declarant. No collateral assertions can be permitted.” People v. Garcia, 115 Cal.App.3d 85, 105, 171 Cal. Rptr. 169 (1981). The court found that because Chia was not interested in the admission of the portions of Wang’s statements which specifically disserved Wang’s interests (such as Wang’s statements regarding his own involvement in the “rip off’ and shooting of the DEA agents), but instead only sought to use Wang’s collateral assertions that Chia was not involved in the actual shooting and that Chia tried to dissuade Wang from participating in the enterprise at all, Wang’s statements were properly excluded. The California Supreme Court affirmed without comment.
*1043The exclusion of Wang’s statements was not an unreasonable application of “clearly established law” as articulated by the Supreme Court in Chambers. It is true that hearsay rules “may not be applied mechanistically to defeat the ends of justice,” Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. at 302, 93 S.Ct. 1038, however, the state trial court’s exclusion of Wang’s statements reached neither the opposite conclusion from the Supreme Court on a question of law nor a different result on materially indistinguishable facts. See Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 401-02, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000).
There are fundamental differences between Wang’s hearsay statements and the statements excluded in Chambers, and the majority has not explained why this case should not be distinguished. In Chambers, the Supreme Court overturned a decision to exclude a third-party confession as hearsay because that person confessed on separate occasions to three different friends, “under circumstances that provided considerable assurance of their reliability.” Chambers, 410 U.S. at 300, 93 S.Ct. 1038. Chambers was convicted of killing a policeman in a small town in Mississippi. Gable MacDonald had confessed to the killing of the officer in a statement to Chambers’ lawyer, but he later repudiated the confession. At trial, Chambers sought to show that he did not shoot the officer. He also attempted to show that McDonald was the shooter. The state trial court would not permit Chambers to introduce the testimony of three witnesses, to whom McDonald had admitted shooting the officer, on the grounds that the proffered testimony was hearsay. Under its “antiquated” rules of evidence, Mississippi recognized statements against pecuniary interest, but not statements against penal interest, as an exception to the hearsay rule. Id. at 302, 93 S.Ct. 1038. Observing that Chambers’s defense was “far less persuasive” than it might have been had he been allowed to admit testimony from other sources about McDonald’s confessions, id. at 294, 93 S.Ct. 1038, the Court held that exclusion of this testimony, crucial to Chambers’s defense, .denied him a fair trial guaranteed by due process. Id. at 300, 93 S.Ct. 1038.
Critical to the outcome in Chambers was the Court’s determination that despite Mississippi’s state evidentiary rules, the hearsay statements involved “were originally made and subsequently offered at trial under circumstances that provided considerable assurance of their reliability.” Id. (emphasis added). Of particular importance, each of McDonald’s confessions was made spontaneously to a close acquaintance shortly after the murder had occurred, each statement was corroborated by some other evidence in the case (e.g., McDonald’s sworn, but later repudiated, confession, the testimony of an eye witness to the shooting, the testimony that McDonald was seen with a gun immediately after the shooting, and proof of McDonald’s prior ownership of a .22-caliber revolver and subsequent purchase of a new weapon, as well as “the sheer number of independent confessions”), as well as the fact that the confession was in a very real sense self-incriminatory and unquestionably against interest. Id. at 300-01, 93 S.Ct. 1038.
None of these considerations favors Chia. Wang’s four statements were all made to the police during post-arrest interrogation, and only in response to specific questions regarding the black Mitsubishi and Chia’s involvement, whereas the de-clarant in Chambers made three independent statements to three different friends. As the state trial court noted, Wang was quite literally caught in the act, and it is not uncommon for someone in Wang’s situation to make statements to protect an *1044arguably less culpable confederate, especially when that confederate is a good friend. Thus, Wang’s statements can hardly be described as “spontaneous,”
Furthermore, unlike in Chambers, there is no evidence to corroborate Wang’s statements regarding Chia’s purported unin-volvement, nor could Wang be impeached about these statements since he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. Indeed, although corroborating evidence is lacking, the record does reveal Chia’s own admissible statements to the police whereby he acknowledges an agreement with Wang to act as Wang’s bodyguard, as well as a plan for Chia to hide somewhere near Tiny Naylor’s restaurant to look out for and come to Wang’s aid should Wang give the signal by sticking his arm out of the car.
Lastly, while portions of Wang’s statements were undoubtedly self-inculpatory, those sections exculpatory to Chia were not against Wang’s interest and therefore were not as reliable as the inculpatory parts. In LaGrand v. Stewart, 133 F.3d 1253 (9th Cir.1998), we held that the state trial court’s exclusion of hearsay statements of a co-defendant as falling outside of Arizona’s “statement against penal interest” rule, which is identical to Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(3), did not violate the defendant’s due process rights. There, defendant Karl LaGrand twice confessed to the police to stabbing the victim. Id. at 1268. During both confessions, Karl LaGrand stated that he, himself, stabbed the victim, and that his co-defendant, Walter LaGrand, did not stab anyone. . Based on Supreme Court precedent, we determined that “[t]he reliability that attends the inculpatory part of the declarant’s confession does not afford any reliability to that part of the statement that merely exculpates [the defendant].” Id at 1268. We further explained that
[b]ecause the ‘statements against penal interest’ exception to the hearsay rule is premised upon the inherent reliability of statements that tend to incriminate the declarant, federal courts have concluded that a statement that includes both incriminating declarations and corollary declarations that, taken alone, are not inculpatory of the declarant, must be separated and only that portion that is actually incriminating of the declarant admitted under the exception.
