THE STATE OF FLORIDA, PETITIONER,
v.
MARIANO ROMANEZ, RESPONDENT

Fla. 3d DCA | 1989-05-09
No. 88-2954
Before BARKDULL, HUBBART and COPE, JJ., BARKDULL and HUBBART, JJ., concur.
543 So. 2d 323 Florida District Court of Appeal, Third District (1989) Positive Treatment
Cited by 5 cases

AI-generated. These summaries, headnotes, and key points are machine-generated and may contain errors or omissions. Always verify against the full opinion text below. Not legal advice.

Synopsis

The State of Florida sought certiorari review of a trial court's order excluding hearsay statements from a five-year-old child sexual abuse victim. The District Court of Appeal affirmed the exclusion, holding that the trial court properly found the statements unreliable under Florida's child hearsay statute due to the child's severely disturbed mental condition and the vague, contradictory nature of the statements.


Holding

The trial court properly excluded the child's hearsay statements because they did not meet the statutory precondition of reliability. The child's severely disturbed mental condition affecting her ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, combined with the vague, contradictory nature of the statements, required their exclusion under the statute.


Headnotes

[1] A hearsay statement made by a child victim aged 11 or less describing child abuse or sexual abuse is admissible if the time, content, and circumstances of the statement p…

[2] A trial court may consider the child victim's mental and physical age and maturity, the reliability of the assertion, the reliability of the child victim, and any other a…

Previewing 2 of 5 headnotes on this case. FLexlaw’s editorially structured points of law — every proposition, pinpointed — are reserved for members.

Join FLexlaw to unlock all legal intelligence

Key Quotes

“the trial court must find "in a hearing conducted outside the presence of the jury that the time, content, and circumstances of the statement provide sufficient safeguards of reliability."”

Establishes the statutory requirement under Section 90.803(23)(a) that trial courts must make a reliability finding before admitting child sexual abuse hearsay statements

Previewing 1 of 3 key quotes on this case — the court’s exact language, pinpointed for members.

Join FLexlaw to unlock all legal intelligence

Facts & Procedural History

A five-year-old child victim (M.R.) made hearsay statements describing sexual abuse to two child abuse professionals. The trial court conducted a pre-…

The full statement of facts, procedural history, and disposition for this case are member content.

Join FLexlaw to unlock all legal intelligence

© FLexlaw, Inc. — AI-generated enrichments are proprietary. All rights reserved.


Opinion of the Court
PER CURIAM.

PER CURIAM.

The State of Florida seeks certiorari review of a pre-trial circuit court order excluding from evidence at trial the hearsay statements of an alleged child sexual abuse victim. We have jurisdiction to entertain the state’s petition for certiorari review, Art. V, § 4(b)(3), Fla.Const.; State v. Pettis, 520 So. 2d 250 (Fla.1988), and deny the subject petition based on the following briefly stated legal analysis. First, Section 90.803(23)(a), Florida Statutes (1987), permits the introduction in evidence of a hearsay statement “made by a child victim with a physical, mental, emotional, or developmental age of 11 or less describing” inter alia “any act of child abuse [or] sexual abuse ...” provided certain preconditions are met. One of those preconditions is that the trial court must find “in a hearing conducted outside the presence of the jury that the time, content, and circumstances of the statement provide sufficient safeguards of reliability.” In making this finding, the trial court is permitted to consider, among other factors, “the mental and physical age and maturity of the child ... the reliability of the assertion, the reliability of the child victim, and any other factor deemed appropriate....”

Second, the trial court entered an extensive order, after conducting a pre-trial evidentiary hearing, in which it concluded that two hearsay sexual abuse statements made by the five-year-old victim M.R. in this case to two child abuse professionals did not meet the above-stated statutory precondition of reliability and accordingly were inadmissible at trial. The trial court reached this conclusion primarily because (1) M.R. had a severely disturbed mental condition which greatly affected her ability to distinguish reality from fantasy and truth from untruth, and (2) M.R.’s statements were vague, lacking in detail, and partially contradictory in critical respects. There was ample evidence adduced below to support these findings, and such findings required the exclusion of the subject statements under the above statute. See Griffin v. State, 526 So. 2d 752, 758 (Fla. 1st DCA 1988). Compare Perez v. State, 536 So. 2d 206 (Fla.1988); Jaggers v. State, 536 So. 2d 321, 324 (Fla. 2d DCA 1988); Distefano v. State, 526 So. 2d 110, 115 (Fla. 1st DCA 1988); Glendening v. State, 503 So. 2d 335, 339 (Fla. 2d DCA 1987), approved, 536 So. 2d 212 (Fla.1988).

