Court Opinion

ID: 9877537
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-27 16:07:23.153921+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:46:55.213397
License: Public Domain

Acosta, J.
(dissenting). The majority ruling is a transparent attempt to circumvent the controlling Court of Appeals decision in People v John (27 NY3d 294 [2016]). The John Court held that the testimony of the testifying criminologist (Melissa Huyck — who also testified in the present case) and DNA reports admitted into evidence pursuant to her testimony violated defendant’s right to confront the analysts who actually generated the DNA profiles. Huyck merely reviewed the reports of the other OCME analysts, who did not testify, including the numerical DNA profiles generated after an editing process, saw that the necessary people had signed off, and agreed with their conclusions. The Court of Appeals explained that “Huyck was acting purely as a surrogate witness ... in vouching for the accuracy of the DNA profiles,” since “[h]er conclusory testimony *249in this regard was based solely on the reports of the nontestify-ing analysts that were admitted into evidence for their truth and not based on a separate, independent and unbiased analysis of the raw data” (id. at 310-311).
This case is virtually indistinguishable from John, because Huyck admitted in her testimony here that she did not conduct the DNA analysis, and merely assumed that it was done properly. More importantly, the majority concedes that the third DNA report admitted into evidence, which compared Male Donor A’s DNA with defendant’s DNA and thus secured a conviction in this case, is testimonial in nature. This is particularly troubling, because defendant was convicted of burglary in the second degree and sentenced to 20 years to life in a case where the only evidence linking him to the burglarized apartment was DNA evidence found on a pair of wire cutters. Therefore, I strenuously disagree with my colleagues who appear bent on doing an end-run around John.
Here, Melissa Huyck testified that defendant’s DNA evidence was found on the wire cutters. She testified that the profile generated from the wire cutters was used to identify defendant. She also testified that defendant’s DNA was then taken for purposes of making a comparison. As in John, she did not do any of the testing herself, and candidly admitted that she assumed it was done properly. Through her testimony, three DNA reports were entered into evidence supporting her testimony as well as a chart comparing defendant’s DNA profile to the DNA profile found on the wire cutters.
Although the majority insists that Huyck’s testimony was proper because it focused only on raw data, it completely misses the point. She compared DNA profiles that may or may not have been generated properly. She had no way of knowing except by blind faith that her colleagues, who actually tested the DNA evidence but did not testify at trial, followed the established protocol. As noted above, John specifically rejected this approach as surrogate testimony that violates a defendant’s constitutional right to confrontation (John, 27 NY3d at 310-311). Moreover, any emphasis by the majority “on formalism for the admissibility of business records is particularly unwise in the area of scientific reports, as the certification requirement can be easily subverted by a simple omission in the format of the documents, with a design to facilitate their use as evidence in a criminal trial” (John, 27 NY3d at 312 [DNA reports that are testimonial in nature must be analyzed *250in terms of Confrontation Clause violations rather than simply being admitted as business records]). In other words, the Confrontation Clause trumps the business records exception. A review of the facts and relevant case law supports the conclusion that defendant’s right to confrontation was violated.
The complainant lived by herself in an apartment on the top floor of a building in lower Manhattan. She had lived there since April 2011. She had a private rooftop deck, consisting of an open area and a glass-enclosed office containing a couch, a table, chairs, and a bookcase. On the morning of August 23, 2012, complainant traveled to Philadelphia to teach a class. She left her apartment in its normal condition, with the front door locked and all of the windows closed.
Complainant returned home around 12:30 a.m. on August 24 and saw that her front door was ajar; someone appeared to have rummaged through her rooms. She then noticed that her jewelry was missing from a drawer in the front bedroom closet. The contents of boxes that had been stored in the closet of the master bedroom were strewn across the floor.