Id. at 1267-68 (citing Williamson v. United States, 512 U.S. 594, 599-600, 114 S.Ct. 2431, 129 L.Ed.2d 476 (1994) (noting that judges in federal courts must separate the incriminatory portions of statements from other portions for purposes of Rule 804(b)(3) because”[t]he fact that a person is making a broadly self-inculpatory confession does not make more credible the confession’s non-self-inculpatory parts”)); Carson v. Peters, 42 F.3d 384, 386 (7th Cir.1994) (“Portions of inculpatory statements that pose no risk to the declarants are not particularly reliable; they are just garden variety hearsay.”); United States v. Porter, 881 F.2d 878, 882-883 (10th Cir.1989) (if a statement exculpatory to the accused is severable from the statement inculpatory to the declarant, each statement must be separately analyzed under Rule 804(b)(3)); United States v. Lilley, 581 F.2d 182, 188 (8th Cir.1978) (“To the extent that a statement is not against the declarant’s interest, the guaranty of trustworthiness does not exist and that portion of the statement should be excluded.”).
Since we are deciding whether the exclusion of Wang’s statements violated Chia’s federal due process rights, our decision in LaGrand v. Stewart, and the cases to which it cites, are particularly helpful on the question of reliability. They imply that excluding the exculpatory portions of a confession do not raise due process concerns because those portions are inherent*1045ly unreliable. Both the state trial court and California Court of Appeal recognized as much, noting that Chia was only interested in introducing the exculpatory portions of Wang’s statements. Indeed, this is not a case where the exculpatory and inculpatory portions are intertwined in a seamless and unseverable confession. A review of the statements reveals that each was made in the course of question-and-answer style police interrogation where the direction of the questions continually and abruptly shifted from one topic to the next. For example, in Wang’s third statement, he admitted that he shot a DEA agent and that he and Kow had planned the transaction to be a “rip-off’ from the very beginning, all before even mentioning Chia’s name. It is both simple and necessary to identify and separate the reliable inculpatory portions of the statement from those that merely exonerate Chia and do not have the same indicia of reliability. Furthermore, even if Chia also sought to admit the self-inculpatory portions, those parts would have been of questionable benefit to Chia. Unlike Chambers, where only one person could have shot the police officer, our case deals with accomplice and conspiracy behavior. Wang’s confession in no way exonerates anyone else.
Although only persuasive, consideration of the factors set forth in Tinsley v. Borg, 895 F.2d 520, 530 (9th Cir.1990) does not support Chia’s due process claim. Wang’s statements are, at best, minimally reliable, and hence their exclusion did not render the trial fundamentally unfair. Chia has pointed to nothing in the record that requires this court to disregard the state court’s findings, nor has he demonstrated that Wang’s statements were otherwise reliable. Id. Because Wang’s statements demonstrate that Chia knew of the plan to rob and murder beforehand, the slight value of Wang’s testimony to Chia’s defense did not outweigh the state’s interest in excluding the evidence. Therefore, Chia has not shown that his interest in the admission of Wang’s post-arrest hearsay statements outweighs the state’s interest in its exclusion under the hearsay rule, nor were Chia’s due process rights violated. See Galindo v. Ylst, 971 F.2d 1427, 1429 (9th Cir.1992).
Again, this court’s role is to decide whether the state trial court’s exclusion of Wang’s hearsay statements was an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court. Williams makes clear that “an unreasonable application of federal law is different from an incorrect application of federal law.” See Williams, 529 U.S. at 410, 120 S.Ct. 1495. The trial court held an evidentiary hearing and heard arguments on the admissibility of the hearsay statements, in which it determined that the statements fell outside of § 1230 of the California Evidence Code for the same reason that exclusion of the statements does not implicate due process concerns under Chambers — the exculpatory statements lacked any indicia of reliability. I am not left with a firm conviction that the trial court’s decision was erroneous.
I would affirm the district court’s decision dismissing Chia’s petition for habeas corpus.

. Section 1230 provides:
Evidence of a statement by a declarant having sufficient knowledge of the subject is not made inadmissible by the hearsay rule if the declarant is unavailable as a witness and the statement, when made, was so far contrary to the declarant’s pecuniary or proprietary interest, or so far subjected him to the risk of civil or criminal liability, or so far tended to render invalid a claim by him against another or created such a risk of making him an object of hatred, ridicule, or social disgrace in the community, that a reasonable man in his position would not have made the statement unless he believed it to be true.