Court Opinion

ID: 9718980
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 07:39:18.558355+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:03.819050
License: Public Domain

*133CLIFFORD, J.,
dissenting.
A more egregious Brady1 violation than the one presented by this case is difficult to imagine. One need not go so far as to impugn the motives of the prosecution in order to reach that conclusion, for it can just as easily be attributed to an appalling lack of basic communicative skills on the pact of the principal polygraphist and various members of the prosecution team. But whether the circumstances originate in unworthy motives, colossal bungling, or plain dullness of comprehension, the fact remains that the misunderstandings thus created have proven to be costly indeed: the State withheld from the defendants material evidence favorable to them in connection with the Harrelson polygraph and, unknown to defendants and their counsel, compounded the error by using the mistaken and erroneous polygraph report to get the prime witness against defendants to change his story again and go back to his original testimony given at the first trial. That all adds up to a deprivation of due process and requires a reversal of defendants’ convictions.
I
As our earlier opinion indicates, by the time the 1976 trial approached, the prosecution was understandably anxious about the credibility of Alfred Bello, the key identification witness. State v. Carter, 85 N.J. 300, 307 (1981). Bello had offered so many variations of his original “on-the-street” theme that that theme had receded into the background and the “in-the-bar” variations had become predominant. 85 N.J. at 305-07. Therefore, the State arranged for Bello to be subjected on August 7, 1976 to a polygraph examination by Leonard H. Harrelson. The purpose of the examination was to evaluate Bello’s credibility, including, as the former prosecutor testified at the remand hearing, “whether he was telling the truth or lying when he said he was in the bar at the time of the shootings.”
*134Harrelson concluded that Bello was telling the truth when he said he was in the bar both before and at the time of the shootings. The polygraphist told members of the prosecution team shortly after the test had been completed that that was his opinion, and he persisted in it in the face of prosecution efforts to convince him it was “impossible.” Harrelson has never waivered in that conclusion and, as was apparent on the remand hearing, believes it to this day.
For reasons that can charitably be described as unfortunate, in his later written report of his test the polygraphist summarized his findings with the opinion that Bello’s 1967 trial testimony (which contained the “on-the-street” version) was “true”: unfortunate, because Harrelson had never read Bello’s 1967 testimony and no representative of the prosecution had enlightened him as to that testimony and hence he was plainly — and grievously — mistaken as to the location from which Bello said, in 1967, that he had witnessed the events before and after the slayings; doubly unfortunate, because although the State continued to promote the notion that Harrelson’s “in-the-bar” conclusion was only tentative,2 Harrelson specifically and adamantly insisted that he never used those or any similar words or ever made the statement to “anyone at all on the face of the earth that [he] was unsure of Bello’s test results * * * and, most unfortunate of all, because the prosecution never told the defense- the critical finding of Harrelson’s test — that Bello was in the bar.
Although the trial court on our remand determined that the prosecution was under no obligation to disclose to the defense the contents of Harrelson’s oral report, the Court wisely has rejected that conclusion, ante at 119. I agree with the majority in that regard and further in its apparent acknowledgement, ante at 112, that the undisclosed information was favorable to *135the defendants. See State v. Carter, 69 N.J. 420, 432-33 (1976). It is in the final step of the analysis, namely, whether this undisclosed favorable evidence was “material” to the defense for Brady purposes, that I part company with the Court.
II
Whether Harrelson’s undisclosed certitude that Bello was in the bar before and at the time of the shootings is “material” in the Brady sense turns on whether that evidence “might have affected the outcome of the trial.” United States v. Agurs, 427 U.S. 97, 104, 96 S.Ct. 2392, 2397, 49 L.Ed.2d 342, 350 (1976), quoted in State v. Carter, supra, 85 N.J. at 313. That determination in turn rests in this case on two related factors: first, what use the prosecution made of the ostensible, but unintended, conclusion in Harrelson’s written report — that the polygraph indicated Bello was on the street during the shootings; and second, what use the defense would have made of the intended, but undisclosed, Harrelson oral opinion — that the polygraph confirmed that Bello was in the bar both before and during the shootings.
-A-
Our earlier opinion adverts to the prosecution’s use of the Harrelson document:
After receipt of Harrelson’s report two representatives of the prosecution interviewed Bello on September 14 and 15, 1976; and while the record is far from clear on the use, if any, made of the polygraph report during that confrontation, the fact is that at the conclusion thereof Bello retreated from his “in-the-bar" story and returned to his 1967 account.
