Opinion
No. 15–P–1188.
09-02-2016
COMMONWEALTH v. Richard A. ANDERSON.
MEMORANDUM AND ORDER PURSUANT TO RULE 1:28
After a jury-waived trial, the defendant appeals from his convictions in District Court of leaving the scene of a motor vehicle accident after causing personal injury (LSPI), leaving the scene of a motor vehicle accident after causing property damage, and reckless operation of a motor vehicle. We affirm.
Background. A fact finder could have found as follows. Just after 2:00 A.M. on December 25, 2011, officers from various law enforcement agencies and firefighters responded to the scene of a motor vehicle accident on Lyman Street in Brockton. Officers observed that an orange Ford Mustang had crashed into the front of a house that is separated from the roadway by a distance of sixteen to twenty feet, an area that includes a sidewalk and a front yard. The car had gone through one of the house's walls and was partially inside and partially outside the house. At the time of the crash, the house was occupied by a Ms. Fernandez and her boyfriend, Magnuson Martins. Martins was transported to Brockton Hospital for treatment of injuries he sustained when the Mustang came through the wall.
When officers arrived, no one was inside the Mustang, which was locked, and no one approached any of the officers and identified himself or herself as the driver. On inspection of the car, officers found the key in the ignition and the glass and locks intact, suggesting that it had not been broken into. The Mustang was registered to the defendant. Police attempted to contact him but only managed to reach his parents.
At about 9:30 A.M. on December 26, the defendant presented himself at the Brockton police station where he spoke briefly with Officer Brian Kirby, one of the officers who had responded to the Lyman Street accident. The defendant told Kirby that he lost control of the car, hit the house, panicked, and went to a friend's house. No one else ever came forward to identify him-or herself as the driver from that night.
At trial, the Commonwealth introduced evidence from the Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) that the orange Mustang was registered to the defendant as well as Martins's hospital records from after he was transported from the scene. Neither Fernandez nor Martins testified at trial.
Discussion. The defendant contends that all of his convictions must be reversed where, notwithstanding his admission to having lost control of his car and driven into a house, the evidence of his operation of an automobile was insufficient. He also argues that his LSPI conviction must be reversed where medical records evidencing Martins's injuries were improperly admitted.
1. Sufficiency of the evidence of operation. The defendant moved for required findings of not guilty both at the close of the Commonwealth's case and at the close of all evidence. He contends that those motions were erroneously denied because operation of a motor vehicle is a required element of every offense of which he was convicted and the evidence of his operation was insufficient.
Under the familiar standard, “[w]hen reviewing the denial of a motion for a required finding of not guilty, we consider whether, after viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.” Commonwealth v. Cole, 473 Mass. 317, 334 (2015) (quotation omitted).
The defendant relies on Commonwealth v. Leonard, 401 Mass. 470 (1988), contending that his statements to Kirby were insufficient to establish his operation in the absence of corroboration. Leonard was an operating under the influence (OUI) case in which “[t]he only evidence on the contested issue of operation” was the defendant's extrajudicial admission that he was driving. Id. at 472. The court reversed the OUI conviction based on “the majority rule of this nation that an uncorroborated confession is ‘insufficient to prove guilt.’ “ Ibid., quoting from Commonwealth v. Forde, 392 Mass. 453, 457 (1984). In so doing, the court found that evidence that the defendant demanded that his wife “give ... back” the keys to the car and that her cigarettes were found on the passenger side of the car's front compartment were insufficient corroboration. The defendant contends that the evidence here was likewise insufficient to corroborate his self-identification as the operator of the orange Mustang that crashed through the Lyman Street house.
As the Commonwealth points out, however, the identity of the operator in Leonard was dispositive of the question whether there had been a crime at all, which is the motivating concern in both Forde and Leonard. See Leonard, 401 Mass. at 472–473, quoting from Forde, 392 Mass. at 457–458 (requiring corroboration “precludes the possibility of conviction of crime based solely on statements made by a person suffering a mental or emotional disturbance or some other aberration”; thus “the corroborative evidence we would require is ‘some evidence, besides the confession, that the criminal act was committed by someone, that is, that the crime was real and not imaginary’ ”). Forde provides a very specific example of the kind of corroboration of “the fact of the loss or injury sustained” that is required: “in a homicide case, the corroborating evidence need only tend to show that the alleged victim is dead.” Forde, 392 Mass. at 458. Based on the offenses at issue here, the existence vel non of a crime is not dependent on the defendant's identity as the operator, a factor distinguishing many OUI cases that address the sufficiency of evidence corroborating an admission of operation.
See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Adams, 421 Mass. 289, 291 (1995) ; Commonwealth v. Boothby, 64 Mass.App.Ct. 582, 583 (2005).
The evidence before the judge here, viewed in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, was more than sufficient to corroborate that a criminal act was committed by someone. Police officers testified to their arrival at an accident scene where a car was half inside and half outside of a home. The judge also had photographs of the scene depicting the accident. The driver of the Mustang, who it can be inferred had operated recklessly in order to land his or her automobile halfway through the wall of a home that sat a good distance from the roadway, was nowhere to be found, having left the scene of both property damage and personal injury without stopping and making his or her identity known. See G.L. c. 90, §§ 24(2)(a) & (a1/2 )(1). See also Commonwealth v. Manning, 41 Mass.App.Ct. 18, 21 (1996) (“The position of the Pontiac, on an island in the middle of the intersection and resting on top of a toppled traffic control signal, alone was sufficient to raise an inference of operating under the influence”). The officers' observations were therefore consistent with, and corroborative of, the defendant's admission. See Commonwealth v. Hubbard, 69 Mass.App.Ct. 232, 236 (2007).
