Com. v. Figueroa

• Decision Date: 05 December 2002
• Docket Number: No. 00-P-1112.,00-P-1112.
• Citation: 56 Mass. App. Ct. 641,779 N.E.2d 669
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Ernan FIGUEROA.
• Court: Appeals Court of Massachusetts

Page 669

779 N.E.2d 669

56 Mass. App. Ct. 641

COMMONWEALTH v. Ernan FIGUEROA.

No. 00-P-1112.

Appeals Court of Massachusetts, Suffolk.

Argued November 6, 2001.

Decided December 5, 2002.

Joseph S. Berman, Boston, for the defendant.

Alex G. Philipson, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth.

Present: BROWN, GREENBERG, & McHUGH, JJ.

McHUGH, J.

Following a street-corner argument late on the night of May 15, 1996, Miguel Reyes shot and killed Vannaroth Ouk. Reyes's friend, the defendant, Ernan Figueroa, his own pistol drawn and cocked, was standing nearby when the shooting occurred. The defendant was thereafter indicted for Ouk's murder, see G.L. c. 265, § 1, on a joint venture theory, and for possession of a firearm. See G.L. c. 269, § 10(a). Following trial, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and of the firearms charge. On appeal, the defendant principally argues that statements he made to police should have been suppressed, that certain photographs were insufficiently authenticated and should have been excluded, and that the judge erroneously instructed the jury that the Commonwealth was not required to prove the absence of an "accidental" shooting in order to prove involuntary manslaughter.¹ There was no error in the judge's careful handling of the trial and we therefore affirm.

Much of the factual detail is most helpfully recited in the context of the alleged errors about which the defendant complains. By way of overview, however, witnesses testified at trial that a group of people, many of whom belonged to the Boston Red Dragons (BRD), a street gang, were standing and sitting on the porch of 56 Sumner Street in Revere late on the evening of May 15. The defendant and Reyes, witnesses said, came out of a nearby house at 47-49 Sumner Street and approached the group. The two men began exchanging words with the group and the words quickly mushroomed into argument. The victim, Ouk, approached Reyes. Reyes and Ouk then moved into the middle of Sumner Street, arguing as they went.

As Reyes and Ouk stood in the street "almost face to face," Reyes drew his gun. Visibly unarmed, Ouk threw his hands in the air and said, "Shoot me motherfucker if you're going to shoot me." Although witnesses varied slightly in their descriptions of what happened next, the essence of their testimony was that Reyes swung or punched at Ouk with the pistol he was holding. As he did, he discharged the weapon, firing a single shot into Ouk's chest.

While the mid-street confrontation between Ouk and Reyes progressed, the defendant stood to one side of the group, near a fence along the porch. One witness testified to hearing a gun cock in the defendant's vicinity. Another testified to seeing the defendant point a pistol toward the porch. When police later recovered from beneath a nearby trash can what the Commonwealth claimed was the defendant's pistol, they found it cocked with a round in the chamber.

1. Motion to suppress. The defendant's first claim of error focuses on the trial judge's denial of his motion to suppress certain statements he made to police. He claims that police obtained those statements in violation of his right to counsel and that he made the statements involuntarily. The trial judge, on factual findings the defendant does not challenge, rightly denied his motion.

The judge's factual findings are to the following effect. The grand jury returned the indictments against the defendant in June of 1996. By then, however, the defendant had disappeared from the local scene. In 1998, local authorities learned that the defendant had been arrested and jailed in New York for an unrelated offense. After appropriate process issued, Revere police Detective John Goodwin and State police Trooper Michael Conti were sent to New York to pick him up and return him to Massachusetts.²

The two officers drove the defendant from the Coxsackie Correctional Institute in Fishkill, New York, to Massachusetts on June 19, 1998, in a rented automobile.³ The trip to Massachusetts lasted about three and one-half to four hours. Conti drove and Goodwin sat in the back seat with the defendant. Throughout the trip, the defendant, although "cuffed and shackled," engaged in what the trial judge found was "congenial conversation" with Goodwin. At no point before or during the ride did the officers give the defendant a Miranda warning.

Along with a series of immaterial topics, the defendant and Goodwin discussed the defendant's whereabouts while a fugitive. That discussion took what the judge found was the form of questions by the defendant followed by Goodwin's responses and follow-up questions.⁴ During the conversation, the defendant asked if there were still a lot of Chinese in Revere and Detective Goodwin responded, "Cambodians." The defendant asked about the BRD and said that, before the shooting, the BRD had been harassing him in the apartment where he had been staying with his girlfriend, and that they had broken windows, had been shooting a shotgun in a nearby alleyway, and had been "messing with us."

