Commonwealth v. Hernandez

• Decision Date: 16 July 2010
• Docket Number: No. 09-P-12.,09-P-12.
• Citation: 929 N.E.2d 992,77 Mass.App.Ct. 259
• Parties: COMMONWEALTHv.Anthony HERNANDEZ.
• Court: Appeals Court of Massachusetts

77 Mass.App.Ct. 259

929 N.E.2d 992

COMMONWEALTHv.Anthony HERNANDEZ.

No. 09-P-12.

Appeals Court of Massachusetts,

Essex.

Argued Dec. 16, 2009.

Decided July 16, 2010.

John O. Mitchell, Cambridge, for the defendant.

Elin H. Graydon, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth.

Present: MILLS, KATZMANN, & FECTEAU, JJ.

FECTEAU, J.

The defendant appeals from convictions, following a jury trial in the District Court, of unlawful possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, G.L. c. 94C, § 32A( a ), and violation of the school zone law, G.L. c. 94C, § 32J. On appeal, the defendant contends that his motion to suppress evidence was wrongly denied, and that the trial judge erred in denying his motion for a required finding of not guilty and in allowing in evidence a certificate of chemical analysis without affording the defendant his confrontation rights under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. We agree that reversible error occurred when the drug certificate was admitted in evidence. However, the defendant's motion to suppress and motion for a required finding of not guilty were properly denied. Therefore, we reverse the convictions and remand for a new trial.

Background. The jury could have found ¹ that at approximately 8:00 p.m., on November 24, 2006, Detectives Ross Panacopoulos and Raymond Guillermo, two experienced Lynn police street-level narcotics investigators,² were on patrol in an unmarked police vehicle on North Common Street, identified as a high crime area. They saw a van parked on the side of the road with its headlights on and the engine running; the passenger door was open, one person was in the driver's seat, and another man (later identified as the defendant) was bent over behind a nearby dumpster. After a moment, they saw the man near the dumpster stand up, put his hands in his pockets, and enter the van by the open passenger door.

While Panacopoulos did not see any drugs in the defendant's hands, he was suspicious of this activity because it suggested to him either a typical narcotics “drug drop,” explained as involving parties separately picking up and dropping off drugs and money, or a drug stash outside a dealer's residence. Guillermo testified that, at that point, they did not know whether the defendant was picking up or dropping off drugs.

As the van drove off, the detectives followed, and a moment later they saw the van fail to stop at a solid red light. They called for the assistance of a marked cruiser, and the van was stopped without incident. Panacopoulos attended to the driver and requested his license and registration,³ while Guillermo went to the passenger side.

Although the officers saw no suspicious movements, weapons, drugs, or drug paraphernalia as they approached the van, they testified that during motor vehicle stops they were apprehensive for their safety. As the officers drew up to the front seat of the vehicle, they could see the defendant, whom they identified as the man they had just seen behind the dumpster, seated in the front passenger seat sitting with his left hand hidden beneath his left thigh and his right hand shaking. Both detectives described the defendant as appearing very nervous and breathing heavily. When asked for his identification, the defendant was unable to provide any. When Guillermo asked if he had any weapons, the defendant turned his back to him and did not answer. When asked again, the defendant first hesitated but finally answered, “No.” Because of the defendant's lack of response to Guillermo's first question whether he had any weapons, his movement turning away from Guillermo, and his hidden left hand, Guillermo became concerned for the officers' safety, and asked the defendant to get out of the car. The officer then pat frisked him for weapons, finding a cellular telephone in his right pants pocket; he felt “a bulge, like a ball” that he believed to be narcotics in the area of the left pants pocket, which he attempted to retrieve. The ball, a clear plastic bag filled with white powder, which the detective believed to be cocaine, was not in his pants pocket but instead in the pocket of a pair of athletic style shorts underneath his pants. The defendant was then arrested. During booking, the detectives also removed fifty-six dollars in cash.

On cross-examination, Panacopoulos acknowledged that the defendant's activity at the dumpster, combined with the discovery of cocaine in his inner pocket, would suggest that the defendant was a buyer, but he further opined, without objection, that the quantity of cocaine found in the defendant's pocket, the cellular telephone, and the fifty-six dollars found during the patfrisk were consistent with possession with intent to distribute. In Panacopoulos's experience, street sales typically involve amounts of cocaine up to one gram; the defendant had 13.98 grams, almost one-half ounce of cocaine. Neither in their search of the defendant nor in the car did the detectives find any other paraphernalia indicative of drug dealing; nor did they find any indicia of personal consumption of cocaine such as needles, “crack” pipes, “crack” stems, or rolling papers.

The Commonwealth's final witness was Lynn police Detective Michael Kelter. ⁴ Testifying as an expert, he identified the North Common Street area where the defendant was first seen behind the dumpster as a high drug crime area. He described typical street-level cocaine transactions in Lynn as involving one gram, one-half gram, or one-quarter gram bags, called twists, being sold for twenty to forty dollars. He also testified that larger quantities of cocaine, such as five to six grams, are amounts more typical of purchases by a “mid level dealer,” and can be broken down into smaller twists for sale to individual users. He expressed the opinion that a one-half ounce of cocaine is “not usually for personal use” because “[i]t's a lot of cocaine to have on hand” for one user, saying that the common practice of street-level users is to buy one or two small twists at a time because they do not have the money to buy larger quantities. He conceded that some people do acquire larger amounts for personal use, but in his experience on the streets of Lynn, one-half ounce of cocaine is “an awful lot of cocaine” for that purpose. He estimated that the amount of cocaine found on the defendant would sell for about $600 as a single package, but could be divided into fifty-six separate one-quarter gram “twists,” sold on the street at twenty dollars each.⁵

Discussion. 1. Drug certificate. ⁶ The United States Supreme Court has held that the admission of the certificate of analysis without an opportunity for cross-examination of the forensic chemist is error. See Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, ---U.S. ----, 129 S.Ct. 2527, 174 L.Ed.2d 314 (2009). The defendant is entitled to a review under harmless error principles. Commonwealth v. Vasquez, 456 Mass. 350, 355-360, 923 N.E.2d 524 (2010). In determining whether the error was harmless, we ask “whether there is a reasonable possibility that the evidence complained of might have contributed to the conviction.” Commonwealth v. Perez, 411 Mass. 249, 260, 581 N.E.2d 1010 (1991), quoting from Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 24, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967).

It is settled that scientific analysis is not the only method to prove the nature of a substance, and that a properly qualified police officer may provide opinion testimony that a substance is a particular controlled substance. Commonwealth v. Dawson, 399 Mass. 465, 467, 504 N.E.2d 1056 (1987). Even assuming that the trial judge implicitly found the officers qualified to give such opinion testimony because of their extensive experience in narcotics investigations, they were not asked to apply that expertise to identify the nature of the substance. Instead, each made an unsupported statement that he believed the substance was cocaine. “We suspect it would be a rare case in which a witness's statement that a particular substance looked like a controlled substance would alone be sufficient to support a conviction.” Ibid. While such a statement might constitute some evidence, the prosecutor properly placed its importance in the over-all context of the Commonwealth's case when she said in closing: “The first charge, the first element. Is this cocaine? Well, you have it in front of you; and you have officers who testified that it looked like cocaine. But most importantly, you have the certificate from the State Police saying, yes; this is cocaine as it is defined, a controlled substance.” Compare Commonwealth v. Ware, 76 Mass.App.Ct. 53, 57-58, 918 N.E.2d 861 (2009) (prosecutor's argument relying on ballistics certificate).

We are not persuaded that the admission of the certificate was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The Commonwealth did not show that other properly admitted “evidence of guilt was ‘overwhelming,’ in the sense that it was so powerful as to ‘nullify any effect’ the [improperly admitted evidence] might have had on the jury or the verdict.” Commonwealth v. Tyree, 455 Mass. 676, 704 n. 44, 919 N.E.2d 660 (2010), quoting from Commonwealth v. Dagraca, 447 Mass. 546, 555, 854 N.E.2d 1249 (2006). See Commonwealth v. Vasquez, 456 Mass. at 363, 367, 923 N.E.2d 524. Thus, reversal is required. ⁷

2. Sufficiency of the evidence.⁸ The defendant contends that the trial judge improperly denied his motion for a required finding of not guilty because the evidence in this case, which most significantly included a bag of cocaine weighing 13.98 grams, a cellular telephone, and fifty-six dollars in cash, was insufficient to permit a guilty verdict. We disagree.

Specifically, the defendant claims that the Commonwealth's evidence implied that he was a buyer as much as a seller. He relies upon a familiar axiom: “ ‘When the evidence tends equally to sustain either of two inconsistent propositions, neither of them can be said to have been established by...