State v. Benson ( 2017 )

IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF DELAWARE
STATE OF DELAWARE, )
)
v. ) I.D. No. 1604008779
)
KARL BENSON, )
)
Defendant. )
MEMORANDUM OPINION
Presently before the court are two motions: (1) a motion to exclude an
utterance made by witness Dominique Roberson to the police; and (2) a motion
under Deberry v. State to exclude evidence relating to phone texts or,
alternatively, a motion for an adverse presumption instruction relating to those
texts. The court has conducted two evidentiary hearings relating to these
motions. The following summarizes the court’s rulings and the reasons for
them.
Background
Defendant is charged with Drug Dealing, Conspiracy and Possession of a
Controlled Substance. According to the State, in April 2016 the police received
a tip that Defendant was selling heroin and that he used a phone with the
number 302-401-3806. The county police made contact with Defendant
through that telephone number via text messages. The police then contacted
that phone number using text messaging and arranged to purchase five
bundles of heroin for two hundred dollars on April 13 at an All Stop parking lot
outside of Newark. At 2256 hours that night, an undercover police officer
texted Defendant he was in the parking lot in a Chevrolet Impala, and
Defendant responded he was walking toward the Impala. Shortly thereafter the
police observed Defendant and a female, later identified as Dominique
Roberson, approach the All Stop and pause at the front door. The female then
walked over to the Impala, at which time an officer sitting in the Impala asked
her “you good?” She responded “I’m good.” The police testified at the first
evidentiary hearing that this verbal exchange is code for ascertaining if the
drug purchase is going forward. At roughly the same time as the female
approached the Impala one of the police officers received a text from Defendant
“I’m here.” Both the female and Defendant were promptly arrested. A search
of the female revealed five bundles of heroin and a white Samsung Galaxy cell
phone; a search of Defendant revealed a black Samsung Galaxy phone with a
cracked screen.
Analysis
The court will first consider the objections to Roberson’s question to the
police about the amount of the narcotics. It will then consider the Deberry
challenges relating to the lost phone texts.
1. The Roberson Question to the Police
While being transported to the station after her arrest Ms. Roberson
asked the officers “Do you know how much dope it was?” Defendant seeks to
exclude this statement because (1) it is hearsay and (2) admission of the
statement deprives him of his right to confront the witnesses against him.
2
Ms. Roberson’s question to the officers is not hearsay because it was not
an “assertion.” The term “hearsay” is defined by the Rules of Evidence as “a
statement, other than one made by the declarant while testifying at the trial or
hearing, offered in evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted.”1 A key
element of this definition is that the utterance2 must be a “statement.” The
rules, in turn, define “statement” as “an oral or written assertion.”3 Ms.
Roberson’s question “do you know how much dope it was?” is not an assertion.
“A question, by its very definition, is not an assertion.”4 Thus, according to the
Third Circuit Court of Appeals, “[c]ourts have held that questions and inquiries
are generally not hearsay.”5 The court therefore DENIES Defendant’s motion to
exclude that question on the basis of hearsay.
Defendant’s second ground for the exclusion of Ms. Roberson’s statement
is based on the Confrontation Clause of the federal Constitution. That clause,
however, is not implicated here because Ms. Roberson is available to testify at
trial and is subject to cross-examination. Her availability is enough to satisfy
the Confrontation Clause: “The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment
gives the accused the right ‘to be confronted with the witnesses against him.’
1 D.R.E. 801(c).
2 In certain instances non-verbal conduct can also amount to a statement subject to the
hearsay rule. That circumstance is not present here.
3 D.R.E. 801(a).
4 State v. Russo, 700 A.2d 161(Del. Super. 1996), aff’d mem., 694 A.2d 48 (Del. 1997); see
also Lexington Ins. Co. v. W. Pa. Hosp., 423 F.3d 318, 330 (3d Cir. 2005) ("Courts have held
that questions and inquiries are generally not hearsay because the declarant does not have the
requisite assertive intent, even if the question 'convey[s] an implicit message' or provides
information about the declarant's assumptions or beliefs.").
5 423 F.3d at 330.