Complainant called the police to report a break-in. She avoided touching things in her apartment aside from the aforementioned drawer. Police Officers Digena and Hennessy arrived at complainant’s apartment in response to a radio report of a burglary. The police canvassed the apartment while avoiding touching anything, then went up to the roof. They saw a propane tank, which did not belong to complainant, next to the skylight, in an area that was supposed to be inaccessible.
The police called the Evidence Collection Unit, which sent Detective Jose Segura and Officer Stephen Schuldner the following morning. Complainant had avoided cleaning or touching anything in her apartment since discovering the break-in.
During the investigation conducted by Segura and Schuld-ner, complainant noticed that her wire cutter, which she described as a pair of pliers, was wedged between the cushions of the sofa in her living room. She testified that there was no legitimate reason for the wire cutter to be there, since she had not brought it into the apartment since she had last used it, two months earlier. She had bought it online and used it to install fencing on her rooftop deck, then left it in the bookcase in her rooftop office. While wearing latex gloves and a mask, Officer Schuldner vouchered the wire cutter in a sealed bag for DNA testing. Schuldner did not dust the wire cutter for *251fingerprints, because he wanted to preserve any DNA. He collected a sample of complainant’s DNA, in case the wire cutter contained DNA from both her and the perpetrator.
Schuldner dusted for fingerprints on both sides of the door to the apartment, the broken glass from the skylight, the bathroom walls, and the drawers from which jewelry was missing, but failed to find any fingerprints sufficient to be collected and tested. He noted that sometimes fingerprints cannot be collected or tested because they have been smudged.
Detective Segura searched for witnesses by knocking on other apartment doors in the building, and checked a surveillance camera located in the front of the building, but to no avail. No suspect was identified in the investigation of the building.
Melissa Huyck, a criminalist at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), testified as an expert in DNA analysis. Huyck testified that under office policy, each step of DNA testing conducted by OCME was observed by a witness, each DNA test was performed twice, and all results and analysts’ conclusions were recorded. She also testified that she did not know if the policy had been followed in this case and that there were no records indicating if office policy had been followed. Any DNA profile compiled by OCME was uploaded to, among other things, a national database called the Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS). Huyck noted that NYPD’s paperwork on the vouchered wire cutter did not refer to any suspect.
She also testified that on October 14, 2012, OCME crimi-nalist Michael Kuhn, who did not testify at trial, performed an analysis of the wire cutter that revealed a “significant amount of DNA” belonging to only one male donor on its handles. The handles contained five or six times more than the minimum amount of DNA required for testing, which suggested that the donor had used the tool “[f]orcefully or for a decent amount of time.” This profile was uploaded to CODIS in December 2012 or January 2013. Shortly after, CODIS informed OCME of a possible match between the DNA recovered from the wire cutter and a certain DNA profile. OCME confirmed that the two profiles were a match, at which point CODIS, per standard procedure, informed OCME that defendant was the person whose DNA profile had been provided to OCME from the database.
According to Huyck, Detective Michael McCready, who also did not testify, collected a swab from inside defendant’s mouth *252and sent it to OCME, which used the sample to compile a profile of defendant’s DNA. Huyck noted that she “didn’t perform the lab work,” and “just did the review of the results.” She testified that as a Criminalist III she was being retrained so that she could do the lab work in the future, and that when the lab work was done in the present case, only “Criminalist Is were responsible for those duties.” In fact, her duties did not include supervising the work of others. However, Huyck “compared the known DNA profile of . . . defendant to the profile developed from the swab on the wire cutters,” and determined that “[t]hey were the same DNA profile,” since they were “an exact match,” based on looking at the numbers assigned to all 15 tested DNA locations, which were the same in both. Huyck testified that one would “expect to see this profile in approximately one in greater than 6.8 trillion people,” i.é., about once if there were 1,000 copies of planet Earth, with its approximate population of 6.8 billion.
