U.S. v. Hall

• Decision Date: 28 October 1996
• Docket Number: No. 95-2994,95-2994
• Citation: 93 F.3d 1337
• Parties: , 45 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 1 UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Larry D. HALL, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 1337

93 F.3d 1337

65 USLW 2192, 45 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 1

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Larry D. HALL, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 95-2994.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued Feb. 22, 1996.

Decided Aug. 27, 1996.

Rehearing Denied Oct. 28, 1996.

Lawrence Beaumont (argued), Office of the United States Attorney, Urbana Division, Urbana, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Craig H. DeArmond (argued), Kurth & Dearmond, Danville IL, for Defendant-Appellant.

Before CUMMINGS, EASTERBROOK, and DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judges.

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge.

One of the hallmarks of the American criminal justice system is the importance it attaches to the protection of the rights of criminal defendants. Just because someone is charged as a defendant does not mean that he committed the crime in question; that simple truth lies behind the presumption of innocence and the many procedural rules that combine to assure that due process is observed. In this direct criminal appeal, we confront one of the most disturbing claims that can be brought: Larry Hall asserts that the government got the wrong man when it convicted him for the kidnapping (and murder) of Jessica Roach, which occurred in late September 1993. He tried to show this through the use of certain expert testimony, that would have put before the jury his claim that his "confession" to the crime was actually false. Because we believe that the district court erred in excluding this testimony, we reverse and remand for a new trial.

I

Fifteen-year-old Jessica Roach was last seen in the afternoon of Monday, September 20, 1993, riding her new bicycle near her home in rural Georgetown, Vermilion County, Illinois. About one-half hour later, her sister saw Jessica's bicycle lying in the roadway. Concerned, she returned home, and her father called the police. About six weeks later, on November 8, 1993, Jessica's decomposed body was found across the state line, near Perrysville, Indiana, mutilated by a farmer's combine. Due to the extensive damage caused by both the machine and the passage of time, it was impossible for investigators to be sure of the cause of death. The police were hampered in their efforts to solve the crime because of the total absence of physical evidence either at the scene of her disappearance or where her body was found.

Months later, on October 22, 1994, two girls in Georgetown reported that they had been followed by a man in a van. He asked them questions as he drove by, but he did not attempt to get out of the vehicle. Nevertheless, they found him suspicious, and they retreated to a house where they could call for help. They also obtained his license plate number. The man turned out to be Larry Hall. Following up on the girls' report, Vermilion County Sheriff's Investigator Gary Miller went to Hall's home in Wabash, Indiana, on November 2, 1994, to question him about the incident. Hall confirmed that he had stopped and spoken to the girls, but he denied doing anything more. The police realized that Hall was the man who had also followed two other teenaged girls on May 29, 1994, in Georgetown. Those two were able to elude Hall by riding their bicycles through an alley that was blocked to motor traffic by a truck. It became apparent that Hall had a habit of stalking, or following, teenaged girls. Other incidents (some of which Hall admitted, others of which he contested) occurred on April 6, 1993, in Marion, Indiana; on March 30, 1994, in Gas City, Indiana; on May 29, 1994, in Perrysville, Indiana; and on July 24, 1994, in Logansport, Indiana.

Hall's November 2, 1994, interrogation was not the first time he had encountered the police in conjunction with his stalking activities. Back in March 1994, when he was stopped in Gas City, Indiana, police officers had questioned him and searched his van. They found a number of suspicious objects in it, including a knife, a can of starter fluid, a mask, a bundle of rope, and a flyer about the disappearance of a young woman named Tricia Reitler. This caused them to turn Hall over to Sgt. Bruce Bender of Marion, Indiana, who was responsible for the Reitler case. Reitler had been a student at nearby Indiana Wesleyan University who had vanished from the campus on March 29, 1993. The Reitler case had received extensive publicity in the Marion newspapers. On that occasion, however, the police learned nothing from Hall that led them to believe he was involved in the Reitler disappearance.