At some point, the defendant asked whether "Mike" (Miguel Reyes) had been caught. Detective Goodwin said that he had been caught after a car stop in Philadelphia. In response, the defendant said, "That night Mike did his thing and fucked up my life." He continued by saying that he wanted to get on with his life and get his life straightened out. The trial judge found that none of the statements about the "Chinese," the BRD, or "Mike" was made in response to a question by Detective Goodwin. She thus denied the motion to suppress and admitted all of the statements at trial.

The judge was correct. Neither the defendant's Fifth nor his Sixth Amendment rights were violated by admission of the statements because the defendant gave them freely and none was elicited by Detective Goodwin. See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 478, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966) ("Any statement given freely and voluntarily without any compelling influences is, of course, admissible in evidence"); Commonwealth v. Torres, 424 Mass. 792, 796-797, 678 N.E.2d 847 (1997). The defendant, not Detective Goodwin, began the conversation in which he made the statements, and there was no evidence that Detective Goodwin coerced or tricked him into making them. See Commonwealth v. Chipman, 418 Mass. 262, 272-273, 635 N.E.2d 1204 (1994); Commonwealth v. Diaz, 422 Mass. 269, 271, 661 N.E.2d 1326 (1996); Commonwealth v. Duguay, 430 Mass. 397, 401, 720 N.E.2d 458 (1999). As the trial judge rightly concluded, Detective Goodwin's discourse and conduct in reaction to the defendant's questions were not the functional equivalent of interrogation, see Rhode Island v. Innis, 446 U.S. 291, 300-301, 100 S.Ct. 1682, 64 L.Ed.2d 297 (1980), and "[t]he officers were not required to rebuff all attempts by [the defendant] to engage them in conversation and sit in silence for the entirety of the three and one-half to four-hour trip" from New York to Massachusetts.

2. Photographic evidence. The defendant's second claim is that the trial judge erroneously admitted four photographs of the defendant and Reyes holding firearms resembling those recovered from the crime scene.⁵ The photographs, the defendant claims, were insufficiently authenticated to permit their admission.

Photographs usually are authenticated directly through competent testimony that the scene they show is a fair and accurate representation of something the witness actually saw. See Commonwealth v. Weichell, 390 Mass. 62, 77, 453 N.E.2d 1038 (1983), cert. denied, 465 U.S. 1032, 104 S.Ct. 1298, 79 L.Ed.2d 698 (1984); Commonwealth v. Ames, 410 Mass. 603, 605 n. 3, 574 N.E.2d 986 (1991); Liacos, Massachusetts Evidence § 11.13.1, at 728 (7th ed.1999). But authenticity also can be established circumstantially by "evidence sufficient to support a finding that the matter in question is what its proponent claims." Proposed Mass.R.Evid. 901(a). See Commonwealth v. Duddie Ford, Inc., 28 Mass.App.Ct. 426, 435 & n. 10, 551 N.E.2d 1211 (1990), S. C., 409 Mass. 387, 566 N.E.2d 1119 (1991). Moreover, the authenticity of a photograph is a preliminary question of fact for resolution by the trial judge. See Commonwealth v. Ames, supra; Advisory Committee's Note to Proposed Mass.R.Evid. 901(a). In making that preliminary determination, the trial judge, with certain exceptions not here relevant, is not bound by the rules of evidence. See Proposed Mass.R.Evid. 104(a); Liacos, Massachusetts Evidence § 3.9.1, at 89 (7th ed.1999). Once authenticated sufficiently for admission, remaining questions about a photograph's evidentiary value are for the trier of fact. See Commonwealth v. Jordan, 50 Mass.App. Ct. 369, 371-372, 737 N.E.2d 511 (2000). All of those principles inhere in the overarching principle that "[t]he admissibility of photographic evidence is left to the discretion of the trial judge, and we will overturn the judge's decision only where a defendant is able to bear the heavy burden of demonstrating an abuse of that discretion." Commonwealth v. Obershaw, 435 Mass. 794, 803, 762 N.E.2d 276 (2002), quoting from Commonwealth v. Waters, 399 Mass. 708, 715, 506 N.E.2d 859 (1987). See Commonwealth v. Vizcarrondo, 431 Mass. 360, 362-363, 727 N.E.2d 821 (2000).

When ruling that the photographs were admissible in this case, the trial judge had before her the defendant's affidavit saying that the photographs came from film he gave to a woman named Katissa Perez to have developed⁶; Revere police Detective Theodore Michalski's testimony that he obtained the photographs from the owner of a photo shop who had called him two days before the shooting to say that she had received from "Kathy," of 49 Sumner Street, the film containing the images from which she made the prints in question; the results of a police investigation showing that "Kathy" was Katissa Perez; direct evidence from trial witnesses that Reyes and the defendant were...