In addition, although “[t]he corroborating evidence need not point to the accused's identity as the doer of the crime,” Forde, 392 Mass. at 458, the RMV records introduced by the Commonwealth showing that the car protruding from the wall of the house was registered to the defendant provided at least some additional corroboration of the defendant's admission as they support an inference that he was the driver. Cf. Commonwealth v. Deramo, 436 Mass. 40, 43 (2002) (agreeing, in analysis of reasonable suspicion standard for an investigative stop, with the “courts [that] have held that the police may, in the absence of any contrary evidence, reasonably conclude that a vehicle is likely being driven by its registered owner”) (collecting cases). But see Commonwealth v. Boothby, 64 Mass.App.Ct. 582, 584 n. 2 (2005) (where defendant and another suspect both admitted on scene in OUI case to being the driver and latter said he wanted “to take the rap,” defendant's registered ownership of car “did not independently corroborate the defendant's confession”). In this regard, and for what it is worth, we note that the evidence before the judge indicated that no one other than the defendant claimed to have been the driver. Contrast Leonard, 401 Mass. at 471–472 (husband and wife both found in vehicle, husband admitted to being driver, wife later testified that she was driver). The fact that authorities were unable to reach the defendant on the night of the accident provides further corroboration of his claim that he left the scene to go to a friend's house.
2. Admission of medical records. The defendant next contends that admission of Martins's medical records was error. The defendant's various arguments on this issue, which we address in turn, are all unavailing.
a. Hearsay. The defendant contends that the statements attributed to Martins in the medical records describing how the accident occurred are hearsay and should have been redacted. We disagree. The medical records were admitted pursuant to G.L. c. 233, § 79. “General Laws c. 233, § 79, excepts certain hospital records from the common-law rule against hearsay evidence.” Cole, 473 Mass. at 321. Statements made for the purposes of medical diagnosis or treatment within those records are not subject to exclusion as hearsay and can include descriptions of pain, symptoms, and cause so long as they do not address the identity of the person responsible or the legal significance of the symptoms or injury. See Mass. G. Evid. § 803(4) (2016); Commonwealth v. DeOliveira, 447 Mass. 56, 62 (2006) ; Commonwealth v. Arana, 453 Mass. 214, 231 (2009). See Cole, 473 Mass. at 324 (factors such as “circumstances of [an injury's] occurrence ... would have a direct bearing on ... treatment at the hospital”).
b. Proof of injury. The defendant also seems to suggest that, as the sole evidence on the element of injury, the medical records were inadequate to the task of proving that element of LSPI. We need not wade into this thicket. The defendant misapprehends the nature of the requisite proof. Specifically, it matters not whether the victim was actually “injured” in any medically significant way. Under the LSPI statute, the Commonwealth must prove that the defendant went “away after knowingly colliding with or otherwise causing injury to any person.” G.L. c. 90, § 24(2) (a1/2 )(1), inserted by St.1991, c. 460. Proof of the existence or extent of any injury is not a required element of the offense as even a collision not resulting in injury is sufficient to establish criminal liability.
c. Reference to liability. The defendant also contends that the medical records were improperly used to establish his liability. Even if the medical records had some tendency to establish the defendant's criminal culpability by establishing that a collision in fact occurred, they were not for that reason brought beyond the scope of G.L. c. 233, § 79.
It is true that “[t]he admissibility of medical records relating to ‘treatment and medical history’ is limited by the proviso that ‘nothing therein contained shall be admissible as evidence which has reference to the question of liability.’ G.L. c. 233, § 79,” and that “[w]e have treated this proviso's reference to ‘liability’ as encompassing criminal culpability.” Cole, 473 Mass. at 323. However, as the Supreme Judicial Court explained again in Cole, “a record which relates directly and mainly to the treatment and medical history of the patient, should be admitted, even though incidentally the facts recorded may have some bearing on the question of liability.” Id. at 324, quoting from Commonwealth v. DiMonte, 427 Mass. 233, 242 (1998).
d. Confrontation. The defendant concedes that “the present case does not involve a strict application of the Confrontation Clause [of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution], since the Supreme Court limited defendants' confrontation rights to testimonial statements that a declarant would reasonably expect to be used prosecutorially.” See Commonwealth v. Irene, 462 Mass. 600, 618 (2012). He nevertheless maintains that his inability to cross-examine someone with personal knowledge of the information contained in the medical records deprived him of a fair trial. The defendant, however, directs us to no authority for this proposition separate from the medical records statute itself (G.L. c. 233, § 79 ), which, it must be noted, does not aid his case.
In closing our discussion of the defendant's evidentiary objections, we note that the defendant was tried in a jury-waived proceeding. To the extent there was any material in the records that should have been redacted, we can presume that the judge properly instructed himself not to consider it. Commonwealth v. Saulnier, 84 Mass.App.Ct. 603, 607 (2013).
Judgments affirmed.