Court Opinion

ID: 9743089
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:25:23.820855+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:39.240515
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion
DeBruler, J.
This case involves the wholesale use of prior testimony and out-of-court statements of less than enthusiastic prosecution witnesses during their direct examination. Five statements given by witnesses to the police, one statement to the coroner, and six sets of grand jury testimony were read, virtually in their entirety, to the jury during the examination of six witnesses. The extrajudicial statements of two of the witnesses were introduced and read only after those witnesses had been questioned as to the events involved and had professed difficulty in remembering those events. The remaining four toitnesses toere simply called to the stand for the purpose of authenticating their respective statements and testimony, which were read to the jury before these witnesses were asked any questions about the events surrounding the death of Erica Grigsby.
The majority sanctions this indiscriminate use of extrajudicial statements by relying on this Court’s holding in Patterson v. State, (1975) 263 Ind. 55, 324 N.E.2d 482, that out-of-court statements are not inadmissible as hearsay when the declarant is available at trial for cross-examination. Patterson did not consider a criminal defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to be confronted with the witnesses against him. The majority “disposes of any confrontation problem” by relying on California v. Green, (1970) 399 U.S. 149, 90 S.Ct. 1930, 26 L.Ed.2d 489. It is true that Green contains such language as this:
“Viewed historically . . . there is good reason to conclude that the Confrontation Clause is not violated by admitting a declarant’s out-of-court statements, as long as the declar*98ant is testifying as a witness and subject to full and effective cross-examination. . . .
“[W]here the declarant is not absent, but is present to testify and to submit to cross-examination, our cases, if anything, support the conclusion that the admission of his out-of-court statements does not create a confrontation problem.” 399 U.S. at 158, 162, 90 S.Ct. at 1935, 1937, quoted in Nelson v. O’Neil, (1971) 402 U.S. 622, 626-27, 91 S.Ct. 1723, 1726, 29 L.Ed.2d 222, and Ortiz v. State, (1976) 265 Ind. 549, 356 N.E.2d 1188, 1194.
I cannot believe, however, that the Supreme Court intended to relieve the State of the obligation to make any attempt to prove its case through the testimony of sworn witnesses given in open court where the trier of fact can observe their demeanor and where cross-examination takes place more or less contemporaneously with the testimony’s reception. In Green the witness whose out-of-court statement was used was questioned about the facts of the offense but professed a lack of memory as to those facts due to drugs he had taken. The Court was therefore required to choose between permitting substantive evidentiary use of his prior statements and the total loss of relevant and necessary evidence. The danger of losing such evidence, in the Green Court’s view, warranted admission of the statements despite diminished confrontation protection.
No one seriously asserts that cross-examination as to extrajudicial statements is the full equivalent of cross-examination of testimony given at trial; the most that is attributed to such substitute confrontation is that it is to be preferred to the loss of the evidence contained in the extrajudicial utterance.
“The most essential difficulty with the claim that cross-examination is ‘by hypothesis’ not requisite when the prior contradictory declarer is physically present is this. It denigrates the real office of cross-examination. Cross-examination postulates a witness who avows a thing under interrogation by a lawyer who would have him deny it, or a witness who denies a thing under inquisition by lawyer who would have him affirm it. Cross-examination is thus essentially adversary. Cooperation is the antonym of cross-*99examination. The measure of the cross-interrogator’s success is the extent to which he is able to destroy the witness’s testimony in chief, shake the witness, elicit retractions, destroy his credibility. If the witness declines to adopt his former statement as true, no adversary cross-examination about it is possible.” Beaver & Biggs, Attending Witnesses’ Prior Declarations as Evidence: Theory vs. Reality, 3 Ind. L. Forum 309, 317-18 (1970) (Footnote omitted) ; See also Falknor, The Hearsay Rule and Its Exceptions, 2 U.C.L.A. L. Rev. 43, 53 (1954).
As the Minnesota Supreme Court noted:
“The chief merit of cross-examination is not that at some future time it gives the party opponent the right to dissect adverse testimony. Its principal virtue is the immediate application of the testing process. Its strokes fall while the iron is hot.” State v. Saporen, (1939) 205 Minn. 358, 362, 285 N.W. 898, 901.
The Michigan Supreme Court has said of cross-examination as to extrajudicial statements:
“The would-be cross-examiner is not only denied the right to be the declarant’s adversary, he is left with no choice but to become the witness’ friend, protector and savior. Though he may be permitted to ask questions in the form of cross-examination, the substance of his effort will be redirect examination and rehabilitation. The reason is simple. The witness cannot recant. Every cross-examiner tries to bring the witness to the point where he changes his story— literally eats his words — in the presence of the jury. . . . No matter how deadly the thrust of the cross-examiner, the ghost of the prior statement stands. His questions will always sound like attempts to permit the witness to explain why he has changed his story before coming to court, with the jury being left to infer that he might have been induced to change his story in the intervening months or years, for some unrevealed and sinister reason.” Ruhala v. Roby, (1967) 379 Mich. 102, 125, 150 N.W.2d 146, 156.
Where no effort to elicit testimony from the witness concerning the facts in issue is made at trial, no such compelling reason exists for dispensing with the safeguards our legal system provides for assuring the trustworthiness of evidence: *100the oath, observation of the witness’ demeanor, and contemporaneous cross-examination. Permitting such evidence will cause criminal trials in this state to resemble trials in the English perogative courts, whose reliance on ex parte affidavits to convict accused persons was a principal evil sought to be remedied by the constitutional guarantee of confrontation of one’s accusers. See California v. Green, supra, 399 U.S. at 156-157 nn. 10-11, 90 S.Ct. 1934.
Note. — Reported at 368 N.E.2d 239.