State v. Camerlin

• Decision Date: 29 July 1976
• Docket Number: No. 74-135-C,74-135-C
• Citation: 360 A.2d 862,116 R.I. 726
• Parties: STATE v. Louis A. CAMERLIN. A.
• Court: Rhode Island Supreme Court

Page 862

360 A.2d 862

116 R.I. 726

STATE v. Louis A. CAMERLIN.

No. 74-135-C.A.

Supreme Court of Rhode Island.

July 29, 1976.

[116 R.I. 735] Julius C. Michaelson, Atty. Gen., Judith Romney Wegner, Richard B. Woolley, Sp. Asst. Attys. Gen., Providence, for plaintiff.

William F. Reilly, Public Defender, Benedetto A. Cerilli, Jr., Asst. Public Defender, for defendant.

OPINION

JOSLIN, Justice.

The defendant was tried and convicted before a jury in the Superior Court on an indictment charging that while confined in the maximum custodial unit of the Adult Correctional Institutions he did on January 19, 1973, assault Joseph C. Thurber, Jr., a correctional officer at those institutions, in violation of G.L.1956 (1969 Reenactment) § 11-25-2. He appealed and assigns as errors certain evidentiary and other rulings.

There are conflicting versions of the alleged offense. The defendant testified that in response to his complaint of a headache and a ruquest for medication, he was taken to the prison hospital at about 2:00 a.m. by Officer Thurber and Lieutenant Louis Gellucci where almost immediately he became engaged in a verbal altercation with the nurse then on duty, Paul Favino. According to defendant, he was complaining to Lieutenant Gallucci about the treatment he was receiving when Officer Thurber, without provocation, struck him in the face with a ring of keys, causing severe injuries to his nose, mouth, and face as well as heavy bleeding; Lieutenant Gallucci grabbed him around the neck; he was punched and began to choke; and he became unconscious. He was taken to a cell near the hospital area where he was confined until sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. when he was attended by another nurse and the prison doctor, and sometime thereafter by the prison dentist. The defendant's story of the affray was largely corroborated by two other inmates who were in the prison hospital when the events described occurred, and who further indicated that defendant was bleeding heavily as the result of being struck.

Officer Thurber, Lieutenant Gallucci, nurse Favino and Norman Galenski, another correctional officer present at the scene, while substantially in agreement among themselves, differed sharply with defendant about what happened after his arrival at the hospital. According to them, Officer Thurber placed himself between defendant and nurse Favino to prevent trouble whereupon defendant initiated the incident by striking Officer Thurber in the shoulder, biting him in the hand, and butting him in the chest. They maintained that defendant swung first; that he was not beaten with a set of keys; that whatever injuries he sustained were attributable to Officer Thurber's swinging his hand upward in an effort to dislodge it from defendant's teeth; and that there was little or no blood on defendant's face immediately after the incident.

At trial defendant realized that credibility would play an important role in the jury's resolution of the evidentiary conflicts. He was also undoubtedly aware that the value of the corroborative testimony of his fellow inmates might have been substantially diminished by damaging cross-examination, and that on the crucial issue of who started the altercation, it was essentially his word against those of the four prosecution witnesses. In that scenario, he now argues, his only hope was to attack the credibility of the prosecution witnesses by discrediting their testimony that his injuries were minor and that he was bleeding only slightly, and thereby to convince the jury that because those witnesses were untruthful about the extent of his injuries, they were also untruthful in their testimony that he had assaulted Officer Thurber.

To accomplish this purpose be called as witnesses a consultant to a community program, an attorney, a correctional officer, an nurse, the prison dentist and others. When they were not permitted to testify, he made an offer of proof that their collective testimony would have been that when they saw him approximately 6 to 8 hours after the affray, there was a great deal of blood on his face and shirt; that there was a pool of blood on the floor of his cell; that his face was swollen, lacerated and required stitches in several places; and that one of his teeth was broken and another one required recapping. ¹ The trial justice rejected the proposed testimony as being in her judgment irrelevant and of minimal probative value on the critical question of whether defendant had committed an assault, and for substantially the same reason refused to admit as exhibits photographs taken shortly after he was removed from the cell where he had been confined following the altercation. These photographs depicted a defendant so bloodied and battered that in the trial justice's judgment they created a potential for prejudicing the jury that overrode whatever relevancy they might have.

It is, of course, the rule that questions of the relevancy of testimony and of photographs are addressed to a trial justice's sound discretion. State v. Verdone, 114 R.I. 613, 617, 337 A.2d 804, 808 (1975); State v. Rezendes, 111 R.I. 169, 172, 300 A.2d 472, 474 (1973); State v. Pombo, 110 R.I. 133, 136, 290 A.2d 855, 856 (1972) (photographs); State v. Amado, 109 R.I. 53, 57, 280 A.2d 324, 326 (1971); State v. Glass, 107 R.I. 86, 91, 265 A.2d 324, 327 (1970). Notwithstanding, it seems to us that the trial justice did not fully appreciate that both the testimonial and the real evidence offered were intended not to disprove the assault per se, but to discredit the state's witnesses by establishing that defendant, while confined in a cell for 6 or 7 hours had, without explanation from his jailers, been somehow transformed from an individual with a slight nosebleed to a person who was bloody, whose face was so severely lacerated as to require sutures in several places, and who had one broken tooth and another requiring recapping.

This evidence, while not contradictory of the prosecution's testimony about the altercation, surely would have provided a starting point for a closing argument by defense counsel that the state's witnesses, whose testimony had minimized defendant's injuries to a point where it was reasonable to believe that it lacked credibility, could also have fashioned out of something less than whole cloth their testimony of what occurred in the altercation between defendant and Officer Thurber. Certainly, evidence intended for this purpose was not so purely collateral as to make it inadmissible as a contradiction of a merely immaterial issue. State v. Verdone, supra at 617, 337 A.2d at 807-08; Kitchen v. Barrett, 58 R.I. 388, 391, 192 A. 809, 812 (1937). Neither was the 6 to 7 hour lag between the alleged assault and the time defendant was seen by the proposed witnesses and the photographs taken so extensive as to deprive the evidence of its impeaching value, although its persuasiveness and weight might thereby be somewhat lessened. Moreover, the photographs, since they tended to disprove the state's testimony about defendant's physical condition, could qualify for admission even though they might have some adverse effects upon the jury. State v. Kieon, 93 R.I. 290, 295, 175 A.2d 284, 287 (1961).

On balance, therefore, it seems to us that the photographs, in any event, and the testimonial evidence, at least to the point where excludable because cumulative, should have been admitted.

The state argues, however, that the exclusion of this evidence, even if erroneous, was harmless for the reason that it cannot reasonably be said that, it admitted, it would have altered the result of the case. See State v. Izzi, 115 R.I. 487, 491, 348 A.2d 371, 373 (1975); State v. Bowden, 113 R.I. 649, 662, 324 A.2d 631, 639 (1974), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 1109, 95 S.Ct. 782, 42 L.Ed.2d 805 (1975); State v. Almeida, 111 R.I. 566, 570, 304 A.2d 895, 898 (1973);...