Third, contrary to the state’s arguments, the trial court did not deny the state any procedural rights by apparently relying, in part, on the corroborative testimony of the state’s own witnesses at a prior hearing in which the trial court, upon the state’s motion, barred the defendant from deposing M.R. based on M.R.’s fragile mental condition. This is so because (a) such testimony was relevant to the issue before the court, and (b) the trial court was entitled to consider the full record in this case, especially the aforesaid relevant testimony adduced by the state. See Kelley v. Kelley, 75 So. 2d 191, 194 (Fla.1954) (A court “will take judicial notice of all its own records in the pending case and the proceedings relating thereto.”); see also In re Freeman’s Adoption, 90 So. 2d 109, 111 (Fla.1956) (same); McNish v. State, 47 Fla. 69, 36 So. 176, 177 (1904) (same); Tower Credit Corp. v. State by Dickinson, 183 So. 2d 255, 256 (Fla. 4th DCA 1966) (same); § 90.202(6), Fla.Stat. (1987).

Finally, the balance of the state’s arguments presents no departure from essential requirements of law. The petition for a writ of certiorari is therefore

Denied.

BARKDULL and HUBBART, JJ., concur.

Dissent
COPE, Judge

COPE, Judge

(dissenting).

In my view, the State has a legitimate claim of surprise because the trial court placed reliance on testimony adduced at an earlier hearing on a motion for protective order. Both the State and the defense agree that there was no indication, prior to the issuance of the order excluding the statements, that the trial court would rely on any information other than that developed in the evidentiary hearing on the admissibility of the child’s hearsay statements. The State contends that, had it known other material in the file would be relied on, it would have offered additional testimony to explain or otherwise meet that information.

The testimony at the earlier hearing on the motion for protective order included that of the child’s own therapist, who did not testify at the later hearing on the admissibility of the child’s hearsay statements. The therapist’s testimony was undoubtedly highly persuasive to the trial court, and was cited in the court’s ruling. There was a difference between the issue presented by the proceedings on the motion for protective order (whether testifying in court or at deposition would be psychologically harmful to the child) and the issue presented in the proceedings on the admissibility of the child’s hearsay statements (whether the child’s out-of-court statements were sufficiently reliable to allow their introduction at trial), and there was an interval of three months between the hearings. The ruling on the instant motion is likely dispositive of the entire case. I would vacate the order under review so that the trial court may reopen the record and permit the parties an opportunity to present additional evidence on those matters relied on by the trial court but not addressed at the evidentiary hearing on the motion to exclude the hearsay statements.


Cases With Similar Vibessemantic neighbors from the corpus


Citator

Cited By

  • State v. Townsend, 635 So. 2d 949 (Fla. 1994)
    …ts have failed to place on the record specific findings indicating the basis for determining the reliability of a child’s statements introduced as hearsay under that section. See, e.g., Leggett v. State, 565 So. 2d 315 (Fla.1990); State v. Ro-manez, 543 So. 2d 323 (Fla. 3d DCA 1989); Jaggers v. State, 536 So. 2d 321 (Fla. 2d DCA 1988); Griffin v. State, 526 So. 2d 752 (Fla. 1st DCA 1988). A mere conclusion that a child’s statements are reliable or a mere restatement of the statute in a boilerplate fashion is…
  • Johnson v. State, 679 So. 2d 49 (Fla. 1st DCA 1996)
    …itorious because the trial court may well have found the child’s hearsay statements unreliable given that she had recanted such statements on several occasions. See Joggers v. State, 536 So. 2d 321, 325 (Fla. 2d DCA 1988); see also State v. Romanez, 543 So. 2d 323 (Fla. 3d DCA 1989). If found unreliable, the statements would not have been admissible as hearsay evidence. And if the hearsay statements had been excluded as substantive evidence, it is questionable whether the medical evidence would have been suff…
  • Oliver v. State (Fla. 2d DCA 2024)

Authorities Cited (12 total)

View all 12 cited authorities →

Full citator, related cases, and AI research tools

Open in FLexlaw