Court Opinion

ID: 9739848
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:22:18.780303+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:31:00.363909
License: Public Domain

WOLLE, Justice
(concurring in part and dissenting in part).
Although I concur in Division II of the majority opinion, I dissent from Division I and would remand this case for a new trial. I am unwilling to label as harmless error the admission of the police officer’s narrative testimony about what the victim told him shortly after the incident. That testimony was hearsay, it was not an excited utterance, it was relevant on the disputed issue of specific intent, and it was more than merely cumulative of other evidence.
I. The State contends that the testimony was not hearsay because it was offered only to show that the child had made a complaint, not to prove the truth of what she had said. See State v. Stevens, 289 N.W.2d 592, 595-96 (Iowa 1980). Our cases point out, however, that only the fact of complaint — such as an oral report of the time and place of the incident to another— is outside the hearsay rules; narrative details “turn the statement into a hearsay assertion ..., inadmissible except as a spontaneous declaration.” Id. at 595 (quoting State v. Grady, 183 N.W.2d 707, 716 (Iowa 1971). Here, the officer was allowed to repeat to the jury the lengthy, detailed version of the incident which he had obtained from the victim by questioning her. Moreover, no limited purpose for the offer of this testimony was proposed by its proponent nor acknowledged and explained to the jury by the trial court. The officer’s testimony about what the victim told him was hearsay, not just a brief non-hearsay report of the incident.
II. The State contends that the testimony was admissible under the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule. See State v. Ogilvie, 310 N.W.2d 192, 196 (Iowa 1981) (adopting definition of Fed.R.Evid. 803(2), identical to present Iowa R.Evid. 803(2)); State v. Stevens, 289 N.W.2d at 596 (admitting responses to questions which were “impulsive, not reflective”). The trial court here, however, made no preliminary determination that the victim’s statements to the officer were spontaneous in any sense. The circumstances in this record belie the State’s claim of spontaneity. The officer testified that the victim was calming down by the time she was questioned by the officer approximately IV2 hours after the event. Everything she said was in direct response to the officer’s questions. Her narrative statements were clearly prompted by the questioning, not by the event. As in State v. Brown, 341 N.W.2d 10, 13 (Iowa 1983), the State here did not meet the foundational criteria for an excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule. The questioning of the officer was calculated to illicit information which would otherwise have been withheld. The *612officer’s hearsay testimony was not admissible as an excited utterance.
III. The State contends and the majority opinion holds that the defendant was not harmed by the officer’s testimony for two reasons: (1) the testimony did not really touch on a disputed issue; and (2) the testimony was merely cumulative of other evidence in the record. I disagree.
We cannot know exactly what evidence made the greatest impression on the minds of the jurors, but we do know from the jury instructions what the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt to convict defendant of kidnapping in the first degree. This was a specific intent offense. To obtain a conviction the prosecution was required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant not only confined the victim or moved her from place to place but also accompanied that act with the intent to subject the victim to sexual abuse. Iowa Code §§ 710.1(3), 710.2 (1981). The trial court properly instructed the jury:
Intent is a mental state, emotion, or condition of the mind with a design, resolve, or determination that the doing of an act shall be with a certain purpose. As such, intent is seldom, if ever, capable of direct and positive proof. Rather, the intent, if any, may be arrived at by such reasonable inferences and deductions as may be drawn from the facts proved by the evidence, in accordance with common experience and observation.
See State v. Rinehart, 283 N.W.2d 319, 320-21 (1979), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 1088, 100 S.Ct. 1049, 62 L.Ed.2d 775 (1980). With specific intent the jugular issue, and intent provable only from facts showing what defendant had done, the officer’s hearsay narrative testimony about what the victim told him touched on the key disputed question in the case. Defendant, after all, staked his defense on the prosecution’s inability to prove specific intent. He offered evidence of diminished capacity, testimony by a psychiatrist that defendant did not have sufficient mental capacity at the time of the incident to form the requisite specific intent because he suffered from unconscious emotional needs which overwhelmed his thinking mind. Regardless what the jury thought of that psychiatric testimony, and regardless how credible was the officer’s hearsay testimony, I cannot conclude that the hearsay testimony was not relevant and important on the core issue of specific intent.
Finally, I view the officer’s hearsay testimony as fundamentally different from and not merely cumulative of other evidence presented in this case. Granted there was other evidence about what happened from the time defendant was first seen until he was arrested: the child victim testified; the girl she was with that morning corroborated some details; and a psychiatrist who had interviewed defendant related defendant’s version of what happened. None of that evidence, however, was the equivalent of the narrative testimony given by the police officer. The officer’s hearsay testimony included several details pertinent to the issue of specific intent which were not mentioned in the testimony of any other witness. For example, in describing what the victim told him had first occurred that morning, the officer testified:
[Defendant] picked her up like a sack of potatoes. She was screaming. If I remember correctly at that point, he put her in the pickup on the passenger’s side, put her down on the floor and held his hand on her while he drove away and told her to shut up or be quiet.
No other witness, not even the victim, said she was picked up quite like that. No other witness said she was screaming. No other witness said defendant held her down on the floor, or held his hand on her, or told her to be quiet. Those details would be consistent with an intent to carry the victim away for the purpose of committing a sexual abuse. The jury may have drawn such an inference from that testimony. I certainly am unwilling to speculate on the likelihood that the jury would ignore that *613evidence. See State v. Brown, 341 N.W.2d at 15.
I also believe the quality of this policeman’s testimony was different from and potentially more prejudicial to defendant than that of the other witnesses. The testimony of small children might be questioned by the jury because of their immaturity, infirm memory, and the potential that they could be influenced by adults in what they might say. The hearsay testimony given by psychiatrists about defendant’s version would also be subject to infirmities. The jury could find from the evidence in this case that when he was examined by psychiatrists defendant was suffering from a neurotic condition, unable to remember certain aspects of the experience, and had lost his ability to evaluate reality appropriately. The testimony of this police officer, in contrast, might well have been given great weight by the jury. Jurors might have considered this to be an official version of what occurred, based on a report given by a child while the details were fresh in her mind. Id. at 15-16.
We have often said that the erroneous admission of hearsay evidence is presumed to be prejudicial unless the contrary is affirmatively established. See id. at 15; State v. Galvan, 297 N.W.2d 344, 348 (Iowa 1980); State v. Horn, 282 N.W.2d 717, 724 (Iowa 1979). When we have found such an error harmless, it has been because the evidence was clearly not prejudicial, for instance when there was a multiplicity of evidence substantially the same as that which had erroneously been admitted. See, e.g., State v. Webb, 309 N.W.2d 404, 411 (Iowa 1981); State v. Johnson, 272 N.W.2d 480, 482-83 (Iowa 1978). We have been unwilling to speculate about how important a jury thought the evidence was when it was of a different quality than that properly admitted.
I would grant defendant’s request for a new trial on the ground that the admission of this inadmissible hearsay testimony deprived defendant of his right to a fair trial.