Between March 1994, and November 15, 1994, a Detective Phil Amones of the Wabash Police Department had several conversations with Hall. Apparently he realized that Hall had mental health problems, because at his recommendation Hall agreed to see a therapist at the Otis R. Bowen Center, a mental health facility in Wabash. Amones kept in touch with the treating therapist and provided him with information about the accusations concerning Hall's propensity to bother young girls. The therapist, in turn, shared his assessment of Hall's condition with Amones, and Amones kept other local law enforcement agencies informed about Hall's treatment. While it is unclear whether every person involved in the Roach case knew about his counseling at Bowen, many did.

It was Sgt. Amones who asked Hall to come to the Wabash Police Department on November 2, 1994. He told Hall that someone from Illinois wanted to speak with him, and that person turned out to be Officer Miller. Miller began by questioning Hall about the October incident in Georgetown, but he soon turned to the Jessica Roach case. (It is worth noting that Miller had, by this time, taken a statement from another individual who had confessed to abducting Roach and dumping her body in the cornfield. Transcript at 455-56. This fact was not developed at the trial.) Hall initially denied ever seeing Jessica. Some of the evidence indicated that Miller became upset with Hall's responses, moved closer to Hall, and started suggesting the "right" answers as the questioning progressed. The government does not directly dispute this, although it claims that no one physically abused Hall. Hall began crying at some point, and he asked Amones during a break what was expected of him. After two and a half hours or so, the police allowed Hall to leave.

On November 15, the police told Hall that they needed to question him again. This session lasted from around 10:00 a.m. that morning until about 3:20 a.m. the next morning. By now, the FBI was involved in the investigation. Hall refused to take a polygraph test that FBI Agent Randolph was prepared to administer. Randolph interrogated him alone for about two hours. About that time, Hall began to talk about Jessica Roach; another 20 or 30 minutes later, he began making admissions about his involvement in the Roach case. There were no notes, tape recordings, or video recordings of the session. Instead, Randolph wrote out a statement in narrative format and asked Hall to sign it. Miller was present for at least part of this questioning, and continued to talk with Hall for an hour or so after the statement was signed. It is a little difficult to make the hours here add up, but the record shows that Hall was booked into the Grant County Jail at 3:25 a.m. on November 16, 1994.

II

On December 21, 1994, Hall was charged in a one-count indictment with the offense of kidnapping Jessica Roach for purposes of sexual gratification and transporting her from Illinois to Indiana, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1). The district court denied Hall's motion to suppress his confession. After an eight-day trial, the jury convicted him. The court denied his voluminous motion for new trial (alleging 77 errors by the trial court!) and sentenced him to a term of life imprisonment. On appeal, Hall makes three arguments: first, the trial court should have suppressed his confession; second, the court erroneously admitted evidence of other crimes under Rule 404(b) (in particular, the Reitler case); and third, the court erred in refusing to permit Hall's experts to testify about false confessions and his susceptibility to coercion.

At the trial, Hall's entire theory of defense boiled down to a simple proposition: due to a personality disorder that makes him susceptible to suggestion and pathologically eager to please, he "confessed" to a crime that he did not really commit, in order to gain approval from the law enforcement officers who were interrogating him. He was, in the words of the Wabash police, a "wannabe." At the trial, one psychologist (Greg Helgesen) and one psychiatrist (Arthur Traugott) testified about his mental and emotional problems. Social worker Timothy Myers, who had treated Hall at the Bowen Center, testified about the fact of his treatment, but the district court did not permit him to offer expert testimony about Hall's condition. Most importantly, the district court significantly limited the scope of Dr. Traugott's testimony, and it excluded altogether another expert. These two decisions are the focus of Hall's appeal.

Hall tendered Dr. Richard Ofshe as a social psychologist expert in the field of coercive police interrogation techniques and the phenomenon of false or coerced confessions. Ofshe had been on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley since 1962, had a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University, and had published widely. He had also worked extensively both with law enforcement officials and with defense counsel. He indicated that he would have testified about the fact that experts in his field agree that false confessions exist, that individuals can be coerced into giving false confessions, and that certain indicia can be identified to show when they are likely to occur. He described his methodology in general terms, and what factors experts in the field rely upon to distinguish between reliable and unreliable confessions. The district court rejected the proffer of Dr. Ofshe's testimony in...