Ruffin v. United States

• Decision Date: 21 November 2019
• Docket Number: No. 15-CF-1378,15-CF-1378
• Citation: 219 A.3d 997
• Parties: Levi RUFFIN, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES, Appellee.
• Court: D.C. Court of Appeals

219 A.3d 997

Levi RUFFIN, Appellant,

v.UNITED STATES, Appellee.

No. 15-CF-1378

District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Argued January 16, 2018

Decided November 21, 2019

Debra Soltis, with whom Paul Y. Kiyonaga and Marcus Massey, Washington, were on the brief, for appellant.

Kristina Ament, with whom Channing D. Phillips, United States Attorney at the time the brief was filed, and Elizabeth Trosman, Washington, John P. Mannarino, Kenechukwu O. Okocha, Akhi Johnson, and Eric S. Nguyen, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief, for appellee.

Before Glickman and Fisher, Associate Judges, and Ferren, Senior Judge.

Glickman, Associate Judge:

Appellant, Levi Ruffin, was convicted after a jury trial of the following offenses: first-degree burglary while armed; kidnapping while armed; third-degree sexual abuse while armed; attempted robbery while armed; assault with a dangerous weapon; and assault with significant bodily injury. In this appeal, he contends the evidence was insufficient to sustain his convictions for first-degree burglary and kidnapping, and that the trial court erred in denying his motions to exclude DNA test results and a knife found in his possession at the time of his arrest. Concluding that these contentions lack merit, we affirm appellant's convictions.

I. The Evidence at Trial

The complaining witness at appellant's trial, whom we shall refer to as J.C., testified that a man wielding a silver folding knife attacked her when she arrived home on the evening of September 14, 2013. J.C. lived at the time in one of three apartments in a row house in Northwest Washington, D.C. Her assailant, who was later identified as appellant, came up behind her as she was unlocking the front door to the building. Putting his hand over her mouth and holding the knife to her face, appellant told her not to move and to drop what she was holding. He then pushed J.C. through the entrance into the common hallway of the row house, followed her in, and closed the door behind them. Alone with her in the hallway, and continuing to hold the knife to her face, appellant demanded her money. J.C. started to hand him her debit and credit cards, but appellant slapped them away. He then lifted her dress and rubbed his fingers against her genital area through her underwear.

At that point, J.C. grabbed the hand in which appellant was holding the knife and pushed him away. A fight ensued, during which appellant bit J.C. on her left cheek and her back. She yelled at him to stop. He pushed her to the floor and fled out the front door of the row house. After he was gone, J.C. went into her apartment and called the police.

A neighbor in an apartment down the hallway heard and saw part of the attack through the peephole of her door and called the police. The recording of that call was played at trial. It captured over 90 seconds of the assault.

J.C. was taken to the hospital by ambulance. She was treated for the bite wounds

on her cheek and back, and for a lacerated finger (which required six stitches) and other knife cuts on her hands. A nurse swabbed J.C.'s bite wounds for biological evidence that could help identify her attacker.

After several months, the police acquired information linking appellant to the assault.¹ In August 2014, officers went to his apartment to arrest him. In a pair of jeans that appellant asked to put on, the officers found a folding knife with a silver blade and a black handle. Over appellant's objection to its relevance, this knife was admitted in evidence against him at trial, along with the parties' stipulation that it had been in appellant's possession "as early as November 2, 2013" (i.e., about seven weeks after the assault on J.C.).²

DNA testing identified appellant as J.C.'s assailant. Two forensic scientists from the District of Columbia Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) testified that they received and tested the swabs taken from J.C.'s cheek and back wounds

and a swab taken from appellant's cheek following his arrest in this case. These scientists performed the extraction, quantification, and amplification of DNA from each of those sources and generated DNA profiles from them for subsequent interpretation and comparison. They did not testify to that interpretation and comparison, however, because flaws had been detected in DFS's statistical computation procedures. These flaws reportedly "resulted in DFS's overstating the rarity of certain mixture profiles,"³ i.e., profiles obtained from samples containing DNA from more than one person. A panel of experts convened by the United States Attorney's Office identified "systematic concerns with DFS's interpretations of forensic DNA mixtures,"⁴ and an ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board (ANAB)⁵ audit of DFS likewise found serious problems with its "mixture interpretation procedures." The ANAB required DFS to suspend DNA testing until it corrected the problems.

