Baker v. State

Moylan, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. This appeal addresses the intriguing question of what latitude a judge should permit counsel when a witness takes the stand and says, “I don’t remember.” What are the available keys that may unlock the testimonial treasure vaults of the subconscious? What are the brush strokes that may be employed “to retouch the fading daguerreotype of memory?” 1 The subject is that of Present Recollection Revived. 2 The appellant, Teretha McNeil Baker, was convicted by a Baltimore City jury of both murder in the first degree and robbery. Although she raises two appellate contentions, the only one which we find it necessary to consider is her claim that the trial judge erroneously refused her the opportunity to refresh the present recollection of a police witness by showing him a report written by a fellow officer.

The ultimate source of most of the evidence implicating the appellant was the robbery and murder victim himself, Gaither Martin, a now-dead declarant who spoke to the jury through the hearsay conduit of Officer Bolton. 3 When Officer Bolton arrived at the crime scene, the victim told him that he had “picked these three ladies up ... at the New Deal Bar”; that when he took them to their stated destination, a man walked up to the car and pulled him out; ⁵⁹⁵ that “the other three got out and proceeded to kick him and beat him.” It was the assertion made by the victim to the officer that established that his money, wallet and keys had been taken. The critical impasse, for present purposes, occurred when the officer was questioned, on cross-examination, about what happened en route to the hospital. The officer had received a call from Officer Hucke, of the Western District, apparently to the effect that a suspect had been picked up. Before proceeding to the hospital, Officer Bolton took the victim to the place where Officer Hucke was holding the appellant.

The appellant, as part of this cross-examination, sought to elicit from the officer the fact that the crime victim confronted the appellant and stated that the appellant was not one of those persons who had attacked and robbed him. To stimulate the present memory of Officer Bolton, appellant’s counsel attempted to show him the police report relating to that confrontation and prepared by Officer Hucke. The record establishes loudly and clearly that appellant’s counsel sought to use the report primarily to refresh the recollection of Officer Bolton and that he was consistently and effectively thwarted in that attempt: “BY MR. HARLAN: Q. Do you have the report filed by Officer Hucke and Officer Saclolo or Saclolo?

A. Right, I have copies. Q. Okay. MR. DOORY: I would object to that, Your Honor.

THE COURT: I will sustain the objection. This is not his report. BY MR. HARLAN: Q. Can you look at this report and refresh your recollection as to whether or not you ever had the victim in a confrontation with Mrs. Baker?

MR. DOORY: Objection, Your Honor. MR. HARLAN: He can refresh — ⁵⁹⁶ THE COURT: Well, he can refresh his recollection as to his personal knowledge.

That’s all right. A. That is what I am saying, I don’t know who it was that we confronted really. BY MR. HARLAN: Q. All right.

Would you consult your report and maybe it will refresh your recollection. THE COURT: I think the response is he doesn’t ■ know who — MR. HARLAN: He can refresh his recollection if he looks at the report. THE COURT: He can’t refresh his recollection from someone else’s report, Mr. Harlan.

MR. HARLAN: I would object, Your Honor. Absolutely he can. THE COURT: You might object, but — MR.

HARLAN: You are not going to permit the officer to refresh his recollection from the police report? THE COURT: No. It is not his report. MR. HARLAN: Your Honor, I think I am absolutely within my rights to have a police officer read a report which mentions his name in it to see if it refreshes his recollection.

If it doesn’t refresh his recollection, then fine. THE COURT: Well, he did that. MR. HARLAN: You have not afforded him the opportunity to do that yet, Your Honor.

THE COURT: He says he does not know who it was before. So, he can’t refresh his recollection if he does not know simply because someone else put some name in there. MR. HARLAN: He has to read it to see if it refreshes his recollection, Your Honor. ⁵⁹⁷ THE COURT: We are reading from a report made by two other officers which is not the personal knowledge of this officer.

MR. HARLAN: I don’t want him to read from that report. I want him to read it and see if it refreshes his recollection.” On so critical an issue as possible exculpation from the very lips of the crime victim, appellant was entitled to try to refresh the memory of the key police witness. She was erroneously and prejudicially denied that opportunity.

The reason for the error is transparent. Because they both arise from the common seedbed of failed memory and because of their hauntingly parallel verbal rhythms and grammatical structures, there is a beguiling temptation to overanalogize Present Recollection Revived and Past Recollection Recorded. It is a temptation, however, that must be resisted. The trial judge in this case erroneously measured the legitimacy of the effort to revive present recollection against the more rigorous standards for the admissibility of a recordation of past memory.

