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After jurors in Hackensack convicted the father of two counts of rape and other charges in 2006, a judge sentenced him to a minimum of seven years behind bars before he could be eligible for parole.
But he appealed the verdict and was granted a new trial by a higher court. As such, he soon could be a free man — even though he admitted he had sex with the girl in New York.
She had lived with him since she was three, court records show. He later remarried, and when the girl was 16, she approached her mother and stepmother, telling them of abuse in a Bronx apartment that she said began when she was 12.
Her subsequent account to city investigators included two alleged incidents at hotels just across the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee.
The father plea-bargained the New York charges and in early 2004 was released from prison after serving all of six months.
Now it was Bergen County’s turn.
Although he admitted the New York crimes, the father said his daughter — disappointed by the outcome in the Bronx court — brought the New Jersey charges “to seek greater punishment.”
Following his trial and conviction, the father’s lawyer appealed, arguing that the jurors in Hackensack shouldn’t have been exposed to evidence from the New York case. Nor, he said, should they have heard the contents of an “emotionally charged letter” that the woman, now in her 20s, wrote to the New York sentencing judge.
The judge not only erred in instructing jurors how to view all of that evidence, his attorney said: The alleged victim should never have been allowed to testify about what happened in New York. What needed to be proven were the alleged rapes in Fort Lee.
There was more than enough blame to go around, however:
The assistant Bergen County prosecutor in the case “grossly exceeded the bounds of propriety,” acting “unnecessarily hostile and sarcastic,“ in her summation to the jurors, wiping out any chance of a fair trial, the defense lawyer argued to the appeals court.
If that weren’t enough, the prosecutor “improperly conveyed that she, too, believed that [the father’s] New York sentence was unjustly lenient and improperly encouraged the jury to think about the adequacy of the New York sentence,” the defense lawyer said
A panel of state Appellate Division judges agreed on just about all of the points — except for the letter, which it set aside. This week, the higher court sent the case back to Hackensack.
“When evidence is properly admitted… it should be ‘sanitized‘ so that only so much evidence is presented as is necessary to prove the point; unnecessary details should not be put before the jury,” the justices wrote, citing a previous opinion. “Here, [the daughter] was permitted to testify about details of the assaults committed upon her in New York.”
It was the judge’s responsibility to explain to the jury how the evidence “may and may not be used,” both when it was brought up and then, later, when instructing jurors how to deliberate.
In this case, the judge “did not provide any limiting instruction at all when the evidence was first presented to the jury,” the appeals judges wrote. “While the trial court did provide a limiting instruction in its final charge to the jury, that instruction was, in our judgment, fatally flawed.
“The jury must be told that it cannot infer from such evidence that the defendant, having committed prior bad acts, is a bad person with a propensity to commit crimes,” they added. “Such an instruction is particularly critical in an atmosphere as emotionally fraught as [this] trial.”
Where the judge truly failed, they said, was in telling the jurors they could “decide that the evidence [of the New York assaults] does demonstrate that those acts did occur in Fort Lee and use it for that specific purpose.
“I have admitted the evidence only to help you decide the specific question of did the alleged acts in Fort Lee occur,” the trial judge told the jury.
The appeals panel called this “a clearly erroneous statement,” under state law.
“Because proper jury instructions are essential to a fair trial, erroneous instructions on material points are presumed to possess the capacity to unfairly prejudice the defendant,” the wrote, citing a previous case. “We have thus concluded that we are constrained to reverse defendant’s convictions.”
Although the appeals judges set other arguments in the appeal aside, including the question of whether the letter should have been part of the evidence, they did add a special note:
“We would expect…that in any future proceeding the prosecutor shall refrain from the perception of sarcasm that runs through her cross-examination of [the] defendant…”
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