3
This has long been read as securing an adequate opportunity to cross-examine
adverse witnesses.”6 As one federal appeals court similarly put it:
The Confrontation Clause is satisfied when the
hearsay evidence falls within a firmly rooted exception
to the hearsay rule or is supported by facts that
otherwise demonstrate the statement's reliability; the
Confrontation Clause is alternatively satisfied when
the hearsay declarant testifies at trial and is available
for cross-examination.7
Defendant’s motion to exclude Ms. Roberson’s statement on the basis of the
Confrontation Clause is therefore DENIED.
2. The Deberry Challenge to the Text Messages
The text messages exchanged between the police and the Defendant have
been lost, and Defendant has moved to exclude evidence of them.
Alternatively, he asks that the jury be instructed that it should presume the
text messages were exculpatory. In this regard the court has made factual
findings based upon the evidence adduced at the two evidentiary hearings:
 As commonly done, the police used a pre-paid cell phone when
they texted the Defendant. They do this so that their cell phone
numbers change frequently and therefore do not become familiar
to drug dealers.
 The County police borrowed a pre-paid cell phone from a State
police officer to use in this investigation. After the transaction was
completed and Defendant was arrested, the County police returned
the pre-paid phone to the State police officer who had lent it to
6 United States v. Owens, 484 U.S. 554, 557 (1988).
7 Bear Stops v. U.S., 339 F.3d 777, 781 (8th Cir. 2003).
4
them. At some unknown time thereafter the pre-paid phone was
lost or discarded.
 The police seized two cell phones at the time of the arrest; one
belonged to Ms. Roberson and the other belonged to Defendant.
The screen of Defendant’s phone contained the message “Na im
waitn here” and indicates it was sent at 11:20 p.m. from the
borrowed pre-paid cell phone the county police were using.
 The police obtained a warrant to search Defendant’s cell phone.
When they attempted to search the contents of the phone’s
memory they were able to recover the phone’s sim card, but they
found that access to the phone’s memory was blocked and
required a password to open it.
 The forensic unit of the County Police unsuccessfully tried several
non-destructive methods to obtain access to the phone’s memory.
After exhausting all reasonable methods the police opted to use a
technique known as a “chip-off.” This method entails heating the
cell phone so that the memory chip can be physically extracted.
Once the memory chip is extracted it is connected to a device
which attempts to read the data on the chip. The chip-off destroys
the phone, and once this method is used there is no further
recourse for obtaining the data in it.
 According to the forensic detective who tried to obtain the data
from the phone and who performed the chip-off, the chip-off
5
technique has been successful approximately 85 percent of the
times the county police have used it. No data has been recovered
in the remaining 15 percent and, because of the destructive nature
of the test, that data has likely been lost forever.
 The chip-off attempt was made on May 4, 2016—roughly three
weeks after Defendant had been arrested. At no time did the police
seek to obtain the pass code from Defendant or his attorney, and
neither Defendant nor his attorney was notified in advance by the
police that they intended to perform a destructive test. (It is
unclear from the record whether Defendant was represented at
that time. The earliest indication that Mr. Benson was represented
is a May 13 letter from a prosecutor to Defendant’s former counsel
accompanying the State’s discovery response.)
 With commendable candor the police admitted at the second
evidentiary hearing that there were no exigent circumstances
requiring an immediate chip-off attempt.
A. The Deberry Request
Evidence sometime gets lost. When this happens the due process clause
of the Delaware constitution provides protection for criminal Defendants who
are harmed when the State loses evidence. The seminal case in this regard is
the Delaware Supreme Court’s decision in Deberry v. State.8 The Defendant has
shown that the Defendant’s cell phone is Deberry material. The decision as to
8 457 A.2d 744 (Del. 1983).
6
what consequences, if any, should flow from the destruction of his telephone
must await the evidence at trial and is therefore RESERVED until further order
of the court.
In the seminal Delaware Supreme Court case Deberry v. State, the
Defendant was convicted of rape and associated crimes. According to the
evidence, the victim was cut on her hand during the assault and bled
profusely, so much so that it was reasonable to expect that her blood would
have been found on her assailant’s clothing. The police collected the clothing
Deberry wore the night of the rape, but sometime before trial that clothing was
lost. Deberry, who denied any role in the assault, argued that the loss of his
clothing deprived him of any chance of showing it did not have the victim’s
blood on it. The Supreme Court characterized the issue as “what should be
done when the State takes possession of exculpatory (or potentially
exculpatory) evidence and then loses or destroys it before or in response to the
Defendant's discovery request.”9 The Deberry court posited a two step analysis
to be applied when there is a claim of lost evidence. In the first step, the court
considers:
1) would the requested material, if extant in the
possession of the State at the time of the defense
request, have been subject to disclosure under
Criminal Rule 16 or Brady?
