State v. Ralston
| Decision Date | 10 November 2022 |
| Docket Number | CC 16CR33180 (SC S068727) |
| Citation | 370 Or. 414,520 P.3d 866 |
| Parties | STATE of Oregon, Respondent on Review, v. Christopher Shane RALSTON, aka Christopher Wayne Ralston, Petitioner on Review. |
| Court | Oregon Supreme Court |
Kyle Krohn, Senior Deputy Public Defender, Office of Public Defense Services, Salem, argued the cause and filed the briefs for petitioner on review. Also on the briefs was Ernest G. Lannet, Chief Deputy Defender.
Paul L. Smith, Deputy Solicitor General, Salem, argued the cause and filed the brief for respondent on review. Also on the brief were Ellen F. Rosenblum, Attorney General, and Benjamin Gutman, Solicitor General.
In this criminal case, defendant was arrested, booked, and charged by district attorney's information with misdemeanor driving under the influence of intoxicants (DUII) and reckless driving. Five days later, the prosecutor dismissed the misdemeanor charges to investigate whether defendant had predicate convictions that would have elevated the charge to felony DUII. Six weeks later, a grand jury indicted defendant on a charge of felony DUII. By that time, video footage from the jail on the night that defendant was arrested and booked had been overwritten automatically. When defense counsel later learned that the booking video had been overwritten, defendant moved to dismiss the charges against him on the ground that his right to a speedy trial under Article I, section 10, of the Oregon Constitution had been violated, arguing that his inability to use the video of his booking at trial was prejudicial to him. The trial court denied the motion and the Court of Appeals affirmed. State v. Ralston , 310 Or App 470, 486 P.3d 822 (2021). We allowed review and, for the reasons that follow, we affirm the decision of the Court of Appeals, and we affirm in part the judgment of the trial court.1
The following facts are undisputed. Shortly after midnight on June 3, 2016, defendant was arrested for DUII. Defendant had bloodshot and watery eyes, smelled of alcohol, and had multiple open containers of alcohol in his car. He refused to submit to a breath test. Two hours later, he was booked into jail. The booking area has several video cameras that record footage of individuals going through the booking process. That footage is kept for at least 30 days and then is overwritten automatically by the recording system, starting with the oldest videos.2
On the day of defendant's arrest, defendant was arraigned and charged by district attorney's information with DUII and reckless driving. He was appointed counsel and taken into custody. The prosecutor soon determined that defendant might have had two previous DUII convictions, which would elevate the DUII charge against defendant to a felony. ORS 813.011(1) (). On June 7, in an effort to avoid a felony DUII conviction, defendant requested a hearing for June 8 to plead guilty to the misdemeanor charges. In response, the state moved to dismiss the information, to give it time to investigate whether a felony charge was warranted. The court granted the state's motion and ordered that defendant be released.
On June 9, the felony DUII prosecutor received a case file that included defendant's prior conviction records. For reasons that are not explained in the record, the prosecutor did not review the file until July 8. At that point, the prosecutor confirmed that defendant could be charged with felony DUII, and, on July 19, 2016, a grand jury indicted defendant on that charge, based on the June 3 incident and two previous Washington state convictions for DUII, one in 2012 and the other in 2014.3 A judge issued a statewide arrest warrant the same day. The sheriff's office entered the warrant into various databases the following day and, on July 29, asked two different law-enforcement agencies in Washington, where defendant lived, to serve the warrant.
On January 4, 2017, the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office learned that defendant was in custody in Washington on unrelated charges, and defendant was arrested on the DUII indictment at issue. The following day, defendant waived extradition and consented to being returned to Oregon to answer the charges here. Defendant was transported to Oregon on March 16, 2017, and he was arraigned the following day. Counsel was appointed at that time. After viewing the police report obtained in discovery, defense counsel requested a copy of the videotape of defendant's June 3, 2016, booking, and, on May 1, 2017, learned that the videotape had been overwritten and no longer existed.4
Defendant moved to dismiss the charges against him on speedy-trial grounds, under Article I, section 10, of the Oregon Constitution. Article I, section 10, provides:
"No court shall be secret, but justice shall be administered, openly and without purchase, completely and without delay, and every man shall have remedy by due course of law for injury done him in his person, property, or reputation."
