Restitution Claim Sufficiently Itemized; Crawford Claims Rejected Because Statements Were Not “Testimonial”.

Hughes v. Minnesota, Minn.S.Ct., 4/25/12.  Back in 2006, a jury found Mr. Hughes guilty of the first degree premeditated murder of his wife, and the court sentenced him to life without possibility of parole.  The court also ordered him to pay restitution to the Crime Victim’s Reparations Board.  Four years later, Mr. Hughes filed a post conviction petition that challenged a lot of things, but only two of which did the supreme court actually discuss.

One was the matter of restitution, which may not have actually been one of the better issues that Mr. Hughes raised.  One wonders what Mr. Hughes had in mind when he said that the jury’s passions were “inflamed” when shown a demonstration using a shotgun.  Anyway, the trial court had awarded restitution to cover his wife’s funeral expenses.  Mr. Hughes complained, apparently for the second time, that this request had not been sufficiently itemized to satisfy the statute’s requirement that a claim for money include both an itemization and description of the loss.  The appellate court rejects this claim, arguing backwards that since the trial court had thrown out a couple of items – something about transportation expenses and a charitable donation – there must have been a pretty specific itemization supporting the claim.

The other claim that the appellate court took up was a confrontation claim.  Mr. Hughes complained that the trial court had improperly admitted statements that his wife made before her death both to the police and to her divorce attorney.  The mistake was, Mr. Hughes said,  was that the state had not proved that in procuring his wife’s absence from trial his purpose had been to prevent her from testifying.  Giles v. California, 554 U.S. 353 (2008).   The state pointed out that it was Mr. Hughes who had procured his wife’s absence from his trial and so had forfeited his confrontation rights.

The post conviction court thought that this confrontation claim was procedurally barred because Mr. Hughes had not raised it in his petition for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Minnesota supreme court assumes without deciding that the claim was not procedurally barred because the Giles opinion had not been available in the prison law library until after the deadline for filing in the U.S. Supreme Court.  On the merits of the claim, however, Mr. Hughes does not fare well.  As to the statements to the divorce attorney, which included derogatory descriptions of Mr. Hughes’s control problem and more, the appellate court concludes that these were not “testimonial” and thus not excluded under Crawford.   His wife’s divorce lawyer was not a government agent and she had not made the statements an eye toward a criminal prosecution for her death.

As to the statements to the police, these occurred during a “welfare check” some days before her death, during which Hughes’s wife told the officer that everything was fine, that Hughes was not at home, and that they were “trying to work things out.”  The officers neither asked questions, nor did the wife make any statements with the purpose of “establishing or proving past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution.”  Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813 (2006)