2) if so, did the government have a duty to preserve
the material?
9 Id. at 749.
7
3) if there was a duty to preserve, was the duty
breached, and what consequences should flow from a
breach?10
If the court finds a breach of a duty to preserve, the second step in the analysis
entails a determination of what remedy, if any, should be provided. This
involves consideration of “(1) the degree of negligence involved; (2) the
importance of the missing evidence; and (3) the sufficiency of other evidence
produced at trial.”
The application of the first step in the Deberry analysis is
straightforward:
1. Would the requested material, if extant in the possession of the
State at the time of the defense request, have been subject to
disclosure under Criminal Rule 16 or Brady?
Defendant’s telephone texts fall within this because Rule 16 obligated the
State, upon request, to “disclose to the Defendant and make available for
inspection . . . any relevant written or recorded statements made by the
Defendant.” Benson’s text messages were a written statement and therefore
needed to be produced.
2. If so, did the government have a duty to preserve the material?
The duty to preserve the text messages on Defendant’s phone readily
flows from the State’s obligation to produce them under Rule 16. If the State
had a duty to produce the messages, it stands to reason it also had a duty to
preserve them.
10 Id. at 750.
8
3. If there was a duty to preserve, was the duty breached, and
what consequences should flow from a breach?
One copy of the text messages was lost when the prepaid phone was
turned over to another officer for use in different undercover operations. The
court finds that under these circumstances the police had no duty to preserve
the text messages on the pre-paid police cell phone. The police had every
reason to believe that the messages would be retrieved from Defendant’s phone.
The constitution does not require the government to preserve every exact11
copy of a document subject to production under Rule 16. Otherwise police
stations and prosecutor’s offices would quickly become overrun with the
multiple photocopies inevitably generated in a criminal investigation and
prosecution.
A different result stems from the destruction of Defendant’s phone. The
police knew, or should have known it was the last copy of the text exchanges
between the officer and Benson. They also knew there was roughly a 15
percent chance that the phone would be destroyed and the data lost forever
during the chip-off technique. It may be that under emergency circumstances
there is no duty to preserve the phone and the State would be free to perform
chip-offs as a last resort. It does not take a fertile imagination to conjure up a
scenario where the safety of an individual will be at risk if the data on the cell
phone is not immediately accessed. The court need not decide the issue here,
11 There may be a different result when a copy contains marginalia not found on the original or
other copies. That issue is not before the court.
9
however, because there concededly was no urgency attached to accessing the
data.
The Supreme Court has on several occasions wisely “declined to
prescribe the exact procedures that law enforcement agencies in this State
must follow in order to fulfill their duties to preserve evidence,”12 and far be it
from this court to ignore that advice. It notes, however, that the analysis here
may have been very different if, in this non-emergent situation, the police had
first given Defendant the option of providing his passcode before attempting a
chip-off of his phone.
Having found that the Defendant’s cell phone was Deberry material, the
next step is to decide what consequences should flow from its loss. This
requires consideration of three factors:
1. The degree of negligence involved.
On a zero to 10 Richter scale of negligence, the negligence here would
have registered at about a 1. The court finds the officer who attempted to
extract the data was well-trained and experienced. He first exhausted the non-
destructive methods available to him before turning to the last resort. Even
then, the officer was reasonable in assuming he would be able to preserve the
data; although the failure rate for these tests at the County Police laboratory is
about 15 percent, the officer involved here had lost the data only three times,
two of which occurred when he was in training.
2. The importance of the missing evidence.
12 See Johnson v. State, 27 A.3d 541, 547 (Del. 2011)(explaining that the second step of the
Deberry analysis requires an examination of the State's duty to preserve).