Defendant's motion emphasized the state's unexplained delay in obtaining an indictment and serving the warrant, but his argument primarily focused on the prejudice to him resulting from the delay. Specifically, defendant argued that the loss of the booking video was prejudicial because it might have shown that he had exhibited ordinary balance and coordination two hours after he drove, and, for that reason, his inability to use the video at trial was likely to harm his defense. In support of his motion, defendant offered a declaration from his lawyer stating that she had reviewed the arresting officer's police report and had noted that it did not describe defendant as exhibiting poor balance or coordination. On that basis, she averred, she expected that the booking video would prove helpful to the defense at trial. She further stated that, in past DUII cases, she had obtained and offered into evidence Multnomah County Sheriff's Office jail booking videos, because they can demonstrate a defendant's ability or inability to walk, follow directions, and stand in balance. She also stated that "it is not uncommon for a jail booking video to show a Defendant standing on one foot and removing a shoe while maintaining balance." Finally, she stated that, in her experience, those booking videos are "uniquely persuasive" as objective evidence at DUII trials.
Defendant also offered an affidavit from a sheriff's office employee explaining the booking area videotaping and overwriting process. Defendant did not introduce a copy of the police report or present testimony from the arresting officer to make a record of what the officer would say. Nor did he introduce an example of what a booking video would look like.
On August 18, 2017, the trial court held a hearing on defendant's motion to dismiss. After hearing argument from both sides, the trial court denied the motion. The court noted that the delays in this case were not exceptional and, in particular, that the "month or so" delay between arrest and indictment was not an unusual length of time. Ultimately, the court concluded that, even if the delay were unreasonable, defendant had not made an adequate factual showing that the lost video recording would have been helpful to the defense. In so doing, the court accepted defense counsel's representation about what the video "would have shown—normally for people," but "without regard to what it particularly would have shown" with respect to defendant. Defendant subsequently entered a conditional guilty plea to felony DUII in exchange for dismissal of the reckless driving charge, reserving his right to appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss on speedy-trial grounds.
Defendant appealed the denial of his motion to dismiss, reprising his state constitutional arguments. The Court of Appeals affirmed that part of the trial court judgment.
As an initial matter, the Court of Appeals noted that defendant had asked it to determine whether the speedy-trial clock began to run on the day that the misdemeanor information was filed or on the day that he was indicted, which is an open question in Oregon. The court concluded that it need not decide that issue in this case, because, as it later explained, even assuming that the speedy-trial clock started to tick at the time that the misdemeanor information was filed and was not reset by the dismissal of the information and defendant's subsequent indictment on the felony charge, defendant had failed to prove that he suffered sufficient prejudice from the delay to warrant dismissal under Article I, section 10. Ralston , 310 Or App at 477, 495, 486 P.3d 822.
As to that principal issue, the court stated that, in determining whether a defendant was denied the constitutional right to justice without delay, a court considers three factors: the length of the delay, the reasons for the delay, and the prejudice to the defendant resulting from the delay. Id . at 477, 486 P.3d 822 (citing State v. Emery , 318 Or. 460, 472, 869 P.2d 859 (1994) ). With respect to the first factor, length of the delay, the court noted that a delay, in and of itself, may be sufficient to establish a violation of the constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial. Id. In State v. Vawter , this court stated that delay alone may violate a defendant's speedy trial right if "such a period of time [passes] that the thought of ordering the defendant to trial shocks the imagination and the conscience." 236 Or. 85, 96, 386 P.2d 915 (1963) (internal quotation marks omitted). Here, the Court of Appeals stated, although the delay was not so "manifestly excessive" that it "shocks the imagination and the conscience," so as to be dispositive on its own, the state had conceded that the 14-month period from the misdemeanor indictment in June 2016 to defendant's guilty...
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