Medical Examiner’s Testimony About an Element of the Offense Is Assumed to be Error but Harmless.

State v. Sontoya, Minn.S.Ct., 9/16/2010.  A jury convicted Mr. Sontoya of first degree murder while committing first degree criminal sexual conduct.  Injuries to the victim were pervasive and included a fourteen inch laceration through the vaginal wall into the pelvic area and the abdominal cavity.  Mr. Sontoya’s defense was that the sex was consensual and the victim’s injuries and death were accidental.

The Ramsey County Medical Examiner testified that the manner of death was “Exsanguination due to multiple traumatic injuries due to a sexual assault.”  [Emphasis added.]  The state followed up this pronouncement by asking if the ME was saying that the victim bled to death from the sexual assault; the doc said, yes.  In closing argument, the state thrice repeated the ME’s assertion about the sexual assault.

Defense counsel didn’t object to the ME’s testimony about an element of the offense, sexual assault, so on appeal, this testimony gets reviewed under plain error.  The appellate court punts the question whether admitting this assertion was error, plain or otherwise, and assumes that it was.  This allowed the appellate court to move right into a lurid elucidation of the injuries to the victim from which it could conclude that any error had no significant effect on the jury’s verdict.

Justices Paul H. Anderson and Page concurred in the result but took the majority to task for ducking the error question, the admission of the ME’s testimony about an element of the offense.  It’s worth quoting at some length from Justice Anderson’s concurrence:

At Sontoya’s trial, the last witness called by the State was the Ramsey County Medical Examiner who examined G.R.’s body at the crime scene and conducted the autopsy. During direct examination, the medical examiner testified that the cause of G.R.’s death was “exsanguinations due to multiple traumatic injuries due to a sexual assault.” The State followed this answer with a question about whether G.R. “bled to death from the sexual assault” and, in his answer, the medical examiner confirmed that she had. The medical examiner then testified that the manner of death was “homicide.” The State continued to question the medical examiner as to whether he could determine G.R.’s time of death due to the “sexual assault.” During this questioning, the medical examiner testified that the contusions on G.R.’s arms were “fingerprint injuries” which occur when someone is grabbed “during the course of an assault.” Finally, the State used the medical examiner’s expert testimony in its closing argument when it made the following assertions:

As I said, we know that G.R. died a horrific death. She bled to death from a sexual assault, as the medical examiner has testified.

The medical examiner testified that G.R. died as a result of bleeding to death from a sexual assault. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is Murder in the First Degree.

The medical examiner told you that she died from a sexual assault that caused her to bleed to death.

(Emphasis added.)

Justice Anderson reminds the majority that way back in 1982 the court  had said that admission of a physician’s opinion that a rape or a sexual assault had occurred constituted error.  State v. Saldana, 324 N.W.2d 227 (Minn. 1982).  So, deciding the error question wasn’t really all that hard to do.  If they needed a reminder, just five years ago, the court had said that admission of the testimony from a treating physician that a victim’s injuries met the definition of “great bodily harm,” an element of the offense, was improper and inadmissible.  Finally, Justice Anderson summarized the proper scope of a ME’s testimony in a murder case:

A pathologist may appropriately testify to things such as the number and extent of the wounds, the amount of bleeding, whether the wounds were caused by a knife or a blunt instrument, whether a gunshot wound is a contact wound, whether the wounds could or could not have been the result of accident, the cause of death, and so forth, but the pathologist should not be allowed to make an “expert inference” of intent to kill from these matters. That is for the jury to do.

State v. Chambers, 507 N.W.2d 237, 238 (Minn. 1993).  Justices Anderson and Page conclude by saying that this is one of those outlier cases where the error did, indeed, fail to affect Mr. Sontoya’s substantial rights.