An additional area ripe for exploration at the evidentiary hearing on remand is precisely what use the prosecution made of Harrelson’s report in confronting Bello on September 14 and 15,1976, prior to the second trial. The State argues that at the September 1976 interviews, Bello gave Chief Assistant Prosecutor Kayne and Chief DeSimone a detailed account of the various pressures and inducements that resulted in his recantation [of his 1967 “on-the-street” version], explained the basis for his [in-the-bar] statements to Assemblyman Hawkins and the Essex County Grand Jury, and thereupon returned to his 1967 trial version of the shootings. During the course of the 1976 trial, both Prosecutor Hum*136phreys and Assistant Prosecutor Marino told the court that the lie detector tests were instrumental in getting Bello back to the “on-the-street” version. The hearing on remand should explore how the polygraphist’s report was linked to that result. [85 N.J. at 309, 315]
In some respects the evidentiary hearing on remand was not particularly helpful in establishing precisely how the polygraph test had been used. Chief DeSimone had died before the hearing, Messrs. Humphreys and Kayne were vague, and Bello was useless. Mr. Kayne “assumed” that when he and DeSimone went to see Bello in September 1976, they had with them a copy of Harrelson’s report and they “very well may have” discussed the test results with Bello, but Kayne had no “specific recollection of what [he and DeSimone] may have told Bello.”
One exception to this otherwise universal failure of recollection is found in Assistant Prosecutor Marmo’s testimony concerning what Bello had revealed to him:
When Bello would get in his testimony to the point where he was — where I was asking — brought him up to coming into the Prosecutor’s Office telling the Essex County story, what happened to come back to the ‘66 story, he said I took the polygraph examination — or lie test, as he called it, the lie test showed that my testimony at the first trial was true; I knew the Essex County story was not true — he called it a fictionalized version — and I knew the Prosecutor’s Office knew it because the lie detector test showed it and so I couldn’t stick with the Essex County story' — as you call it, the in the bar story — anymore, so I told the story that I told at the first trial, which is what happened (emphasis added).
This, coupled with the acknowledgement by both prosecutor Humphreys and Assistant Prosecutor Marmo during the 1976 trial, as noted in our earlier opinion, that “the lie detector tests were instrumental in getting Bello back to the ‘on-the-street’ version,” 85 N.J. at 315, makes it abundantly clear that sometime after he had been subjected to the polygraph technique, Bello was confronted with the unintended “on-the-street” result of Harrelson’s report, and that this confrontation caused him to return to his 1967 “on-the-street” version. That this is so is confirmed by documentary proof that surfaced at the evidentiary hearing on remand: a draft of a November 22, 1976 letter (coinciding with the conclusion of Bello’s trial testimony) from Prosecutor Humphreys to Attorney General Hyland:
*137When we first interrogated Bello, he told us the Hawkins-Essex County Grand Jury story. (Bello in the bar — four men involved. Carter and Artis outside the bar with weapons.) He then disappeared. However, we found him in a far away state, arranged for his return and had Professor Haroldson [sic] examine him. Professor Haroldson concluded that Bello’s 1967 trial testimony was the truth. We interrogated Bello further. Bello finally “broke” and has given us the whole story * * *.
The conclusion is thus inescapable that not only did the prosecution know that Harrelson’s written report contradicted his findings regarding the vantage point from which Bello had supposedly made his pivotal observations, but they concealed the fact that the “wrong” test result was fed to Bello to “break” him.
This determination is in no way undermined by the trial court’s finding, apparently adopted by the majority, ante at 119, that “Bello recanted the recantation when he told Harrelson during the polygraph pre-test interview that Raab, Hogan and Levinson pressured him into recanting the 1967 trial testimony * * *.” What bearing that can have on the present inquiry is unclear at best, given the fact that after Bello recited those pressures, he thereupon turned around and told Harrelson, directly contrary to his 1967 testimony, that he was in the bar when the significant events occurred. And Harrelson said the polygraph confirmed that version. And he still says that.
-B-
There can be little doubt that the defendants could have used Harrelson’s undisclosed opinion had they but known of it.
