Court Opinion

ID: 9789006
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 01:24:28.490126+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:18.547269
License: Public Domain

WERDEGAR, J., Concurring.
I concur in the decision affirming defendant’s convictions and imposition of the death penalty, but write separately to address the admission of DNA match testimony that was based on analysis by a nontestifying laboratory technician. I agree with the majority that the technician’s notes and report were not “testimonial” hearsay and hence their introduction through the prosecution’s DNA expert did not violate defendant’s confrontation rights under Crawford v. Washington (2004) 541 U.S. 36 [158 L.Ed.2d 177, 124 S.Ct. 1354] (Crawford). I reach that conclusion, however, only on narrow, fact-specific grounds; I would not hold or imply that all laboratory reports are nontestimonial. Unlike the majority, moreover, I would not hold that any error in admitting the DNA match evidence was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
As the majority explains, the prosecution tied defendant to the rape and murder of Erin Tynan partly through the expert testimony of Dr. Robin Cotton, laboratory director for Cellmark. Cotton testified that DNA taken from Tynan’s vagina matched defendant’s DNA sample and that the frequency of the matched DNA profile was between one in 53,000 and one in 5.7 million, depending on the population statistics used. Cotton did not, however, perform or personally supervise the laboratory analysis leading to the match. That was done by Cellmark technician Paula Yates, who was not called as a witness. In testifying to the procedures used and the analytical results, Cotton relied entirely on Yates’s forms, notes and report and at points quoted or paraphrased statements Yates had made in those written records, thus introducing them into evidence. The truth of Yates’s written statements regarding the steps she had taken to compare the various DNA samples was obviously critical to Cotton’s opinion that defendant’s DNA profile matched that of semen found in the victim’s vagina, and the jury was not instructed that Yates’s statements were not to be considered for their truth.
The prosecution thus introduced, through Cotton, hearsay statements of a declarant—the technician, Paula Yates—who was not present at trial and whom defendant had had no prior opportunity to cross-examine. If those statements were testimonial, their admission violated defendant’s rights under the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause. (Crawford, supra, 541 U.S. at p. 59.)
The majority gives two reasons for holding Yates’s notes and report were nontestimonial. First, Yates’s written record of her laboratory procedures *622“constitute^] a contemporaneous recordation of observable events rather than the documentation of past events.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 605.) Second, the majority relies on the broader set of circumstances surrounding the production and use of Yates’s records and notes: “Yates’s report and notes were generated as part of a standardized scientific protocol that she conducted pursuant to her employment at Cellmark” and “merely recount the procedures she used to analyze the DNA samples,” while “the accusatory opinions in this case—that defendant’s DNA matched that taken from the victim’s vagina and that such a result was very unlikely unless defendant was the donor—were reached and conveyed not through the nontestifying technician’s laboratory notes and report, but by the testifying witness, Dr. Cotton.” (Id. at p. 607.)
I agree with the majority’s second approach, reliance on the entire set of facts surrounding the production and use of Yates’s hearsay statements. I am not persuaded that every part of every laboratory report could properly be deemed nontestimonial simply because it did not recount past criminal events. A report’s accusatorial conclusion that a defendant’s fingerprints or DNA matched a latent print at the scene or an evidentiary blood or semen sample, for example, might be considered testimonial under some circumstances even though it did not recount past criminal events.
Having concluded that Dr. Cotton’s DNA match testimony did not violate Crawford, a conclusion with which I agree, the majority goes on to assert, gratuitously, that any error in its admission would be harmless under the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of Chapman v. California (1967) 386 U.S. 18, 24 [17 L.Ed.2d 705, 87 S.Ct. 824], (Maj. opn., ante, at pp. 606-607.) I cannot agree. The other evidence tying defendant to Tynan’s rape and murder was mainly circumstantial and was not definitive: Defendant expressed a sexual interest in Tynan, hairs consistent with defendant’s were found at the scene, the gun defendant had earlier sold to William Jones, Jr., was missing from the victim’s apartment, and defendant possessed and may have used a similar gun later. Defendant’s girlfriend’s roommate, a regular amphetamine user, testified that defendant had made detailed statements about the manner of Tynan’s death before she (the roommate) read about it in the newspaper, but admitted on cross-examination that she did not read the newspaper every day and in fact did not know if any articles had appeared prior to her conversation with defendant. An accomplice of defendant’s in another murder, a methamphetamine user testifying under a grant of immunity, stated that defendant had told him he killed Tynan but gave no details. In contrast to the circumstantial evidence and the highly impeachable hearsay evidence of defendant’s statements, Dr. Cotton’s DNA match testimony showed defendant’s involvement in the crime directly and scientifically. Where, as here, the other evidence of guilt was far from conclusive, finding *623beyond a reasonable doubt that evidence of a DNA match with semen found in the victim’s vagina had no effect on the verdict is, in my view, unsupportable.
In all other respects I concur in the majority opinion.