6th Amendment Violation – Confrontation Clause

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Odonis D. Parker

Case No.: 20-1231

Officials: SYKES, Chief Judge, and FLAUM, and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: 6^th Amendment Violation – Confrontation Clause

Selina Schutt, her three young children, and her boyfriend, Jamayl Wash, were driving into her apartment complex in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when shots rang out. Wash’s Hyundai Sonata was hit with a barrage of bullets, including one that grazed the top of his scalp. Schutt saw her recently estranged ex-boyfriend, Odonis Parker, shooting from the side of the building. She grabbed her children, ran, and called 911 reporting that her ex-boyfriend, “Odonis Parker,” had shot up a car and was trying to shoot her friend.

The court later sentenced Parker to 114 months in prison followed by a two-year term of supervised release. Parker appealed, arguing that the district court violated his Sixth Amendment rights under the Confrontation Clause when it prohibited him from cross-examining the government witnesses about the lack of DNA evidence tying him to the firearm. The government argues that Parker failed to raise the Confrontation Clause objection at trial and thus waived it, making it subject only to plain error review. Parker asserts that although “the specific words ‘confrontation clause’ were not used in the district court,” the substance of the argument was properly raised. Parker Reply Brief at 5. We need not resolve this issue, because even if we assume that Parker properly preserved the argument, and even if we were to determine that the district court erred by disallowing the proposed cross examination, any error would have been harmless.

Parker argues that the crux of his strategy was to cast reasonable doubt that he possessed the firearm, arguing that the only eyewitness who could identify him by name was biased and her identification was not backed by forensic evidence. Pointing out the lack of forensic evidence, he argues, was essential to his case. Information about the police department’s failure to conduct DNA testing, however, would have added little, if anything to Parker’s defense. The jury already knew that the police did not find any fingerprint evidence on the weapon, magazine, or bullets and that the police did not look for hair and fiber samples. This was not a case made or broken on forensic testing. It was an eye-witness case—with circumstantial evidence as nails that sealed the coffin shut. Indeed, the government lacked forensic evidence, but the circumstantial evidence was robust—the car keys, the documents with Parker’s name, the identification of a man in a red hoodie, the red hoodie in the car, and Parker’s proximity to the scene of the crime. The additional evidence, or rather lack thereof— that the police also did not test the weapons for DNA—would have added little or nothing for the jury’s consideration. Consequently, we can conclude that any error would have been harmless.

Affirmed

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Derek A Hawkins is Corporate Counsel, at Salesforce.