In contrast, a profile compiled from complainant’s DNA sample did not match any of the DNA on the wire cutter. Huyck testified that DNA left by complainant on her wire cutter could have been replaced by a subsequent user of the wire cutter, or her DNA could have been diminished by sun or rain. Huyck further testified that the amount of DNA a person leaves on an object when touching it, known as a “primary transfer,” depends on various factors, including how many times the person handles the object, how long the person spends touching the object, the cleanliness of the person’s hands, how many skin cells the person typically sheds, and whether the person was perspiring at the time. A “secondary transfer” occurs when DNA left on an object by a person is later transferred to a different object; for example, if a person sneezes onto a pair of gloves, and the gloves later touch an object, the person’s DNA may be transferred to the latter object.
Detective Segura testified that defendant was arrested after receiving a fax from OCME identifying defendant as “a perpetrator or someone of interest for this case.” Complainant testified that she did not know defendant and had never given him permission to enter her apartment or remove her belongings from her apartment.
Defendant did not present any evidence at trial. The jury convicted defendant of second-degree burglary.
Defendant contends that he was deprived of his right to confront his accusers by Huyck’s testimony on the DNA test*253ing, since Huyck was at best generally knowledgeable about OCME’s DNA testing based on her experience as an OCME criminalist, but was not one of the analysts who conducted the testing. Although defendant’s Confrontation Clause claim is unpreserved,11 believe that reversal in the interest of justice is warranted, because the only evidence linking defendant to the burglary was the DNA evidence at issue.
“Testimonial statements of witnesses absent from trial” are admissible “only where the declarant is unavailable, and only where the defendant has had a prior opportunity to cross-examine” (Crawford v Washington, 541 US 36, 59 [2004]). A statement is testimonial “only if it was procured with a primary purpose of creating an out-of-court substitute for trial testimony” (People v Pealer, 20 NY3d 447, 453 [2013], cert denied 571 US —, 134 S Ct 105 [2013] [internal quotation marks omitted]). The following factors should be considered in determining whether such a primary purpose existed:
“(1) whether the agency that produced the record is independent of law enforcement; (2) whether it reflects objective facts at the time of their recording; (3) whether the report has been biased in favor of law enforcement; and (4) whether the report accuses the defendant by directly linking him or her to the crime” (id. at 454 [internal quotation marks omitted]).
Applying this standard in People v John (27 NY3d 294 [2016], supra), where Huyck also testified in the same capacity as she did in the present case, the Court of Appeals found that defendant’s confrontation rights were violated. In John, the police arrested the defendant in response to a report that he had pointed a gun at someone just outside his apartment building; the police sent DNA recovered from a gun found in the building’s basement to OCME; and the police attached a report to the vouchered gun informing OCME that the defendant had been arrested for possessing the gun (id. at 298). Huyck testified at the defendant’s trial about the methods used by nontes-*254tifying analysts, which were contemporaneously reviewed by her. The Court of Appeals found that the DNA reports were testimonial because OCME generated and analyzed the DNA profiles “in aid of a police investigation of a particular defendant charged by an accusatory instrument and created for the purpose of substantively proving the guilt of a defendant in his pending criminal action” (id. at 308). The Court of Appeals stated that
“[t]he primary purpose of the laboratory examination on the gun swabs could not have been lost on the OCME analysts, as the laboratory reports contain [ed] the police request for examination of the gun swabs on the basis that the ‘perp’ handled the gun and repeatedly identified] the samples as ‘gun swabs,’ ” and some “documents in the OCME file refer [red] to the suspect (defendant) by name” (id. at 308).2
Further, in John, Huyck merely testified that she had “reviewed the reports of the other OCME analysts, including the numerical DNA profiles generated after an editing process, saw that the ‘necessary people’ had signed off and agreed with their conclusions”; the Court of Appeals found that this “cursory testimony vitiated defendant’s right to confront the analysts who actually generated the DNA profiles” (id. at 310). The Court of Appeals explained that “Huyck was acting purely as a surrogate witness ... in vouching for the accuracy of the DNA profiles,” since “[h]er conclusory testimony in this regard was based solely on the reports of the nontestifying analysts that were admitted into evidence for their truth and not based on a separate, independent and unbiased analysis of the raw data” (id. at 310-311). Notably, “Huyck opined that the two obviously identical series of [15] numbers, represented in box score form, were a match and that the source of the two DNA profiles were the gun and defendant” (id. at 301) — which also occurred in the instant case. Accordingly, the Court of Appeals concluded *255that “at least one analyst with the requisite personal knowledge” was required to testify (id. at 313).
