State v. Thompson

• Decision Date: 03 January 1986
• Citation: 503 A.2d 689
• Court: Maine Supreme Court
• Parties: STATE of Maine v. Miles Benjamin THOMPSON.

Page 689

503 A.2d 689

STATE of Maine v. Miles Benjamin THOMPSON.

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

Argued Nov. 26, 1985.

Decided Jan. 3, 1986.

Paul Aranson, Dist. Atty., Laurence Gardner (orally), Asst. Dist. Atty., Portland, for plaintiff.

Childs, Emerson, Rundlett, Fifield & Childs, Richard S. Emerson, Jr. (orally), Portland, for defendant.

Before McKUSICK, C.J., and NICHOLS, ROBERTS, WATHEN and SCOLNIK, JJ.

McKUSICK, Chief Justice.

After a jury trial the Superior Court (Cumberland County) convicted defendant Miles Benjamin Thompson of three counts of gross sexual misconduct, 17-A M.R.S.A. § 253(1)(B), a Class A crime; one count of incest, 17-A M.R.S.A. § 556, a Class D crime; and one count of sexual abuse of a minor, 17-A M.R.S.A. § 254, a Class D crime. All five charges resulted from a continuous sexual relationship to which defendant Thompson had subjected his minor daughter, commencing in 1978 when she was eleven years of age. The daughter gave birth to a child in May 1982. In addition to extensive testimony from the victim about defendant's regular sexual intercourse with her over a period of about five years to the exclusion of any other male until after the birth of that child, the State presented the results of blood tests that in the opinion of the State's expert witness indicated that defendant had fathered the daughter's child to a 99.46% probability. As his sole ground for appeal, defendant attacks the admission of that evidence, arguing that the chain of custody of the blood samples involved in the testing was not adequately established and that the State's expert based his opinion on tests and analyses relied upon only for the purpose of litigation. We find no error in the Superior Court's admission of that opinion evidence, and accordingly we affirm Thompson's convictions.

The State obtained a court order in June 1984 compelling defendant to allow a sample of his blood to be drawn for paternity testing. The victim and her child also submitted to the blood sampling procedure. The samples were drawn by a technician of Roche Biomedical Laboratories, Inc., who labeled each specimen with the drawee's name, thumbprint, and photograph, signed a chain-of-custody certificate, and mailed it with the specimens to the Roche laboratory in Burlington, North Carolina. When the samples arrived at the Roche Laboratory, a medical technician, according to a strict recordkeeping procedure, removed the samples, examined the package to ensure that they had not been tampered with or substituted, and completed and signed the chain-of-custody certificate. Roche laboratory technicians then performed a battery of tests on the blood samples. Because of blood grouping similarities among defendant, the victim and her child, Dr. G.L. Ryals, associate director of Roche's Department of Paternity Evaluation and the State's expert witness at trial, directed that second samples be drawn in November 1984. On those second samples, the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue-typing test was repeated and yielded identical results, and additional tests were performed involving an analysis of red cell enzymes and serum proteins. In all, 16 independent systems were studied. Since not one of these 16 independent tests excluded defendant as the father, Dr. Ryals testified to his opinion that there is a 99.46% probability that defendant begot his minor daughter's child. ¹

I.

At trial defendant objected to the adequacy of the authentication of the blood specimens tested at the Roche laboratory. He complained that since none of the Roche technicians from North Carolina was present, he could not test the authenticity of the specimens by cross-examination. The presiding justice overruled the objection and held that the documents shipped with and used to identify the blood samples were sufficient to authenticate the specimens for the purpose of Dr. Ryals' testimony. The documents, admitted under the business records exception to the hearsay rule, M.R.Evid. 803(6), included the chain-of-custody certificates and recorded the identity, shipping, receipt, and condition of the specimens prior to testing at the Roche laboratory. On appeal, defendant does not challenge admission of those foundational documents pursuant to the business records exception. Instead, he contends that they failed to establish a sufficient chain of custody to guarantee the integrity of the blood specimens on which Dr. Ryals ultimately based his opinion as to the probabilities of the child's paternity.

The foundational showing required of the State for admission of the paternity test results is prescribed by M.R.Evid. 901(a), which provides with general applicability:

The requirement of authentication or identification as a condition precedent to admissibility is satisfied by evidence sufficient to support a finding that the matter in question is what its proponent claims.