First, the defense could have attacked Bello’s credibility in a more devastating fashion than any other evidence in the case allowed for. The polygraph report itself would have been admissible by what the Court correctly perceives, ante at 116, as the functional equivalent of a stipulation, see State v. McDavitt, 62 N.J. 36 (1972). Whether its admissibility would be limited to the use made of the report as distinguished from the substance — the scientific verification of the “truth” — is open to question. But for purposes of this case I submit it makes no difference to the result.
*138Were the evidence of Harrelson’s report limited to the use the prosecution had made of it, defendants would have been in a position to argue that the State had persuaded Bello to return to the “on-the-street” version because that is what the “lie detector” results demanded. Marmo’s recitation of Bello's reaction to the ostensible test results would tend to buttress that contention: Bello “told the story [he] told at the first trial” because the lie detector test showed the Essex County story was not true. See supra at 136. The argument to the jury would have been that Bello was such a malleable witness that he would have testified to either the “on-the-street” or the “in-the-bar” version depending upon what he was told the polygraph test showed.
Second, the defense would have been able to attack DeSimone (on the not unreasonable assumption that it was DeSimone who, with Kayne, confronted Bello with the report and thereby “turned him around”) for concealing the polygraphist’s conclusion that Bello was in fact in the bar.
Third, if the report were deemed to be admissible for its substance, defense counsel could have confronted Bello with Harrelson’s “true” opinion — a dicey maneuver, to be sure, inasmuch as Harrelson was equally firm in his conclusion that Bello had in fact identified Carter as having been at the scene. But the ultimate answer to this has to be that that strategem was well worth the risk, for the culmination of all this wholly unnecessary confusion (so the argument would go) is that no one can believe anything that Bello says: he can confound two polygraphists, Harrelson and Arther, on the very same issue— whether he was in the bar or on the street — by getting results 180° removed from each other in tests given just weeks apart. Bear in mind that although, as the Court observes, ante at 116, the “Harrelson test results, if laid before the jury, would have established that an eminent polygrapher entertained ‘no doubt at all’ that Bello was truthful when he identified the defendants” as having been at the scene, this same “eminent polygrapher” likewise entertained “no doubt at all” that Bello was *139equally truthful when he said he was in the bar before and at the time of the shootings. And an equally eminent polygraphist, Arther, was doubtless equally certain when he concluded that Bello was on the street. So much for the polygraph evidence.
-C-
Finally, to view the “added inconsistency that Bello told Harrelson that he was in the bar” as “merely cumulative,” as the Court asserts, ante at 118, is to gloss over the essential nature of that inconsistency and misgauge its potential impact.
The inconsistency these proceedings have focused on goes to more than a witness’s inconsistency in describing the physical characteristics of a defendant or the color socks he was wearing. It goes to the opportunity and ability Bello had to identify defendants and to describe their movements. Chances are that what one sees from a vantage point within a tavern as all hell breaks loose is not going to be the same as what one sees as one strolls up the sidewalk after the carnage. The defense attacks on Bello’s “on-the-street” story would have proceeded from a wholly different perspective and in an entirely different framework.
Might all of this have affected the outcome of the trial? How can we say it might not have, given the real capacity for the additional information to bring about the utter destruction of by far the most important witness in the State’s arsenal, with the fallout levelling the vaunted polygraphists and casting doubt on the tactics of the prosecution? Never before could defendants argue so persuasively that Bello was in all respects a complete, unvarnished liar, utterly incapable of speaking the truth. When, as here, a key witness’s reliability might well have been determinative of guilt or innocence, nondisclosure of evidence affecting credibility falls within the general rule that suppression of material evidence justifies a new trial irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution. See Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264, 79 S.Ct. 1173, 3 L.Ed.2d 1217 (1959); Brady v. *140Maryland, supra, 373 U.S. at 87, 83 S.Ct. at 1186, 10 L.Ed.2d at 218; Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150, 153-54, 92 S.Ct. 763, 765-66, 31 L.Ed.2d 104, 108 (1972).
I would reverse and remand for a new trial.
Chief Justice WILENTZ and Justice SULLIVAN authorize me to record their concurrence in this opinion.
For affirmance — Justice PASHMAN, SCHREIBER, HANDLER and POLLOCK-4.
For reversal — Chief Justice WILENTZ and Justices SULLIVAN and CLIFFORD — 3.

 Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963).

The trial court on remand adopted the same position to the extent that it determined that “the State was justified in its impression that Harrelson’s oral report was preliminary or tentative and subject for further review.”