Com. v. Sherick

• Decision Date: 05 January 1987
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Daniel O. SHERICK.
• Court: Appeals Court of Massachusetts

Page 156

502 N.E.2d 156

23 Mass.App.Ct. 338

COMMONWEALTH v. Daniel O. SHERICK.

Appeals Court of Massachusetts Plymouth.

Argued Oct. 20, 1986.

Decided Jan. 5, 1987.

William R. Hill, Jr., Committee for Public Counsel Services, Boston, for defendant.

Robert P. Snell, Asst. Dist. Atty., for Commonwealth.

Before ARMSTRONG, KAPLAN and DREBEN, JJ.

KAPLAN, Justice.

Upon indictments charging him with aggravated rape, kidnapping, and assault by means of a dangerous weapon, committed upon the person of a young woman (whom we shall call "the victim") on May 3, 1984, the defendant, Daniel O. Sherick, was tried in Plymouth Superior Court and found guilty of rape (as a lesser included crime), and acquitted on the other charges. ¹ The present appeal attacks some remarks by the prosecutor in his closing argument, and a portion of the judge's instructions. It will suffice to outline the case without plunging into details. Then we deal with the particular contentions.

In the afternoon of May 3, the victim and her father and a younger sister were walking on Main Street, Brockton, the former two carrying bags of groceries. The defendant came by in a beat-up station wagon and offered them a ride. The victim and the father knew the defendant as a worker for a moving company who had recently assisted in moving their family to Main Street from Parker Street. The trio piled into the car and the defendant, with stops at the Registry of Motor Vehicles and a liquor store, drove them home, accepting along the way an invitation to take dinner with them.

The defendant ate little but drank a considerable amount of beer. Shortly after dinner the victim called her friend, Mary Dexter (we use a fictitious name), who lived on Court Street, and volunteered to babysit for her. The defendant offered to give the victim a ride there: it was a cold, rainy evening. Arriving outside Dexter's house, the defendant, instead of letting the victim out, locked the door on the passenger side, grabbed the victim's forearm to stop her from opening the door, and told her they were going for a ride. He said she would be in trouble if she told the police or the lawyers. Then he reached into the glove compartment, drew out a knife, and held it to her throat. Again he warned her about telling. (It may be noted here that the victim was eighteen years old, thin, frail, and of low intelligence.)

After a further struggle with the victim, the defendant drove to a junk yard on Freight Street, deserted at that hour, and turned off engine and lights. He removed his clothes, talking now (and later) about the victim having "his kid." Again the victim tried to get out of the car but the defendant prevented her. He undressed her, pushed her onto the back seat, and followed her there. He entered her mouth, then her vagina, then her anus. They put on their clothes and resumed places on the front seat. After some driving around, the defendant returned to the Dexter house and let the victim out of the car.

Mary Dexter, opening the front door in response to the doorbell, observed that the victim was wet and dishevelled. Asked where she had been--she was long overdue--the victim, evidently distraught, said she had been at McDonald's. When Dexter, disbelieving that story, said she would call the victim's father--he had been phoning Dexter repeatedly to see whether she had shown up--the victim told Dexter of the rape, identifying the man as the one who had moved the family from Parker Street.

Dexter called the Brockton police department and the Rape Crisis Center. Officer Eric Smith arrived with Officer Lee Kendrick, spoke with the victim, and brought her to the Brockton Hospital. There she told her story again. Her clothes were taken and Dr. Henry Kurusz, assisted by Nurse Maria J. LaCara, made various tests of which that for acid phosphatase (an enzyme found in seminal fluid) proved positive in readings from the mouth, questionably positive for the anus, and positive for the vagina (but this reading could be false because of the presence in the vaginal vault of blood remaining from the victim's recent menstrual period).

When the defendant was brought to the police station after his identification and arrest, he said, following Miranda warnings, that he was willing to talk. In conversation with Captain John Bukunt, with Officers Smith and Kendrick also present, the defendant denied knowing any family called "Robert" (fictitious name) though he knew a man for whom he had done some moving whose first name he took to be Robert. He told how he had spent May 3. In this narrative he accounted for the whole day and did not mention any encounter with the victim or her father. At the trial he took the stand and testified that he had picked up the victim and her father in the station wagon on the afternoon of May 3, had drunk beer at the Robert place that evening, and had driven with the victim to the Dexter address. While in the car he had asked her whether she wanted to do some "parking," and she agreed. He had engaged in vaginal and oral intercourse with the victim at the junkyard, but she was a consenting partner. Following vaginal entry, it was the victim who initiated oral intercourse. He had returned her to the Dexter house.

