Criminal Practice – Police Detective – Credibility Assessment – Hearsay

Listen to this article

The trial court properly allowed a police detective – testifying as a fact witness – to explain his investigative process, including how he looked for cues that a speaker was fabricating responses. The court also properly allowed the detective to testify that, when he asked defendant how long it had been since defendant had been in Burlington, defendant looked up, indicating to the detective that defendant was “constructing a memory” rather than remembering.

We find no error in defendant’s convictions of attempted first-degree murder, robbery with a dangerous weapon and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury.

When two witnesses testified that they could not remember what they had told the detective during his investigation, the detective was allowed to testify as to what those witnesses had told him near the time of the crimes. The trial court did not err in allowing the detective’s testimony for impeachment purposes to prove the witnesses’ prior inconsistent statements without calling the inconsistencies to the attention of the witnesses.

State v. Kennedy (Lawyers Weekly No. 012-220-23, 11 pp.) (Toby Hampson, J.) Appealed from Caswell County Superior Court (Todd Burke, J.) Michael Bulleri for the state; Paul Smith for defendant. North Carolina Court of Appeals (unpublished)