Jarrell v. State

852 N.E.2d 1022, 2006 Ind. App. LEXIS 1680, 2006 WL 2435553
CourtIndiana Court of Appeals
DecidedAugust 24, 2006
Docket06A05-0506-CR-356
StatusPublished
Cited by31 cases

This text of 852 N.E.2d 1022 (Jarrell v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Indiana Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Jarrell v. State, 852 N.E.2d 1022, 2006 Ind. App. LEXIS 1680, 2006 WL 2435553 (Ind. Ct. App. 2006).

Opinion

OPINION

BARNES, Judge.

Case Summary

James Jarrell appeals his conviction for operating a motor vehicle with a breath alcohol concentration of at least .15 gram per 210 liters of breath (operating with .15 BAC), a Class A misdemeanor. We affirm.

Issues

The issues before us are:

I. whether Jarrell's rights under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution were violated by introduction into evidence of the certificate attesting that the machine used to test his breath for aleohol had been inspected and was

II. whether there is sufficient evidence to support his conviction.

Facts

The underlying facts here are largely undisputed. On July 13, 2004, at 9:15 pm., Deputy Randy Wise of the Boone County Sheriff's Department pulled over Jarrell's vehicle for speeding. Deputy *1024 Wise noted that Jarrell was exhibiting signs of intoxication, and he read Jarrell the implied consent law and Jarrell agreed to submit to a breath test. Because Deputy Wise is not a certified breath test operator, he transported Jarrell to the Boone County Jail. There, at 10:00 p.m., Officer William Seott of the Lebanon Police Department, a certified breath test operator, tested Jarrell's breath using a BAC Data-Master machine. The machine reported a BAC of .16.

The State charged Jarrell with Class A misdemeanor operating while intoxicated, Class A misdemeanor operating with .15 BAC, and speeding. Jarrell stipulated to the speeding allegation, and the State dismissed the operating while intoxicated charge. On May 5, 2005, a bench trial was conducted on the remaining operating with 15 BAC charge. Over Jarrell's Sixth Amendment objections, the trial court allowed into evidence a certificate from the State Department of Toxicology stating that the DataMaster machine used by Officer Seott had been inspected and certified as being in good operating condition on June 22, 2004. Officer Scott testified at trial but lacked knowledge regarding the inspection of the DataMaster; the person who tested the machine and prepared the certificate did not appear at trial. The trial court found Jarrell guilty of Class A misdemeanor operating with .15 BAC. He now appeals.

Analysis

I. Sixth Amendment

Jarrell's Sixth Amendment argument is two-fold, in that he challenges denial of his right to confrontation under Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 124 S.Ct. 1354, 158 L.Ed.2d 177 (2004), as well as his general right to cross-examine adverse witnesses under different precedent. We first address Crawford. Under the rule announced in that case, the Sixth Amendment does not permit the admission of testimonial statements of a witness who does not appear at trial unless he or she is unavailable to testify and the defendant had a prior opportunity for cross-examination of the witness. Id. at 53-54, 124 S.Ct. at 1365. Here, the preparer of the certificate assuring that the DataMaster used on Jarrell was tested and accurate did not appear at trial, and the State does not contest that the preparer was unavailable to testify or that Jarrell had a prior opportunity to cross-examine him or her. Thus, as with many post-Crawford cases, the dis-positive issue here is whether the statements in the certificate were "testimonial" and its introduction was barred by the Sixth Amendment.

Crawford did not offer a comprehensive definition of "testimonial." Id. at 68, 124 S.Ct. at 1374. The Court did state, "Whatever else the term covers, it applies at a minimum to prior testimony at a preliminary hearing, before a grand jury, or at a former trial; and to police interrogations. These are the modern practices with closest kinship to the abuses at which the Confrontation Clause was directed." Id. Elsewhere, the Court described "testimonial" statements as:

ex parte in-court testimony or its fune-tional equivalent-that is, material such as affidavits, custodial examinations, pri- or testimony that the defendant was unable to cross-examine, or similar pretrial statements that declarants would reasonably expect to be used prosecuto-rially; extrajudicial statements ... contained in formalized testimonial materials, such as affidavits, depositions, prior testimony, or confessions; statements that were made under circumstances which would lead an objective witness reasonably to believe that the statement would be available for use at a later trial....

Id. at 51-52, 124 S.Ct. at 1364 (quotations and citations omitted).

*1025 Recently, the Supreme Court revisited the question of what constitutes "testimonial" statements under Crawford in Davis v. Washington, - U.S. -, 126 S.Ct. 2266, 165 L.Ed.2d 224 (2006). That opinion, combined with Hammon v. Indiana, addressed two domestic violence cases in which out-of-court statements of the alleged victims were introduced at trial. In Davis, the statements were made to a 911 operator, while in Hammon they were made to a police officer who had arrived at the scene and was asking questions of the alleged victim. The Court offered the following clarification of what is "testimonial" in addressing the cases before it:

Statements are nontestimonial when made in the course of police interrogation under circumstances objectively indicating that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency. They are testimonial when the cireum-stances objectively indicate that there is no such ongoing emergency, and that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prose-ecution.

Id. at --, 126 S.Ct. at 2273-74. Applying this rule to the cases at hand, the Court held that the 911 statements in Davis were not "testimonial," while the on-the-scene statements in Hammon were. Id. at --, 126 S.Ct. at 2277, 2279.

It appears to us that Davis/Hammon is of little or no assistance in deciding the case before us. Those cases were highly fact-specific and generated a rule related to a precise, but frequently recurring, see-nario: that of 911 calls or statements made by alleged victims to police who are "first arrivers" in response to a 911 call. The DataMaster certificate in this case was not generated within the context of an ongoing emergency or recently ended emergency and it was not generated in response to "police interrogation." That is not to say the certificate could not possibly be "testimonial," but we must look at Crawford and other cases, not Davis/Hammon, for the answer.

Different panels of this court have addressed the argument Jarrell makes regarding whether breath test machine certifications are "testimonial" in two cases: Napier v. State, 820 N.E.2d 144 (Ind.Ct.App.2005), modified in part on rehearing, 827 N.E.2d 565 (Ind.Ct.App.2005), trans. denied, cert. denied; and Rembusch v. State, 836 N.E.2d 979 (Ind.Ct.App.2005), trans. denied.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
852 N.E.2d 1022, 2006 Ind. App. LEXIS 1680, 2006 WL 2435553, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/jarrell-v-state-indctapp-2006.