Court Opinion

ID: 9788662
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 01:14:33.961487+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:15.809848
License: Public Domain

KENNARD, J., Dissenting.
I join the majority in upholding the trial court’s admission of a statement that the alleged victim, a minor, made to an emergency room physician treating his injuries. I also agree that the trial court violated defendant’s rights under the confrontation clause of the federal Constitution by admitting two statements that the minor made to a sheriff’s deputy, describing the cause of the minor’s injuries. I do not agree, however, that the erroneous admission of these two statements was harmless.
I
While investigating a domestic disturbance at defendant’s home, Riverside County Deputy Sheriff Perry Mullin saw a bloody towel and drops of blood outside the home; inside the home, he saw the top of a glass coffee table was missing and defendant was picking up broken glass. After talking to defendant and other family members, Deputy Mullin left. An hour later he was dispatched to an intersection a mile from defendant’s home, where he found defendant’s 15-year-old son, John R, who had not been present at the home during Muffin’s earlier visit. John had a large cut running from his ear to his neck. Muffin saw to it that John was taken to a hospital.
Later, Deputy Mullin talked to John in the hospital’s emergency room. John said that during an argument with his mother (defendant), she pushed him, causing him to fall on the glass coffee table and break it. John’s grandmother then grabbed him; while she was holding him, defendant cut him with a shard of glass. When defendant started to cut John a second time, he broke free and ran away.
When the emergency room physician, Dr. Paul Russell, asked John what had happened, John replied he had been held down by his grandmother and cut by his mother.
*995After John’s release from the hospital, Deputy Mullin questioned him at the police station. In a tape-recorded statement, John described the assault in detail. He said he had been living with defendant for four or five weeks. On the day of the assault, defendant became upset when she saw John looking for a belt of his in a closet where she kept personal items. He went to the garage to look for another belt; when he returned, defendant accused him of messing up the garage. She then pulled John by his shirt, tearing it, after which she pushed him onto the glass coffee table, breaking it. John’s grandmother came downstairs and grabbed John when he got up. Defendant picked up a piece of broken glass from the coffee table and slashed John’s face; when defendant tried to slash John a second time, he broke free and ran out the door.
At trial, John did not testify, but the prosecution introduced his two statements to Deputy Mullin—the one made at the hospital and the one made at the police station—as well as his statement to Dr. Russell at the hospital. Dr. Russell testified that John’s wound could have been inflicted by glass or a knife. He said he had treated many people with head injuries sustained by colliding with and breaking a pane of glass. Those wounds were ordinarily “very jagged,” with “lots of more ripping rather than cutting type wounds”; “rarely” did he see “one isolated long cut . . . with no other injuries on a body,” as was the case with John.
The defense called as a witness defendant’s seven-year-old son Jermaine, who was five years old when the incident occurred. At the time, Jermaine testified, John was living at the house. Defendant and John got in a fight and fell onto the coffee table, breaking the glass. As John got up, a piece of glass that was on the floor cut his neck.
The defense also called as a witness defendant’s 14-year-old daughter Kathy, who was 12 years old at the time of the incident. She testified that when John, who was not living at their home, came to the door, defendant told him to leave, and the two then began pushing each other. John threatened to kill defendant and pushed her onto the coffee table, breaking the glass, and John fell on top of defendant. John then got up and ran out. John’s grandmother tried to break up the fight, and defendant told Kathy to call 911. In rebuttal, the prosecution impeached Kathy with her prior statement to a social worker that she had not seen the fight and that John was living at the family home.
The jury convicted defendant of assault by means of force likely to inflict great bodily injury.
*996II
I have no quarrel with the majority’s conclusion that the trial court’s admission of John’s two statements to Deputy Mullin violated defendant’s right, under the Sixth Amendment to the federal Constitution, to confront the witnesses against her. In Crawford v. Washington (2004) 541 U.S. 36 [158 L.Ed.2d 177, 124 S.Ct. 1354] and in Davis v. Washington (2006) 547 U.S. 813 [165 L.Ed.2d 224, 126 S.Ct. 2266], the United States Supreme Court held that the confrontation clause bars admission of an out-of-court “testimonial” statement for the truth of the matter asserted when the defendant has no opportunity to cross-examine the declarant who made the statement. As the majority explains, John’s two statements to Deputy Mullin came within the high court’s definition of “testimonial” statements. Because admission of those statements violated the federal Constitution, the error may be found harmless only if, on appeal, the Attorney General demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that the result would have been the same notwithstanding the error. (Chapman v. California (1967) 386 U.S. 18, 24 [17 L.Ed.2d 705, 87 S.Ct. 824].)