The instant case is controlled by John. To be sure, here OCME compiled the profile of the DNA recovered from the wire cutter before any suspect had been identified. However, that fact alone is insufficient to distinguish this case from John, where OCME was informed of the suspect’s name from the outset. OCME in this case eventually compared the DNA profiles recovered from the wire cutter and provided by CODIS, determined that they were an exact match, and so informed CODIS. At that point, in accordance with the standard CODIS procedure, OCME was informed of the identity of the person whose DNA profile had been analyzed by OCME, for the purpose of linking defendant to the burglary. OCME further carried out that purpose by sending a fax to the police identifying defendant as “a perpetrator or someone of interest” in this case, and the police then arrested defendant, apparently based on that information.
This case is distinguishable from Williams v Illinois (567 US 50 [2012]), a rape case in which the prosecutor called an expert who testified that a DNA profile compiled by a private laboratory from a vaginal swab from the victim “matched a profile produced by the state police lab using a sample of [the defendant’s blood” (576 US at 56). The defendant objected that he did not have an opportunity to cross-examine anyone involved in preparing the private lab’s report. A plurality opinion by Justice Alito (Alito was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy and Breyer and, in part, by Justice Thomas) found that the expert’s testimony did not violate the Crawford rule, for two reasons: first, the expert could testify based on documents that were not themselves in evidence, and, second, under the primary purpose doctrine, the original DNA testing did not involve a targeted individual. Justice Thomas concurred with respect to the first reason. However, the majority of our Court of Appeals in John noted that the evidence would not be admissible on that theory under New York law:
“First, [the Supreme Court plurality in Williams v Illinois] concluded that the fact that the source of the DNA profile was found on the semen from the victim’s vaginal swabs was not a fact admitted into *256evidence, as the lab report setting forth this information had not been admitted, and the expert’s reference to that fact was not offered for the truth of the matter asserted therein. Pivotally, the Court opined that since this was a bench trial, the trier of fact, which was a judge and not a layperson, would understand this evidentiary distinction (see 567 US at —, 132 S Ct at 2234-2235), i.e., that the factual statements had been ‘related by the expert solely for the purpose of explaining the assumptions on which [his or her] opinion rest[ed]’ (567 US at —, 132 S Ct at 2228). Since the expert’s opinion evidence of a DNA match in Williams had no relevancy without proof that the defendant’s DNA profile was derived from the vaginal swabs from the rape victim and that the DNA profile was accurate, and neither foundational fact was admitted into evidence, this opinion testimony was inadmissible under New York law (see People v Goldstein, 6 NY3d 119, 127-129 [2005])” (People v John, 27 NY3d 294, 305-306 [2016]).
And, significantly, Justice Thomas did not join Justice Alito as to the second reason, so it did not garner a majority.
Here, by contrast, defendant does not merely challenge testimony about a DNA profile created by an entity unaware of any suspect, but instead challenges the use of an expert witness to provide “nothing more than surrogate testimony to prove” the accuracy of OCME’s conclusion that defendant’s DNA matched the DNA found at the crime scene (John, 27 NY3d at 309). After all, Huyck testified that OCME employees other than herself received a possible match from CODIS, the national database, and CODIS identified defendant to OCME only after OCME employees other than Huyck confirmed that his DNA profile matched the sample from the wire cutter.
