Court Opinion

ID: 9493482
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:09:33.4219+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:52.106117
License: Public Domain

DUGGAN, District Judge,
concurring.
Although I concur in Judge Ryan’s opinion, I write, separately to address the statement by the dissent that this Court, affirming “the ruling of District Judge Duggan,” has “specifically upheld the introduction of such evidence without a further reliability analysis in exactly the situation faced by McCleskey, namely, when the prosecution seeks to admit a statement against a declarant’s penal interest that inculpates the defendant,” citing Neuman v. Rivers, 125 F.3d 315 (6th Cir.1997).
In Neuman, I ruled, and this Court affirmed, that the trial judge had properly admitted, at the request of the government, the out-of-court statements of the defendant’s then “unavailable” father under Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(3). However, I disagree with the dissent that *646the father’s out-of-court statements in Neuman inculpated the defendant. As Judge Boggs noted in Neuman, “[t]he trial court admitted testimony ... that [the father] had confessed to having oral sex with the complainant, and to firing a gun into the air.” Neuman, 125 F.3d at 319. Such statements only inculpated the father, making no mention whatsoever of the defendant. That fact, in my view, distinguishes Neuman from this case, in which the declarant’s statements clearly inculpated McCleskey.
Furthermore, Judge Boggs is correct that in my opinion in Neuman I stated that the father’s statements were “against [his] penal interests, a firmly rooted hearsay exception,” citing Rule 804(b)(3). I did not, however, rule that an out-of-court statement by a declarant that directly inculpates the defendant, such as in this case, is admissible as a “firmly rooted hearsay exception.”
Moreover, this Court’s decision in Neu-man was issued on February 16,1996. On June 10, 1999, the United States Supreme Court rendered its decision in Lilly v. Virginia, 527 U.S. 116, 119 S.Ct. 1887, 144 L.Ed.2d 117 (1999), in which four justices expressly stated:
The decisive fact, which we make explicit today, is that accomplice’s confessions that inculpate a criminal defendant are not within a firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule as that concept has been defined in our Confrontation Clause jurisprudence.
Id. at 134, 119 S.Ct. at 1899. This statement, coupled with Justice Scalia’s concurring opinion that the admission of certain out-of-court statements represent a “paradigmatic Confrontation Clause violation,” lead me to believe that the Supreme Court would find the admission of the out-of-court statements in this case to be impermissible. Id. at 143, 119 S.Ct. at 1903.
Because I agree with Judge Ryan that those portions of a declarant’s statement that directly inculpate a defendant are inadmissible hearsay when offered by the government against the defendant, even though the statements may (also) be against the declarant’s penal interest, I concur with his conclusion that defendant’s conviction must be reversed.