Court Opinion

ID: 9753740
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:24:51.066225+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:41.068216
License: Public Domain

FLANDERS, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent from the reasoning of the Court in deciding to vacate the judgments of conviction against the defendant, Troy Lassiter (Lassiter), and to remand this case for a new trial. I would affirm the convictions for the following reasons:
*1110(1) Relevancy of the Victim’s Statements about the Other Shooters Who Were in the Car with the Defendant. The out-of-court statements that the victim, David Andrews (Andrews), supposedly communicated to his girlfriend, Wraina Dale, were relevant to show why Hazard and Roberts — the other shooters who were in the car with Lassiter when the murder occurred — might have had a motive and plan to shoot Andrews to death on the date he was murdered.
“Decisions about the admissibility of evidence on relevancy grounds are left to the sound discretion of the trial justice; this Court will not disturb those decisions on appeal absent an abuse of discretion.” State v. Pena-Rojas, 822 A.2d 921, 924 (R.I.2003) (per curiam) (citing State v. Botelho, 753 A.2d 343, 350 (R.I.2000)). Moreover, “when reviewing such decisions, we will not conclude that a trial justice abused his or her discretion as long as some grounds to support the decision appear in the record.” Id. (citing Botelho, 753 A.2d at 350).
Here, there were “some grounds” supporting the trial justice’s decision that Andrews’s out-of-court statements were relevant to show that Hazard and Roberts had a motive to kill Andrews. Williams identified Hazard and Roberts as being in the same car as Lassiter when the shooting occurred. Andrews’s statements to his girlfriend were relevant because they tended to explain why these two individuals might have been in the car shooting at Andrews. As the trial justice concluded, if those statements were true, then they provided some indication of prior “bad blood” between Andrews and these two individuals.5 Consequently, such circumstances were relevant to show that they still may have wanted to hurt Andrews, as they apparently had attempted to do in the past. And given that Lassiter grew up with Hazard and that Roberts was Lassi-ter’s cousin, such evidence also helped to explain why Lassiter may have been with these other two people in the car, as well as revealing why all of them may have been doing what Williams said they were doing. Thus, the evidence was relevant because it corroborated Williams’s testimony and helped to explain why the individuals in the car may have been shooting at Andrews. Moreover, if Williams identified Hazard and Roberts correctly, and placed them in the car with Lassiter — who was a lifelong friend and cousin, respectively— then this evidence also tended to corroborate Williams’s identification of Lassiter as well (“the enemy of my friend is also my enemy”).
In any event, I do not believe the jurors would have convicted Lassiter merely because they thought ill of him when they heard the evidence concerning his cocon-spirators’ prior bad acts towards their victim. Indeed, Lassiter’s own attorney apparently thought so little of this evidence that he weighed the possibility of not even objecting to it (“if it comes out * * * maybe I won’t [object]”). Also, the trial justice instructed the jury at the close of all the evidence that “[t]he only person who is on trial before this jury is Troy Lassiter,” and that “[h]e is the only one that is a defendant in this case * * * [and] *1111whose guilt or innocence you are concerned with.”
Accordingly, the admission of the challenged evidence, even if it had constituted error because it was irrelevant, was not unfairly prejudicial to Lassiter and did not constitute reversible error. Such decisions should not be overturned on appeal unless no grounds to support the decision appear in the record. Pena-Rojas, 822 A.2d at 924. In my judgment, and for the reasons previously stated, there are indeed “some grounds” in the record to support the admission of this evidence.
(2) Allowing Police Det. Springer to Testify that the Eyewitness, Williams, Was “Not Completely Honest” when He First Spoke with the Police Did Not Bolster Williams’s Credibility. I also do not believe that the trial justice committed reversible error in allowing Det. Springer to testify that Williams, in his opinion, was “not completely honest” when he initially told the detective that all he could see was a “black face” in the shooters’ car. It is difficult for me to accept the proposition that when a witness testifies that he believes that a person was “not completely honest” with him, he is thereby bolstering that person’s credibility when the individual in question later testifies at trial to a contrary version of the same events.
I also do not agree that when Det. Springer testified that, in his judgment, Williams was “not completely honest” when Williams initially told him that he was unable to identify the shooters, this testimony implied that Williams was being truthful when Williams changed his story and later named Lassiter as one of the gunmen.
First, as previously noted, it does not usually enhance one’s credibility in the eyes of others by pointing out that he or she was untruthful about the same subject matter on one or more previous occasions. Characterizing someone as “not completely honest” is scarcely a way of bolstering his or her credibility when he or she later testifies under oath on the same subject matter.