Despite some wavering in the victim's testimony (mentioned below at note 2), the jury could well have believed the substance of the evidence which amounted to proof of forcible intercourse, and disbelieved the defendant's assertions of consent on the part of the victim, as well as the defendant's attempt at an alibi as told to Captain Bukunt. (The judge correctly denied the defendant's motion at the close of the Commonwealth's case for required findings of not guilty; the motion was not renewed at the close of all the evidence.)

1. In his closing argument to the jury, the prosecutor commented on the strength of the Commonwealth's evidence in comparison with the defendant's and asked the jury to consider where the balance of credibility lay. He said the victim's several accounts of the May 3 incident, including her testimony at the probable cause hearing, before the grand jury, and at trial, had been consistent. ² On the other hand, the defendant had told his story twice, at the police station and at trial, and the stories were contradictory. ³ The prosecutor's comment passed without objection or remark by defense counsel. On the present appeal, however, the defense contends there was a breach of the rule that forbids prosecutor (or judge) to lead the jury to draw an adverse inference from an accused's failure to come forward and speak at any stage after being taken into custody. See Commonwealth v. Teixera, 396 Mass. 746, 752, 488 N.E.2d 775 (1986). Cf. Commonwealth v. Haas, 373 Mass. 545, 553-554, 369 N.E.2d 692 (1977); Commonwealth v. Mahdi, 388 Mass. 679, 694-698, 448 N.E.2d 704 (1983). The policy at work here is that of the privilege against self-incrimination embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and, locally, in art. 12 of our Declaration of Rights and two satellite statutes, one, G.L. c. 233, § 20, Third, in effect embodying or restating the privilege, ⁴ and a second, G.L. c. 278, § 23, applying it more particularly to references to the failure of a defendant to testify or offer evidence at a preliminary hearing. ⁵ privilege should never fail of high respect and solid enforcement in our courts, but the attempt to bring it or its policy to bear in the present case to reverse the conviction seems to us much overdrawn and without merit. Here the prosecutor's comment was not directed to any failure of the defendant to testify; that would have been improper. Rather the comment was directed to an appraisal of the evidence on both sides that had been given at the trial; that was permissible. We elaborate the distinction as far as necessary.

(a) Impermissible. A prosecutor may not at trial, in questioning witnesses or addressing the jury, point to the defendant's failure to take the stand, thereby inviting the inference that the defendant fears to face the music or has something to hide. See Commonwealth v. Domanski, 332 Mass. 66, 69, 123 N.E.2d 1954 (1954); Commonwealth v. Smith, 387 Mass. 900, 908-909, 444 N.E.2d 374 (1983). Of course such a fault is as bad or worse where the judge himself makes such a direct, tendentious reference. See Commonwealth v. Goulet, 374 Mass. 404, 410-411, 372 N.E.2d 1288 (1978). The same vice inheres in interrogation or comment at trial that is pointed toward bringing out that a defendant had nothing to say when he was arrested, see Commonwealth v. Cobb, 374 Mass. 514, 520-522, 373 N.E.2d 1145 (1978), or avoided testifying or putting in any case at an earlier hearing, see Commonwealth v. Haraldstad, 16 Mass.App.Ct. 565, 574-575, 453 N.E.2d 472 (1983), in either instance inviting an inference headed toward a conclusion of guilt. The situation is not different where a prosecutor, in lieu of saying in terms that the defendant has failed to testify, remarks archly that the Commonwealth's case has not been answered or remains uncontradicted, when it is apparent that a response must have come, if at all, from the defendant. See Commonwealth v. Balthazar, 366 Mass. 298, 303-304, 318 N.E.2d 478 (1974); Commonwealth v. Gouveia, 371 Mass. 566, 570-572, 358 N.E.2d 1001 (1976); Commonwealth v. Hawley, 380 Mass. 70, 82-84, 401 N.E.2d 827 (1980). So, too, instead of saying outright that the defendant was speechless and tendered no evidence at a hearing on probable cause, a prosecutor may produce the same effect by the maneuver of beginning his cross-examination of witness after witness offered for the defense at trial by asking whether the witness was called by the defense to testify at the probable cause hearing, and eliciting in each instance a negative answer. See Commonwealth v. Morrison, 1 Mass.App.Ct. 632, 305 N.E.2d 518 (1973), and remarks in Commonwealth v. Maguire, 375 Mass. 768,...