10
There is little reason to believe at this time that the data on the cell
phone is central to this case. Although the loss of the data will prevent the jury
from seeing the precise language used in the exchange between the Defendant
and the officer, the State’s case does not seem to hinge on exactly what was
written between the two. It is often the case in this court that drug
prosecutions proceed without recordings of conversations between confidential
informants or undercover officers and the suspect. To be sure the loss of the
data might hinder a future defendant’s ability to argue the officer was texting to
someone else’s phone. But that avenue seems to have been foreclosed here
because the sole retrievable message on Defendant’s phone—the one that
appeared on the screen when the phone was seized from him—shows that the
officer was texting to Defendant’s phone.
At the moment it appears there is little likelihood that the data on the
cell phone would have exculpated Defendant. The absence of any potential for
exculpation is a key factor in a Deberry analysis. In Jones v. State,13 for
example, the Supreme Court found that the failure to test any items seized in a
drug raid for fingerprints was not a Deberry violation because the presence or
absence of Jones’ fingerprints on any particular item would not be very
meaningful.” Defendant Benson argues that the loss of the data prevents him
from presenting a linguistics expert who might be able to testify that the word
patterns in the messages show that Ms. Roberson, not Defendant, was using
Defendant’s phone and was the one texting with the police. When asked about
13 841 A.2d 307 (Del. 2004).
11
this at oral argument, Defendant’s counsel acknowledged he had no evidence
to show it was possible to make such an assessment from a few terse messages
on the phone. The speculative possibility that this could be done does not
elevate the data to matter of critical importance here.14
3. The sufficiency of other evidence produced at trial.
There is other evidence of the conversation, most notably the testimony
of the officer who texted with Defendant. The officer prepared a report shortly
after Defendant’s arrest which documented the text conversation. In Wainer v.
State15 the Supreme Court held that no Deberry remedy was necessary when a
police officer lost the notes he took during an interview because “the police
report incorporated the substance of the notes and was written the same day
the interviews were conducted.”
B. Deberry Relief
After considering the above factors, the court must determine if relief is
warranted, and if so, what relief the defendant is entitled to. Whether or not the
defendant has suffered any prejudice directs this determination.
Where there is availability of reliable secondary evidence and sufficient
remaining evidence to support the defendant’s conviction, relief will not be
afforded to the defendant. In Hammond v. State16 where there was a failure to
preserve a crash vehicle in a vehicular homicide case, Hammond moved for
14 See Powell v. State, 49 A.3d 1090, 1102 (Del. 2012)(“Nor can a speculative possibility of
‘missing evidence’ fairly be said to have ‘substantially prejudiced’ Powell’s case.”)(internal
editing marks omitted).
15 2005 WL 535010 (Del.).
16 569 A.2d 81 (Del. 1989).
12
dismissal, or, alternatively, an instruction to the jury that the lost evidence if
available would be exculpatory in nature. This court denied both motions
because even in the absence of the crash vehicle, the State’s case against
Hammond was so strong that it was not so fundamentally unfair that
Hammond’s prosecution should have been barred as a denial of due process.
Where, however, the missing evidence is integral to securing a conviction,
and secondary evidence is not available, this Court is permitted to give a Lolly
instruction.17 Such an instruction asks the jury to infer that the missing
evidence, had it been preserved, would not have incriminated the defendant
and would have tended to prove the defendant not guilty.
Conclusion
The Supreme Court has held that the determination of whether a
Defendant is entitled to relief under Deberry must be made on the basis of the
entire record. Although the record built to date suggests that Defendant will
not be entitled to any relief, a complete record will provide a better gauge the
centrality of the data and the prejudice caused by their loss. Therefore, the
court will defer its ruling on whether Benson is entitled to relief under Deberry
until it has heard all of the evidence.18
17 611 A.2d 956 (Del. 1992).
18 Even if the court declines to give any Deberry relief, Benson will be free to argue the
significance of the lost data to the jury. In Hendricks v. State, 871 A.2d 1118 (Del. 2005) the
Court wrote:
Although Hendricks’ attorney was free to argue to the jury the
significance of the drug paraphernalia that was missing because
of the negligent destruction, the Superior Court properly denied
Hendricks’ request for a “missing evidence” jury instruction.
13
Date: May 31, 2017 __________________________
John A. Parkins, Jr.
Superior Court Judge
oc: Prothonotary
cc: Amanda J. DiLiberto, Esquire, Department of Justice, Wilmington,
Delaware
Benjamin S. Gifford IV, Esquire, The Law Offices of Benjamin S. Gifford
IV, Wilmington, Delaware
14