The rule casts questions of the identity or authenticity of evidence in terms of conditional relevancy. M.R.Evid. 901 advisors' note, reprinted in Field & Murray, Maine Evidence 245 (1976). "This requirement of showing authenticity or identity falls in the category of relevancy dependent upon fulfillment of a condition of fact and is governed by the procedure set forth in Rule 104(b)." Fed.R.Evid. 901 advisory committee note. Evidence must be shown to be genuine before it is admissible. 5 J. Weinstein & M. Berger, Weinstein's Evidence p 901(a), at 901-15 (1985).

Because blood specimens lack distinctive identifying characteristics, the State in the case at bar relied on proving a chain of custody in order to establish the authenticity of the blood specimens. See generally 29 Am.Jur.2d Evidence § 775 (1967). Chain of custody evidence merely provides one way of satisfying the basic requirements of Rule 901. Proof by that method does not impose any new or extraordinary conditions upon the admission of evidence. See State v. Nason, 498 A.2d 252, 256 (Me.1985). Like other methods of authentication, "[t]he chain of custody ... serve[s] a dual purpose. It is an aid to the court in determining the admissibility of the evidence and it may also act as an aid to the finder of facts in determining what weight is to be given the evidence once admitted." State v. Thibodeau, 353 A.2d 595, 603 (Me.1976). The law does not demand that the proponent of evidence demonstrate the chain of custody so overwhelmingly "as to eliminate all possibility of tampering with the exhibit involved." Id. On the contrary, "[f]or admission purposes, it suffices if the custodial evidence establishes by the fair preponderance of the evidence rule that it is more probable than not that the object is the one connected with the case." Id.; see also State v. Desjardins, 401 A.2d 165, 171 (Me.1979).

In the present case the State met the threshold requirement for admissibility under M.R.Evid. 901(a) by adducing custodial evidence in the form of detailed documents. Once those documents surmounted the hearsay hurdle, they were admitted to prove the truth of the matter asserted, namely, that the blood samples drawn from the Thompsons were the same samples tested at the Roche laboratory to determine the probability of the child's paternity. See United States v. Duhart, 496 F.2d 941 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 967, 95 S.Ct. 230, 42 L.Ed.2d 182 (1974) (chain of custody of vaginal smear in rape case established by use of federal statutory business records exception). See also E. Cleary, McCormick on Evidence § 212, at 668 n. 28 (3d ed. 1984) ("The various business records [hearsay exception] statutes ... have proved of great utility in securing admission of regularly marked and labeled specimens"). See generally Annot., 19 A.L.R.3d 1008, 1021-25 (1968). Nothing in Rule 901 obligated the State to parade every individual who handled the blood specimens onto the witness stand to testify subject to cross-examination. On the contrary, "[a]ny lack of further [evidence] as to the chain of custody properly went to the weight, and not to the admissibility" of testimony based on the paternity testing of those samples. State v. Pickering, 491 A.2d 560, 562-63 (Me.1985).

Defendant also complains that the chain of custody testimony, presented out of the presence of the jury on the voir dire of Dr. Ryals, was not repeated in full before the jury. He asserts that the jury accordingly had an insufficient basis for assessing the reliability of the blood tests that Dr. Ryals relied upon. The quick and complete answer is that at trial defendant never made any objection, under M.R.Evid 705(b) or otherwise, to Dr. Ryals' testifying before the jury without a complete repetition of his voir dire testimony. Defendant had an unrestricted opportunity before the jury to cross-examine the State's expert to expose any shortcomings that he might claim to exist in the chain of custody shown by the documentary exhibits. The presiding justice correctly charged the jury that it was to treat an expert witness's testimony like any other testimony, and that it was free to believe all of that testimony, some part of it, or none at all of it. In the circumstances of this trial the presiding justice committed no error, let alone the obvious error required for reversal by M.R.Crim.P. 52(b), in permitting Dr. Ryals to testify before the jury to his expert opinion based on the blood tests performed by his laboratory on what purported to be the Thompson blood samples.

II.

Defendant finally contends that Dr. Ryals' opinion testimony failed to meet the requirement for the admission of such testimony by an expert set forth in M.R.Evid. 703 ² because it relied on blood tests and on statistical analysis performed solely for the purpose of this present litigation. We find no merit in this contention. Once the trial justice determines that an expert is qualified to render an opinion relevant to the pending proceeding, "the opinion of [the] expert is admissible if it is based on a...