Court Opinion

ID: 9786995
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 00:07:53.504009+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:36:51.012627
License: Public Domain

BOSSON, Justice (concurring in part and dissenting in part). {41} I am pleased to support most of this Opinion with the sole exception of Section II D, “Forfeiture by Wrongdoing,” from which I dissent. {42} Assuming that Defendant Romero is found guilty of intentional homicide of his deceased wife, in some form, I would hold that all the referenced statements of his wife may be used against him, notwithstanding the Confrontation Clause. Romero has forfeited his right to cross-examine his wife with respect to these statements by virtue of intentionally causing the very absence of his deceased wife of which he now complains. Whether Romero caused that absence with the specific intent to prevent his wife from testifying, or whether he caused that absence simply in a drunken rage, the effect is the same. The witness cannot speak for herself because she is dead at Romero’s hands. It seems a perversion of the Constitution and the Confrontation Clause to allow any defendant to profit so from his own misdeeds. Recent decisions from other jurisdictions express a similar reluctance to so narrowly construe the forfeiture doctrine in the wake of Crawford’s sweeping changes to the Confrontation Clause analysis. See, e.g., People v. Giles, 40 Cal.4th 833, 837, 841-43, 55 Cal.Rptr.3d 133, 135, 138-39, 152 P.3d 433, 435, 438-39, (Cal. 2007); United States v. Martinez, 476 F.3d 961, 966-67 (D.C.Cir. 2007); State v. Jensen, 727 N.W.2d 518, 533-537 (Wis.2007). I am persuaded by the reasons discussed in these cases, as well as those in Justice Minzner’s able opinion, and as developed by Judge Pickard in the Court of Appeals below. {43} I regret that we have lost an opportunity to clarify this Court’s recent opinion in Alvarez-Lopez, on which the majority appears to rely as a reason for requiring an intent not just to kill the witness, but to silence her as well. In my judgment, Alvar rez-Lopez is a poor vehicle for this Court’s reticence. Alvarez-Lopez was not a murder case. The defendant absconded, and by the time he was brought to justice the incriminating witness had been deported. This Court appropriately held, in only a brief discussion, that Alvarez-Lopez had not caused the absence of the witness for purposes of the forfeiture rule. We could have stopped there. Nonetheless we continued, essentially in dicta, to add that according to the federal rule in question Alvarez-Lopez needed to show some specific intent to procure that absence in order to silence the witness, which of course was totally absent in that case. Even the State conceded the point. Rhetorically, the State also conceded in Alvarez-Lopez that such a specific intent was an essential element of the forfeiture doctrine, which of course is true if we look only at the federal rule, which is all the parties did in Alvarez-Lopez and which of course is NOT the position of the State in the matter before us. As a general proposition, cases do not usually serve as helpful authority for propositions, or in this case choices, neither argued nor discussed. See Fernandez v. Farmers Ins. Co. of Arizona, 115 N.M. 622, 627, 857 P.2d 22, 27 (1993) (“[CJases are not authority for propositions not considered.” (internal quotation marks and quoted authority omitted)). I believe that norm should apply in this instance. At the very least, it should serve as a deterrent against undue reliance on that one opinion. I concede that one could go either way on how one interprets the forfeiture doctrine. Alvarez-Lopez should be used to frame the question, not decide it.