In characterizing the error as harmless, the majority reasons that John’s statement at the hospital to Dr. Russell, which the trial court properly admitted, “succinctly indicated what had caused John’s injury” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 992) and that John’s two erroneously admitted statements to Deputy Mullin were “largely cumulative” (id. at p. 993) of John’s brief statement to Dr. Russell. Not so.
Dr. Russell’s description of John’s account of the assault was quite pithy: “he had been held down by his grandmother and cut by his mother,” a total of 13 words. By contrast, John’s tape-recorded statement to Deputy Mullin was quite detailed, taking up more than 2,000 words (12 pages of transcript). The details in that statement may have been important to the jury. It seems rather unusual that a 15-year-old boy would be held down by his grandmother while being cut with broken glass by his mother. Absent some explanation of how that could have happened, the jury might well have thought that John concocted the story. The circumstance that the statement to Deputy Mullin was recorded could also have been significant, because the jury, after listening to John’s voice, may have concluded that he sounded credible, a determination the jury could not have made from Dr. Russell’s description of what John had told him. Finally, the jury may have given John’s story greater credence because it learned that he gave roughly the same account on three different occasions: once to Dr. Russell, once to Deputy Mullin in the hospital’s emergency room, and once at the police station. Thus, contrary to the majority, John’s statements to Deputy Mullin were not “largely cumulative” of his statement to Dr. Russell. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 993.)
*997According to the majority, the “evidence strongly indicated John had been injured by broken glass during a domestic argument.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 992.) There was little evidence, however, of such a fight in the prosecution’s case apart from John’s two separate statements to Deputy Mullin, which the majority concedes were inadmissible. True, the defense presented evidence—through the testimony of John’s brother and sister—that John had argued and struggled with his mother, and that they fell onto the coffee table and broke the glass top. But that evidence might never have been presented if the trial court had not permitted the prosecution to introduce John’s two statements to Deputy Mullin: The defense might simply have rested without calling any witnesses and argued that John’s brief out-of-court statement to Dr. Russell was insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant had assaulted him.
The majority states: “In a hospital emergency room for acute treatment of a serious injury, and visibly frightened, John had every reason to answer the treating physician’s questions truthfully.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 993, italics added.) Perhaps. Perhaps not. As John acknowledged in his recorded statement to Deputy Mullin, he knew that there was a warrant for his arrest on an unrelated matter, and that he would be taken to juvenile hall. John also knew that Deputy Mullin had come to the hospital to investigate the circumstances of his injury, and it is reasonable to infer that John expected Dr. Russell to pass on to Deputy Mullin anything John would say about the cause of the injury. Thus, if John was the initial aggressor in his encounter with defendant, he might have had reason to give Dr. Russell an inaccurate account of the incident because of fear of prosecution if he told the truth. Moreover, John had reason to be angry at defendant because, by his own account, she had berated him and had tom his shirt before the injury occurred. His anger at his mother could have prompted him to falsely blame her for his injury. Furthermore, during pretrial discussions pertaining to the admissibility of John’s statements to Dr. Russell and Deputy Mullin, defense counsel commented that John had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. If so, John may have suffered from a delusion that caused him to inaccurately describe the manner in which he was injured. In short, because the defense had no chance to cross-examine John, the veracity of his statement to Dr. Russell cannot be ascertained.
It may well be that if the trial court had excluded John’s two separate statements to Deputy Mullin describing defendant’s assault on him, the jury would still have found defendant guilty. But the jury could also have acquitted defendant. Because John’s two erroneously admitted statements to Deputy Mullin were the most important evidence in the prosecution’s case against defendant, I cannot say “beyond a reasonable doubt” (Chapman v. California, supra, 386 U.S. at p. 24) that, had they been excluded, the jury
*998would nevertheless have convicted her. I would therefore reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeal.