Reyes v. State
| Decision Date | 29 March 2023 |
| Docket Number | 1426-2021 |
| Parties | ANDY E. REYES v. STATE OF MARYLAND |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County Case No. C-02-CR-20-480
Reed Albright, Salmon, James P. (Senior Judge, Specially Assigned), JJ.
We hold that the circuit court did not err in declining to suppress Mr. Bartley's pretrial identification of Mr. Reyes as the shooter. Nor did it abuse its discretion in admitting surveillance camera footage (and still images derived from that footage) and in limiting cross-examination of Mr. Bartley. Accordingly, we will affirm the circuit court's judgments.
On December 28, 2019, in the early morning, Mr. Bartley walked to pick up some of his belongings from his girlfriend, Emily Barahona, at a church close to her house.
When Mr. Bartley arrived, he saw Ms. Barahona's car but did not see her. Mr. Bartley then noticed an individual walking toward him. The individual stopped approximately ten feet in front of Mr. Bartley, where, under the glow of a streetlight, Mr. Bartley was able to recognize the individual as Mr. Reyes, Ms. Barahona's longtime friend.
This was not the first time Mr. Bartley met Mr. Reyes; the two met through Ms. Barahona on several occasions, the first being six months prior. As before, Mr. Reyes and Mr. Bartley spoke to each other. Approximately twelve seconds later, and without provocation, Mr. Reyes pulled out a gun and aimed it at Mr. Bartley's head. Mr. Bartley ducked, and Mr. Reyes started shooting. He shot Mr. Bartley eleven times. Mr. Bartley fell to the ground and yelled for help.
A nearby resident heard the shots. Peering outside her bedroom window, she saw Mr. Bartley fall to the ground between a parked car and the curb. She grabbed towels, ran to Mr. Bartley, pressed the towels to his wounds, and waited for help to arrive.
Separately, in a nearby house where Robert Stevvings lived with his grandparents, a motion-activated security camera captured the scene of the shooting. After hearing the gunshots, Mr. Stevvings's grandmother went outside and saw her neighbors attending to Mr. Bartley, and then called emergency services. After the police arrived, Mr. Stevvings told officers that, at around the time that his grandmother heard the shooting, he received an alert on his phone that the home security camera had begun recording. Mr. Stevvings later reviewed the footage and emailed it to the police.
When Detective Davis returned to the hospital a few days later, Mr. Bartley reiterated that it was Mr. Reyes who shot him and that he could recognize Mr. Reyes in a photograph.
Several months later, in April 2020, Mr. Reyes was charged with attempted first- degree murder and other related crimes. He then moved to suppress Mr. Bartley's pretrial and expected in-trial identification of Mr. Reyes.
At the suppression hearing in September 2020, Mr. Reyes sought to suppress the identifications on the ground that showing Mr. Bartley a single photograph rather than a true photo array was impermissibly suggestive. The circuit court agreed, and then asked the State to show that the identification was sufficiently reliable to negate the effect of the impermissibly suggestive procedure. In response, the State called Detective Davis to testify.
Detective Davis explained that during his first visit, Mr. Bartley told him that Ms. Barahona and the man who shot him were "linked together," so he "searched Emily Barahona on Facebook" and "found a Facebook post . . . with [] Andy - Andy Reyes and Ms. Barahona." Detective Davis further testified that he "snip[ped] a photograph of Mr. Reyes's face" from the Facebook photograph and put the information through Dashboard-Maryland State's facial recognition software.[5] Dashboard's multi-database search of the Facebook photograph returned a positive match to a photograph of Mr. Reyes from the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration.
The State next called Mr. Bartley as a witness. Mr. Bartley testified that Detective Davis never told him whom to identify as the shooter. Instead, Mr. Bartley explained that he first met Mr. Reyes six months before the shooting and knew him through Ms. Barahona-Mr. Bartley's then-girlfriend. Mr. Bartley reiterated that he identified Mr. Reyes to Detective Davis as the shooter, not the other way around.
Following a brief cross-examination, the parties rested. The circuit court ruled that Mr. Bartley's identification of Mr. Reyes was reliable because, among other things, Mr. Bartley had the opportunity to view Mr. Reyes at the time of the crime, had met him several times before, and knew with whom Mr. Reyes associated.
In April 2021, on the first day of Mr. Reyes's trial, the State called Mr. Stevvings to testify about the video surveillance footage captured on his home security camera, which had recorded the shooting of Mr. Bartley.[6] Mr. Stevvings testified that he installed that camera in the front window of his house, and he provided additional information about how it worked, including that it was Wi-Fi-enabled and motion-activated, and sends an alert to his phone when it begins and ends recording. Mr. Stevvings also testified that the State's exhibit containing his camera footage accurately depicted the conditions on the night of the shooting and was the same footage that he emailed to the police.
The defense objected to the video footage, arguing that the State did not lay a sufficient foundation for authentication because the video was not a photograph, so "it ha[d] a whole different set of authentication questions that must be asked." The circuit court ultimately overruled the objection and admitted the video, finding that the State laid a sufficient foundation:
[THE COURT]: Well, I think he has - testified that the video on the disk is the same video - not the actual physical disk, but it is the same video that he emailed to the police. So I think he said that he viewed that and that is the video from his . . . camera. So I disagree with the Defense.
Later in the trial, the State also introduced photographs into evidence that depicted the scene of the shooting. These...
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