The government arranged for an accredited private laboratory, Bode Cellmark Forensics (Bode), to interpret and compare the profiles generated by DFS in this case. Over appellant's objection, the court allowed Karin Crenshaw, a forensic biologist at Bode, to testify that appellant's DNA profile matched the foreign DNA profiles recovered from the swabs of J.C.'s back and cheek wounds

.⁶ According to Ms. Crenshaw, the probability of randomly selecting an unrelated African American with the same profile as that of the foreign DNA from J.C.'s back was 1 in 450 quadrillion; and the equivalent random match probability for the DNA from J.C.'s cheek was 1 in 4.1 sextillion.⁷

II. Sufficiency of the Evidence

Appellant claims the evidence was insufficient to convict him of the first-degree burglary and kidnapping charges. Each claim turns on a question of statutory interpretation.

A. First-Degree Burglary While Armed

The crime of burglary in the first degree is defined in D.C. Code § 22-801(a) (2019 Supp.) in pertinent part as follows (emphasis added): "Whoever shall ... enter ... any dwelling , or room used as a sleeping apartment in any building, with intent ... to commit any criminal offense, shall, if any person is in any part of such dwelling or sleeping apartment at the time of such ... entering, ... be guilty of burglary in the first degree."⁸ Appellant contends there was insufficient proof that he entered a "dwelling" to support his conviction of this crime because the evidence at trial established that J.C.'s assailant entered only the common hallway of her multi-apartment row house (and not also her or any other tenant's individual apartment). Appellant asserts that the common hallway of a residential apartment building is not part of a "dwelling" as that term is used in the burglary statute.

The burglary statute does not define the term "dwelling," and this is the first time this court has been called upon to construe it. Its meaning in the statute, and whether it encompasses a common hallway in a multi-unit residential building, are questions of statutory interpretation that we decide de novo .⁹ Where, as here, statutory terms are undefined, we presumptively construe them according to their ordinary sense and plain meaning, taking into account the context in which they are employed, the policy and purpose of the legislation, and the potential consequences of adopting a given interpretation.¹⁰ "We may also look to the legislative history to ensure that our interpretation is consistent with legislative intent."¹¹ These principles have guided our interpretation of other language in the first-degree burglary statute.¹² They favor giving the term "dwelling" a broad interpretation that would render § 22-801(a) applicable here.

To begin with, the term "dwelling" is not limited to single-family occupancies. Apartment houses and other multi-unit residential structures also are included within standard dictionary definitions of "dwelling," particularly when that word is used in burglary and similar statutes. Black's Law Dictionary, for example, states that "dwelling" is the short form of "dwelling-house," a term meaning, in criminal law, virtually any "building ..., part of a building ..., or [ ]other enclosed space that is used or intended for use as a human habitation."¹³ We think it informative and noteworthy that a number of federal courts, tasked under the Sentencing Guidelines with determining the "generic" meaning of "burglary of a dwelling," have accepted this definition.¹⁴

In construing the District's first-degree burglary statute, we have no reason to reject the broad ordinary meaning of "dwelling" as any enclosed space used for human habitation, nor any reason to narrow the definition of "dwelling" to exclude some types of habitation. Section 22-801(a) states that it applies to entries into "any dwelling" without qualification or exception. "[T]here is no indication in the legislative history to the contrary."¹⁵ Congress enacted the first-degree burglary statute in 1967.¹⁶ As explained in the report on the bill by the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, up until then, "the crime of breaking and entering in the District of Columbia [was] called housebreaking" and did "not distinguish between dwellings and other premises."¹⁷ The authorized penalty for housebreaking, imprisonment for up to 15 years, was the same regardless of the character of the premises.¹⁸ The 1967 enactment amended the housebreaking statute to create two degrees of burglary and specify different minimum sentences for each.¹⁹ The graver offense, first-degree burglary of an occupied dwelling or sleeping apartment, carried an enhanced penalty of no less than 5 nor more than 30 years of imprisonment. Burglaries of other premises were covered by the second-degree statute, which tracked the previous housebreaking statute and continued to carry a maximum penalty of 15 years' imprisonment.²⁰

Accepting the broad, ordinary definition of "dwelling" best serves the evident legislative purpose behind the enactment of the first-degree...