Second, Det. Springer never said anything about whether Williams was telling the truth when he gave his second statement to the police in which he named Lassiter as one of the gunmen. Although Det. Springer’s testimony that he thought Williams was “not completely honest” also indicated that, during their initial conversation, the detective believed that Williams knew who the gunmen were, this evidence did not imply that Williams’s later statement that Lassiter was one of the gunmen was truthful. If Williams was “not completely honest” when he first spoke to Det. Springer, then why would the jury believe that Williams was necessarily telling the truth when he later purported to identify Lassiter as one of the gunmen? Even though Det. Springer believed that Williams could identify the shooters, such a statement does not imply that Williams’s later statement to the police, or his testimony at trial in which he identified who the assailants were, was in fact worthy of belief. After all, Williams could have known full well who the shooters were, but deliberately lied yet again — just as he had done when he first spoke to Det. Springer — by falsely identifying the people he named to the police. In any event, the crucial point is that Det. Springer never said anything about whether Williams was telling the truth when he later fingered Lassiter as one of the shooters.
Third, even without Det. Springer’s testimony, the jury would have heard that Williams had provided inconsistent statements to the police, denying at first that he knew who the shooters were, and then later contradicting himself and identifying them. Given the fact that the police *1112charged Lassiter with murder, and the relative lack of evidence to corroborate the later version of Williams’s eyewitness account, the jury would have known that the police chose to believe Williams’s later statement to them, rather than his first one. Thus, the notion that Det. Springer, and for that matter every other police officer on this case, thought that Williams was not telling the truth when he initially said that he could not identify the shooters was hardly earthshaking news to the jury, especially given the police involvement in obtaining the indictment of these defendants. For these reasons, even if it was error for the trial justice to allow Det. Springer to state his opinion about Williams’s “not being completely honest” when they first spoke, I do not believe it amounted to reversible error because the jury would have known, in any event, that the police did not believe Williams’s initial statement to Det. Springer. The defense’s failure to request a limiting instruction or to move for a mistrial when the trial justice allowed this evidence to be admitted also suggests that it did not view this evidence as unduly prejudicial. See State v. Brown, 709 A.2d 465, 477 (R.I.1998).
Fourth, the evidence was not offered to bolster the credibility of Williams’s identification of Lassiter as one of the shooters but as proof of Det. Springer’s state of mind to show why he intended to pursue farther questioning of Williams. In doing so, the state intended to counter the anticipated defense that the police had coerced Williams into changing his story by suggesting that this was just good police work in following up with a witness who was reluctant at first to get involved in identifying the shooters and, therefore, initially lied to the police about whether he could identify them.
Finally, unlike the situations in State v. Webber, 716 A.2d 738 (R.I.1998), State v. Miller, 679 A.2d 867 (R.I.1996), and State v. Haslam, 663 A.2d 902 (R.I.1996), I do not believe that Det. Springer’s testimony that Williams was “not completely honest” served to enhance Williams’s credibility when he later identified Lassiter as the shooter. In Miller, 679 A.2d at 872, this Court held that allowing a police officer to testify that a prosecution witness’s failure to mention important information was not uncommon (because such witnesses often fail to appreciate the importance of the information they possess) directly bolstered the credibility of that witness’s later testimony that filled in the missing information. But here, I do not believe that a police officer’s testimony that a witness was “not completely honest” when he first spoke with the witness bolstered that witness’s later contradictory version of the same events. Likewise, in Webber, 716 A.2d at 742, a witness was permitted to testify that certain evidence the jury heard was more reliable and credible than other evidence. This is the kind of direct bolstering of a witness’s testimony that also was present in Haslam, 663 A.2d at 906, but simply was not present in this case. In short, I do not believe that Det. Springer’s testimony “squarely addressed and bolstered another witness’s credibility,” Miller, 679 A.2d at 872, when he testified that Williams was “not completely honest” when they first spoke. On the contrary, if it had any effect whatsoever, it would have underscored the fact that Williams was quite capable of lying to the police when he wanted to do so. In any event, it did not speak to or bolster the credibility of Williams’s identification of Lassiter as one of the shooters.
Unfortunately, this case is a grim reminder that, all too rapidly, the “bolstering” doctrine has become the third rail of Rhode Island criminal law: if a prosecution witness so much as touches on what he or she thinks about another witness’s *1113out-of-court statements or credibility, it becomes a fatal reversible error, requiring the vacating of a conviction and a new trial. In my judgment, the best proof that this doctrine has gone too far is its application to the facts of this case, one in which the characterizing of another witness’s out-of-court statement as “not completely honest” is deemed to bolster that witness’s credibility in the eyes of the jury when the witness later testifies to a different version at trial.
For these reasons, I would affirm the convictions.

. The majority states that the girlfriend’s testimony indicated that "Hazard was not actually shooting at Andrews but was in fact shooting Andrews’s companion * * * suggesting that Hazard’s animus was not aimed at Andrews.” But this interpretation of the previous shooting incident overlooks the possibility that Hazard may have resented the fact that Andrews was hanging out with the person who had attempted to run the mother of Hazard’s child off the road and who then witnessed Hazard’s attempts to murder that individual, thereby giving Hazard a motive to kill Andrews.