The majority makes much of the trial court’s ruling that only raw data could come in so that Huyck could make a comparison. But just as in John, where the Court of Appeals noted that although it had “previously held that certain DNA laboratory reports were raw data or machine-generated [,] Huyck’s testimony and the laboratory reports admitted into evidence prove otherwise” (John, 27 NY3d at 309-310 [citation omitted]). Here, Huyck testified that the analysis of the DNA found on the wire cutter, when submitted to CODIS, led CODIS to identify defendant by his DNA; not surprisingly, defendant’s *257DNA sample then matched the sample found on the wire cutter. She also testified that someone else did the DNA testing. In fact, as noted above, she testified that as a Criminalist III she was being retrained so that she could do the lab work in the future, and that when the lab work was done in the present case, only “Criminalist Is were responsible for those duties.” In short, regardless of the wording of the ruling, Huyck’s testimony and the laboratory reports admitted into evidence in this case violated defendant’s right to confront the analyst who actually did the testing (John, 27 NY3d at 310 [Huyck’s “cursory testimony vitiated defendant’s right to confront the analysts who actually generated the DNA profiles”]).
Huyck had not “witnessed, performed or supervised the generation of defendant’s DNA profile,” nor had she “used . . . her independent analysis on the raw data” (id. at 315). Rather, just as in John, Huyck was merely acting as a surrogate witness. Indeed, on direct, when asked whether the OCME’s safeguards were utilized in this case, she responded, “I didn’t personally examine them, but I would assume that the analyst did that.” The majority trivializes the safeguards imposed by OCME, by referring to them as “gowning up” and “cleaning”; the safeguards also include, as Huyck testified, having a second person observe the testing process, using positive and negative controls, performing the test twice, and checking equipment. Those safeguards are what make the test results reliable and therefore admissible.
Furthermore, the People’s argument that “the OCME report . . . consisted] of merely machine-generated graphs, charts and numerical data, involving no conclusions, interpretations, comparisons or subjective analysis” was strongly rejected by the Court of Appeals in John:
“We will not indulge in the science fiction that DNA evidence is merely machine-generated, a concept that reduces DNA testing to an automated exercise requiring no skill set or application of expertise or judgment. Likewise, the sophisticated software programs require trained analysts who engage in skilled interpretation of the data ... to construct the DNA profile. Even Huyck conceded that the testing and reviewing analysts independently make these necessary and qualitative judgments by applying the laboratory’s thresholds when using the software” (27 NY3d at 311).
*258The People’s observations that Huyck was well experienced and defendant had the opportunity to cross-examine her are insufficient, because the Confrontation Clause entitled him to cross-examine at least one analyst with direct personal knowledge of the DNA testing (see John, 27 NY3d at 313).
Tom and Kapnick, JJ., concur with Kahn, J.; Acosta, P.J., and Gesmer, J., dissent in an opinion by Acosta, PJ.
Order, Supreme Court, New York County, rendered March 19, 2014, and judgment same court, rendered May 12, 2013, as amended May 20, 2014, affirmed.

. Defense counsel failed to object to the admission of Huyck’s testimony and there was no strategic or other legitimate explanation for this failure (see People v Rivera, 71 NY2d 705, 709 [1988]). Indeed, counsel was aware that the witness did not conduct the tests herself, because the prosecutor informed the court and the defense about this before Huyck testified. The right to effective assistance of counsel can be violated “by even an isolated error. . . if that error is sufficiently egregious and prejudicial” (see Murray v Carrier, 477 US 478, 496 [1986]).

. The Court of Appeals further found that the DNA reports were “sufficiently formal to be considered testimonial,” since they set forth “facts prepared to be used as critical evidence at a criminal trial,” and “every person who prepared the information in the laboratory reports had a business duty to do so truthfully and accurately” (id. at 312). The Court of Appeals also noted that “the independent nature of [OCME] does not exclude it from the primary purpose test,” “since the predominant purpose of OCME’s Forensic Biology Department is to provide DNA testing on crime scene evidence for the New York City Police and prosecutors” (id. at 308 n 5).