Court Opinion

ID: 9517160
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 00:06:43.009058+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:43:42.888553
License: Public Domain

Braucher, J.
(dissenting) My reading of the transcript of the evidence convinces me that the defendant was fairly tried and that the evidence of her guilt was overwhelming. My brothers feel compelled to order a new trial, at which highly persuasive, reliable evidence is to be excluded. I am equally bound to follow the law. But the result is not compelled by the Constitution, by statute, or by any judicial precedent squarely in point. In my view, judge-made rules of law are to be tailored to justice rather than to abstract logic. Notwithstanding the impeccable logic of the court’s opinion, therefore, I dissent.
The trouble, as is usual in such cases, lies in the premises on which the logic proceeds. The court proceeds on the premise that the numerous “recognized exceptions” to the hearsay rule have a magical quality and that the adverse party must be given advance warning of the precise legal theory on which an “innominate exception” is based. Robert Slade testified that Gilbert said to him, “I didn’t do it, she did it.” This and other out-of-court statements by Gilbert were offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted, and were therefore hearsay. They did not fit within either of the two established exceptions on which the judge relied. Therefore, says the court, he erred in admitting them in evidence, and we should not think further about the matter, since the prosecutor did not articulate in advance his common sense judgment that they did *716not present the usual hearsay dangers. Moreover, since the evidence was highly reliable and important, the error was not harmless.
I take a different view, not at all original with me. “In the Federal Rules of Evidence, there are twenty-seven specific exceptions and a catch-all, essentially for any other hearsay as good as that which the rules specifically make admissible. That’s complicated, and because it’s complicated, it’s inelegant. Why not reformulate the rule to say that hearsay is admissible unless the trial judge in his or her sound discretion thinks it fair to exclude it. That’s the rule judges apply most of the time anyway. It’s as much as any appellate court can do with hearsay. And it turns a clumsy contraption of exception piled upon exception into an object of plain and simple elegance.” Younger, In Praise of Simplicity, 62 A.B.A.J. 632, 634 (1976). As to spontaneous utterances, we have said that the trial judge should be given “broad discretion” and that his ruling should be revised “only in clear cases.” Commonwealth v. McLaughlin, 364 Mass. 211, 223 (1973), quoting from Rocco v. Boston-Leader, Inc., 340 Mass. 195, 197 (1960).
There was evidence that Gilbert and the defendant were engaged in a joint criminal venture, and that they acted in concert in fleeing in opposite directions. But any common enterprise ended when Gilbert surrendered, the court says, and his subsequent statements therefore could not be found to be during the course and in furtherance of the joint venture. The court summarily rejects the judge’s ruling that the statements, made within a few minutes after the crime, were made spontaneously and were within the McLaughlin rationale of the “res gestae.” So far as I can discover, this is the first time in our history that we have reversed a trial judge’s ruling in a criminal case on the admissibility of evidence as a spontaneous utterance. Contrast Commonwealth v. Pearsall, ante, 413, 415 (1976).
So be it. But analysis should not end there. The statements in question were highly significant as corroboration of the victim’s identification of the defendant as one of those who robbed him. For any other purpose they were *717worthless, and their admission in evidence for any other purpose was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The other facts of the robbery were fully established, and the defendant was careful not to contest them. There was no showing that Gilbert, a juvenile, was unavailable, but I do not think we should insist on a procedure calling for the Commonwealth to swear a juvenile as a witness and to force him to claim his privilege against self-incrimination. Gilbert was, of course, well known to the defendant, and there is no suggestion that he was not available to her as a witness or that the evidence of his declarations came as a surprise to her.
Eyewitness identification is one of the most troublesome aspects of our criminal law, and is probably responsible for a large proportion of the cases where innocent defendants are convicted. The problem is acute in cases such as armed robberies, involving fleeting contacts between strangers. Any rule which bars probative evidence with respect to the accuracy of eyewitness identification increases the likelihood of conviction of the innocent. Or else it transfers the truth-seeking function from the trial jury to the police and the prosecutor. For this reason we have admitted evidence of out-of-court identifications to corroborate eyewitness identifications made in court. Commonwealth v. Sheeran, ante, 82, 87 (1976). Commonwealth v. Leaster, 362 Mass. 407, 412 (1972).
“The hearsay rule, which has long been recognized and respected by virtually every State, is based on experience and grounded in the notion that untrustworthy evidence should not be presented to the triers of fact. Out-of-court statements are traditionally excluded because they lack the conventional indicia of reliability: they are usually not made under oath or other circumstances that impress the speaker with the solemnity of his statements; the declar-ant’s word is not subject to cross-examination; and he is not available in order that his demeanor and credibility may be assessed by the jury. California v. Green, 399 U.S. 149, 158 (1970). A number of exceptions have developed over the years to allow admission of hearsay statements *718made under circumstances that tend to assure reliability and thereby compensate for the absence of the oath and opportunity for cross-examination.” Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284, 298-299 (1973).
The possible inaccuracies to be probed by cross-examination “are usually attributed to the four testimonial infirmities of ambiguity [in the out-of-court statement], insincerity, faulty perception, and erroneous memory.” Tribe, Triangulating Hearsay, 87 Harv. L. Rev. 957, 958 (1974). The largest group of hearsay exceptions is justified by specific attributes which are thought to reduce these weaknesses so substantially that the balance of untrustworthiness and likelihood of probative value favors admissibility of the evidence. Declarations against interest and spontaneous utterances ordinarily afford safeguards as to ambiguity and veracity, but not necessarily as to perception and memory. Id. at 964-969.
The statements here in issue, when used to corroborate the victim’s eyewitness identification, present no problem of ambiguity. Even if they were too remote in time and place to come within the established exception for spontaneous utterances, there is no problem of faulty perception or erroneous memory. There is a problem of sincerity, as the court points out, since the statements push blame away from the speaker and thrust it on the defendant.
To this there are two answers. First, although in form exculpatory, taken together with the surrender of the stolen $5 the statements were highly inculpatory of the speaker. “His statement was spontaneous, and it was against his penal interest to make it. These are indicia of reliability which have been widely viewed as determinative of whether a statement may be placed before the jury though there is no confrontation of the declarant.” Dutton v. Evans, 400 U.S. 74, 89 (1970). Second, the possibility that cross-examination of the speaker “could conceivably have shown the jury that the statement, though made, might have been unreliable [as corroboration of the identification of the robbers] was wholly unreal.” Ibid.
For these reasons I would uphold the judge’s ruling on *719the ground that he did not abuse his discretion in admitting the evidence to corroborate the victim’s eyewitness identification of the defendant. It is not a ground of reversal that he gave erroneous reasons for his correct ruling, if indeed they were erroneous. To the extent that he admitted the evidence for other purposes, any error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.