It is, of course, hornbook law that when a party seeks to introduce a record of past recollection, he must establish 1) that the record was made by or adopted by the witness at a time when the witness did have a recollection of the event and 2) that the witness can presently vouch for the fact that when the record was made or adopted by him, he knew that it was accurate. Hall v. State, 223 Md. 158 , 162 A. 2d 751 ; Edwards and Person v. State, 31 Md. App. 562 , 358 A. 2d 590 ; Ringgold v. State, 34 Md. App. 286 , 367 A. 2d 35 . McCormick, Law of Evidence (1st Ed., 1954), describes the criteria, at 15: “Appropriate safeguarding rules have been developed for this latter kind of memoranda, requiring that they must have been written by the witness or examined and found correct by him, and that they must have been prepared so promptly after the events recorded that these must have been fresh in the mind of the witness when the record ⁵⁹⁸ was made or examined and verified by him. We have treated such memoranda separately, as an exception to the hearsay rule.” Had the appellant herein sought to offer the police report as a record, of past recollection on the part of Officer Bolton, it is elementary that she would have had to show, inter alia, that the report had either been prepared by Officer Bolton himself or had been read by him and that he can now say that at that time he knew it was correct.

Absent such a showing, the trial judge would have been correct in declining to receive it in evidence. When dealing with an instance of Past Recollection Recorded, the reason for the rigorous standards of admissibility is quite clear. Those standards exist to test the competence of the report or document in question. Since the piece of paper itself, in effect, speaks to the jury, the piece of paper must pass muster in terms of its evidentiary competence. 4 Not so with Present Recollection Revived!

By marked contrast to Past Recollection Recorded, no such testimonial competence is demanded of a mere stimulus to present recollection, for the stimulus itself is never evidence. Notwithstanding the surface similarity between the two phenomena, the difference between them could not be more basic. 5 It is the difference between evidence and non- ⁵⁹⁹ evidence. Of such mere stimuli or memory-prods, McCormick says, at 18, “[T]he cardinal rule is that they are not evidence, but only aids in the giving of evidence.” When we are dealing with an instance of Present Recollection Revived, the only source of evidence is the testimony of the witness himself. The stimulus may have jogged the witness’s dormant memory, but the stimulus itself is not received in evidence.

Dean McCormick makes it clear that even when the stimulus is a writing, when the witness “speaks from a memory thus revived, his testimony is what he says, not the writing.” Id., at 15. McCormick describes the psychological phenomenon in the following terms: “It is abundantly clear from every-day observation that the latent memory of an experience may be revived by an image seen, or a statement read or heard. It is a part of the group of phenomena which the classical psychologists have called the law of association. The recall of any part of a past experience tends to bring with it the other parts that were in the same field of awareness, and a new experience tends to stimulate the recall of other like experiences.” Id., at 14.

The psychological community is in full agreement with the legal community in assessing the mental phenomenon. See Cairn, Law and the Social Sciences 200 (1935): “In permitting a witness to refresh his recollection by consulting a memorandum, the courts are in accord with present psychological knowledge. A distinction is drawn, in the analysis of the memory process, between recall, which is the reproduction of what has been learned, and recognition, which is recall with a time-factor added, or an awareness that the recall relates to past experience. It is with recognition that the law is principally concerned in permitting a witness to revive his recollection.

The psychological evidence is clear that in thus allowing to be brought to mind what has been forgotten, the law is following sound psychological procedure.” ⁶⁰⁰ And see Hutchins and Slesinger, Some Observations on the Law of Evidence — Memory, 41 Harv. L. Rev. 860 (1928). The catalytic agent or memory stimulator is put aside, once it has worked its psychological magic, and the witness then testifies on the basis of the now-refreshed memory. The opposing party, of course, has the right to inspect the memory aid, be it a writing or otherwise, and even to show it to the jury.

This examination, however, is not for the purpose of testing the competence of the memory aid (for competence is immaterial where the thing in question is not evidence) but only to test whether the witness’s memory has in truth been refreshed. As McCormick warns, “But the witness must swear that he is genuinely refreshed. . . . And he cannot be allowed to read the writing in the guise of refreshment, as a cloak for getting in evidence an inadmissible document.” 6 One of the most thorough reviews of this aspect of evidence law is found in United States v. Riccardi, 174 F. 2d 883 (3rd Cir., 1949), where the court said at 888: “In the case of present recollection revived, the witness, by hypothesis, relates his present recollection, and under oath and subject to cross-examination asserts that it is true; his capacities for memory and perception may be attacked and tested; his determination to tell the truth investigated and revealed; protestations of lack of memory, which escape criticism and indeed constitute a refuge in the situation of past recollection recorded, merely undermine the probative worth of his testimony .” 7 ⁶⁰¹ In solid accord with both the psychological