Court Opinion

ID: 9716917
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 06:53:52.999369+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:50.038267
License: Public Domain

Chief Judge Lippman. (dissenting in part).
In far from lucid trial testimony, the shooting victim, Alik Pinhasov, stated that on the evening of December 16, 2003 he went out in the company of three fellow members of the insular Bukharan community. As is here relevant, the group included Pinhasov, his cousin Boris and defendant. There was testimony that Boris owed Pinhasov $1,200 and that the debt had been a source of bad feeling. According to Pinhasov, the four men drank heavily, each having purchased at the excursion’s outset a liter of vodka and of cognac, and as the night progressed there were flashes of temper and occasional episodes of violence. Pinhasov testified *441that the evening’s entertainment, such as it was, came to an end when defendant took out a gun and fired it twice, the first shot just missing Pinhasov’s back and the second hitting him in the buttocks. The shots were heard by Jose Ramirez, who, according to his trial testimony, immediately went to a window of his fifth story apartment and observed, from a distance of some 50 feet, a person lying in the street being lifted by two other people. About eight feet away from this group, Ramirez observed another person in a long black coat and pants with a white stripe running down the side of each leg, yelling and waving his hands in the air. Ramirez thought he saw a gun in one of that person’s hands. Ramirez’s wife called 911 and the police responded. At the time of his closely ensuing apprehension, defendant was described by the arresting officers as having been clad in a leather jacket and sweat pants. A .22 caliber pistol was recovered from his person, and a firearms expert testified that the bullet removed from Pinhasov had been fired from that weapon. Ramirez was interviewed by the police after the arrest, but the extent of the People’s pretrial disclosure with respect to Ramirez was a memo book entry containing Ramirez’s name and pedigree information. Specific inquiry was made of Ramirez on cross-examination whether he had been asked by the investigating detective or the Assistant District Attorney for a statement, and he replied that no such request had been made.
The defense at trial was that Boris, and not defendant, had shot Pinhasov and that the gun had been handed to or picked up by defendant in the interval between the shooting and his arrest. Pinhasov, defendant urged, had accused defendant to protect his cousin who, for a period of weeks, had been held in connection with the shooting.
Shortly after the trial an article appearing in the New York Daily News reported that jurors had been aware of possible “link[s]” between the matter being tried and the murder of one Eduard Nektalov, and that one juror had stated that there was concern within the jury over the possibility of Russian mob involvement in one or both crimes.
Relying on this newspaper account, defendant moved pursuant to CPL 330.30 to set aside the verdict. He argued that the jury had been impermissibly influenced by external sources. The People responded that the motion was based on mere hearsay and that there was no indication that external influences had affected the jury’s deliberative process. Rather, the People urged that the verdict turned on the properly admitted *442proof tending to show that defendant, and not Boris, shot Pinhasov. The decisive evidence, claimed the People, was the testimony of Ramirez, the one witness whose motives were not shrouded by the impenetrable-seeming web of personal, business and familial relationships within the Bukharan community. In their opposition papers, the People prominently recounted that immediately after the trial and in the presence of the trial court:
“the jury was asked, in sum and substance, by the attorney’s [sic] what evidence caused them to convict the . . . defendant of the shooting. Several jurors replied, and the others nodded in acknowledgment, that it was the testimony of the independent eyewitness Jose Ramirez . . . which ultimately was found to be most compelling.”
Some six months after the judgment of conviction had been rendered, Ramirez was visited by an investigator hired by defendant. At the investigator’s request, Ramirez, after having had handwritten changes inserted, executed an affidavit stating in substance that he had on three occasions been interviewed by detectives and the Assistant District Attorney and that on each occasion “a Detective made hand written entries into a spiral note pad after each question.” Based on this affidavit, defendant brought a CPL 440.10 motion to vacate the judgment of conviction. It was argued that the nondisclosure of the interview notes referred to in the Ramirez affidavit constituted a Rosario violation, and that, inasmuch as defendant was thereby prevented from effectively cross-examining a crucial prosecution witness, he had been deprived of a fair trial.
The People responded by obtaining their own affidavit from Ramirez. In this affidavit, Ramirez stated that no notes had been taken on the two occasions subsequent to the night of the crime that he had been visited by Assistant District Attorney Kane and “two blond ladies from the District Attorney’s Office.” He explained that he had only signed the prior affidavit because he was badgered into doing so by defendant’s investigator. The People’s response also included affidavits by Assistant District Attorney Kane, and, presumably, the “two blond ladies” mentioned for the first time in Ramirez’s second affidavit, Detective Investigator Elizabeth Curcio and a paralegal in the District Attorney’s office named Joanna Fiorentini. All stated that they had participated in interviews with Ramirez but that no notes had been taken.
*443The motion court found that, in light of Ramirez’s recantation and what the court referred to as “the People’s substantial evidentiary showing” of what had occurred during the investigatory interviews of Ramirez, no issue of fact had been raised as to the existence of undisclosed Rosario material by the initial Ramirez affidavit. The court also was of the view that, even if there had been a Rosario violation, there was no reasonable possibility that it affected the outcome of the trial. The Appellate Division affirmed in a brief decision and order (56 AD3d 575 [2d Dept 2008]).
While I am in agreement with the majority that defendant’s CPL 330.30 motion was correctly denied, since there was no showing that the verdict was attributable to any outside influence, I part with the majority respecting the propriety of the summary denial of defendant’s CPL 440.10 motion.
