State v. Walker
| Decision Date | 01 September 1996 |
| Docket Number | No. 23,23 |
| Citation | 691 A.2d 1341,345 Md. 293 |
| Parties | STATE of Maryland v. Lawrence Joseph WALKER , |
| Court | Maryland Court of Appeals |
Mark Colvin, Assistant Public Defender (Stephen E. Harris, Public Defender, on brief), Baltimore, for Respondent.
Argued Before BELL, C.J., and ELDRIDGE, RODOWSKY, CHASANOW, KARWACKI, RAKER, and WILNER, JJ.
Respondent, Larry Walker, was convicted in the Circuit Court for Montgomery County of robbery with a deadly weapon, for which he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The Court of Special Appeals reversed that judgment on the ground that certain out-of-court statements made by respondent's wife, Robin Walker, and testimony by two detectives regarding those statements should not have been admitted into evidence.
The statements at issue were concededly hearsay and were not admissible under any of the categorical exceptions to the hearsay rule set forth in Maryland Rules 5-803 or 5-804. When Ms. Walker, summoned as a State's witness, exercised her privilege under Maryland Code, § 9-106 of the Courts and Judicial Proceedings article, not to testify against her husband, the court found her to be "unavailable" and admitted her extra-judicial statements and the detectives' testimony regarding them under the residual exception set forth in Rule 5-804(b)(5). We granted certiorari to consider whether the
statements were wrongfully admitted. We hold that they were and therefore affirm the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals.
The incident giving rise to the charges against respondent occurred around 4:00 a.m. on June 10, 1994. The victim, Jose Iraheta, was riding his bicycle to work when a man accosted him, threw him off his bike, stuck a knife to his stomach, and demanded money. Iraheta gave his wallet to the robber, who took $60 and fled. Iraheta provided the police with a description of the robber, noting that he was a black male and was wearing a green hooded "sweater." Mr. Iraheta later identified respondent in court as the man who robbed him.
A few days after the robbery, Ms. Walker contacted county police officer Ivan Langford with some information about the robbery. Ms. Walker was not then married to respondent but was his girlfriend and the mother of his children. After speaking with her at a shelter where she was staying, Langford consulted with Detective Klarko who, along with Detective Bauers, interviewed Ms. Walker at her father's home on June 15, 1994.
Ms. Walker told the detectives that on June 11--the day after the robbery--she and respondent were walking along Twinbrook Parkway; as a police car passed by, respondent attempted to hide his face. When she questioned him about that, he admitted to her that he had committed a robbery the previous day. Specifically, he said that he had robbed an Hispanic man of $60, that he was wearing a hooded green sweatshirt at the time with the hood pulled over his face, and that he had thrown the sweatshirt away. The next day--June 12--they were together again in front of the Halpine View apartment complex. Respondent said that he needed to retrieve the sweatshirt he was wearing during the robbery. He went behind the complex, returned with a green sweatshirt, and threw it into a dumpster on Twinbrook Parkway.
The detectives, separately, made notes of Ms. Walker's statement, and she later signed both versions. According to Detective Klarko, Ms. Walker said that she had lived with respondent for a while but "couldn't handle it so she moved out." As recorded in his notes, she said that she had known respondent since 1989, that they had lived together intermittently since then, that in the past month he had been "doing more crack cocaine than usual," and that in March she moved from the apartment they had been sharing because she could no longer handle his drug use--it "was a bad influence on the kids." 1
On September 1, 1994, Ms. Walker and respondent were married. Before trial commenced on January 12, 1995, Ms. Walker informed the State, which had summoned her as a witness, that she intended to invoke her privilege under Cts. & Jud. Proc. article, § 9-106 and refuse to testify against her husband. The State then moved, in limine, to have her signed statements to Detectives Klarko and Bauers admitted. At the in limine hearing, defense counsel noted his understanding that Ms. Walker made her statement to the police "because she wanted [respondent] to get some help for his drug problem," to which the prosecutor replied, "I believe that is accurate." 2
Respondent objected to the statements on the ground that they were hearsay, that they did not fall within any of the The court concluded that the statements were admissible under the holding of the Court of Special Appeals in Metz v. State, 9 Md.App. 15, 262 A.2d 331 (1970), and under Rule 5-804(b)(5). With respect to the rule, the court first found that, by exercising her privilege not to testify against her husband, Ms. Walker was unavailable to the State as a witness and that the situation was "unique." It held that the statements were being offered as evidence of a material fact and that they were more probative of that fact than any other evidence that the State was able to procure through reasonable efforts. Based on a proffer from the State, which is not in the record and which, in any event, turned out to be inaccurate, the court assumed that the victim would be unable to identify the assailant. 3 It further found that the general purpose of the rules and the interest of justice would best be served by admission of the statements and that the statements appeared to be reliable. That last finding was premised on the assumption Mr. Iraheta was the first witness. As noted, he identified respondent as the robber. When Officer Langford and Detectives Klarko and Bauers were then called and began to testify about Ms. Walker's statements, respondent objected and received a continuing objection to that line of inquiry. The testimony was allowed, and redacted versions of the two statements written by the detectives and signed by Ms. Walker were admitted into evidence.
exceptions to the hearsay rule set forth in Md. Rules 5-803, 5-804, or 5-805, and that general reliability was not an adequate basis upon which to justify their admission. He pointed out that the statements were actually written by the detectives and did not purport to be a verbatim repetition of what Ms. Walker may have said and that, if, indeed, they were given in desperation in order to get him help, they were not necessarily reliable that Ms. Walker implicated appellant in order to get him help for his drug problem.
The Court of Special Appeals concluded, in the first instance, that, because the trial commenced after July 1, 1994, Rule 5-804(b)(5) was applicable. It determined that, as a result, the initial inquiry was whether the evidence was admissible under that rule. If the evidence was admissible under the rule, a second inquiry was necessitated by the conditional language in our order, namely, whether the evidence also With that framework, the appellate court held that the trial court erred in admitting the evidence under Rule 5-804(b)(5) because it failed (1) to make a clear finding that an exceptional circumstance existed and (2) to consider all of the factors bearing on whether the statements possessed circumstantial guarantees of trustworthiness, both of which, it held, were required by the rule. Id. at 526, 668 A.2d 990. In the first regard, the Court noted that, unlike its Federal counterpart, Md. Rule 5-804(b)(5) allows admission only under "exceptional circumstances," and it held that, upon finding such circumstances, the trial court is bound to "state on the record the factual findings supporting his [or her] conclusion." Id. at 527, 668 A.2d 990. No such explicit findings were made in this case.
would have been admissible under preexisting common law. Walker v. State, 107 Md.App. 502, 522-23, 668 A.2d 990, 999-1000 (1995).
With respect to the circumstantial guarantees of trustworthiness, the Court looked to the factors enunciated in Simmons v. State, 333 Md. 547, 636 A.2d 463, recons. denied (Mar. 4, 1994), cert. denied, Maryland v. Simmons, 513 U.S. 815, 115 S.Ct. 70, 130 L.Ed.2d 26 (1994), and Dallas County v. Commercial Union Assurance Co., 286 F.2d 388 (5th Cir.1961) as those necessary to consider. From Simmons, the Court extracted three factors--(1) the age, education, experience, and condition of the declarant, (2) the spontaneity of the statement, and (3) the motive of the declarant. From Dallas County, the Court drew another three factors--whether (1) the circumstances are such that a sincere and accurate statement would...
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