Ordinarily, when there are conflicting affidavits on a material matter a triable issue turning on credibility inappropriate for summary resolution is raised. This case presents no occasion to depart from this basic rule of proceeding. Indeed, the governing statute, CPL 440.30, specifically requires an evidentiary hearing where, as here, defendant’s allegations are not insufficient as a matter of law to establish the alleged violation (see CPL 440.30 [4] [a], [b]); are not “conclusively refuted by unquestionable documentary proof’ (CPL 440.30 [4] [c]) or “contradicted by a court record or other official document,” or “made solely by the defendant and [without support] by any other affidavit or evidence” (CPL 440.30 [4] [d] [i]); and there are no other grounds to conclude that “there is no reasonable possibility that [defendant’s allegation of a Rosario violation] is true” (CPL 440.30 [4] [d] [ii]; see People v Baxley, 84 NY2d 208, 214 [1994]).
While the majority, presumably in an attempt to satisfy the last of these dispensational factors (the others plainly being unavailable), labor to show that Ramirez’s first affidavit must have been a mistake, the proposition is difficult to embrace on this record, much less as a matter of “overwhelming” likelihood (majority op at 440). Before us are two affidavits by the same affiant evidently contradictory in a crucial respect—in one, which the affiant apparently took care to read and correct where he thought emendation was necessary, the affiant purports to recollect with a fair degree of specificity that his statements were recorded by a detective on three occasions in a spiral notebook; in the other, he states that none of this happened. All that would appear “overwhekningly” likely on this record is that these *444affidavits are inconsistent. There appears no ground upon which one deliberately prepared and executed sworn statement might be dismissed as “mistaken” and the other embraced as true.
Ramirez may well have wished to be rid of defendant’s investigator, but that motive, without more, does not adequately explain his execution of an affidavit seemingly at odds with his trial testimony that no statement had been taken from him. Nor are the circumstances of his recantation of the affidavit, nearly a year after signing it, set forth. The record does not disclose, for example, whether, as would seem likely, the detective from the District Attorney’s office who obtained the recanting affidavit explained to Ramirez that his original affidavit, if not recanted, raised, at the very least, the possibility of a new trial at which he would be called upon to testify all over again and at which he would be impeached on the basis of his affidavit and prior testimony. Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that Ramirez was not at least as eager to be rid of the District Attorney’s minion as he had been to be rid of the defendant’s. In addition, while there were affidavits before the motion court affirming that the trial assistant, Ms. Kane, and two associates from the District Attorney’s office had not, during their interviews of Ramirez, taken a single note, these submissions, even if accepted at face value, do not exclude the possibility of undisclosed recorded statements from Ramirez since, as defendant points out, Ms. Kane entered the prosecution late, succeeding the originally assigned ADA after an earlier Rosario violation, and investigators other than the affiants had been involved in the development of the prosecution’s case.
For the foregoing reasons, the motion court’s conclusion that no triable issue had been raised as to whether there were undisclosed prior statements by Ramirez bearing upon the subject matter of his testimony appears to have been unwarranted. Even more unwarranted was the motion court’s view that, even if such statements existed, there was no reasonable possibility that they could have affected the trial’s result. Without knowing the content of any such statements, it is manifestly impossible to say whether they could have been used by the defense to raise a reasonable doubt as to defendant’s commission of the shooting. It is true that the sufficiency of the People’s case did not depend on Ramirez’s testimony. But the strength of the case, as distinguished from its sufficiency, concededly did. Pinhasov’s account of the shooting and the antecedent events was, to say the least, not a model of clarity, and a significant issue *445evidently remained after his delayed accusation,* and after his testimony, as to whether his shooting had not actually been the drunken work of his debtor cousin Boris, with whom Pinhasov was “very close,” but who, according to Pinhasov, immediately after the shooting stood over Pinhasov enraged, screaming that Pinhasov was “vomit” and “garbage.” It was Ramirez’s testimony that seemed to crystalize the situation for the jury, and resolve doubts naturally remaining in the wake of Pinhasov’s account, in favor of convicting defendant. In view of the pivotal importance of Ramirez’s testimony—a circumstance the majority completely elides—it does not seem possible to say that nothing he could have said during the shooting’s investigation as to what he saw, or thought he saw, or did not see from his fifth story window in the small hours of the morning of December 17, 2003, could possibly have been used by defense counsel to alter the trial’s course in defendant’s favor.
Where “a defendant can articulate a factual basis for the assertion that a prosecutor is improperly denying the existence of [Rosario material],” the court is bound to determine whether such material exists (see People v Poole, 48 NY2d 144, 149 [1979]). Here, such a factual basis was presented and it does not appear that its truth can be tested except by an evidentiary hearing. It is, of course, perfectly accurate to say as the majority does that it is “theoretically possible that a hearing could show . . . the existence of suppressed Rosario material” (majority op at 440). But this is not a rationale for dispensing with a hearing; it is precisely because the possibility of suppressed Rosario material has been shown to exist that a hearing must be had (see CPL 440.30 [5]). The possibility of suppressed Rosario material is only theoretical because it has not been tested.
Accordingly, I would reverse the order denying the CPL 440.10 motion and grant the motion to the extent of directing a hearing to determine whether there exists or existed undisclosed Rosario material pertinent to Mr. Ramirez’s trial testimony and, if so, whether the nature of any such material raises a reasonable possibility that its nondisclosure materially affected the trial’s outcome (see CPL 240.75; and see People v Baxley, 84 NY2d 208 [1994]).
*446Judges Cipabick, Gbafpeo, Read and Jones concur with Judge Smith; Chief Judge Lippman dissents in part in a separate opinion in which Judge Pigott concurs.
Order affirmed.

 Pinhasov evidently did not implicate defendant when the police arrived immediately after the shooting and the issue, despite the “CASE CLOSED” notation upon which the majority places such emphasis, was sufficiently unclear that Boris was held for weeks in connection with the shooting.