## Facts

- Jose Morales, a New York state prisoner, was convicted with co-defendant Ruben Montalvo of murder in Bronx County Supreme Court for the beating and stabbing death of Jose Antonio Rivera by a group of teenagers.
- Shortly after trial but before sentencing, Jesus Fornes told multiple people (a priest, Montalvo’s mother, Morales’s trial lawyer, and a Legal Aid lawyer) that he and two others committed the murder and that Morales and Montalvo were innocent.
- In a state post-trial proceeding seeking to set aside the verdict, Fornes invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify.
- The priest and the Legal Aid lawyer refused to disclose the confession content based on priest-penitent and attorney-client privilege, respectively.
- The state court treated remaining testimony relaying Fornes’s statements as hearsay and denied the motion for a new trial.
- Fornes later died in an unrelated incident; after his death, the priest and Legal Aid lawyer disclosed the substance of the confessions.
- Morales filed a federal habeas petition, arguing that exclusion of Fornes’s confessions violated due process by preventing presentation of a complete defense.

## Issues

1. Whether excluding evidence of Fornes’s multiple inculpatory confessions, which were exculpatory as to Morales, violated due process by preventing Morales from presenting a complete defense.
2. Whether the state court’s hearsay and privilege-based exclusions, as applied to these confessions, were an unreasonable application of clearly established Supreme Court law governing admission of reliable exculpatory evidence in criminal cases.

## Decision

- The district court granted Morales’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
- The court held that Fornes’s confessions bore substantial indicia of reliability and qualified as statements against penal interest (and, alternatively, under a residual hearsay theory).
- The court concluded that excluding this evidence deprived Morales of a fair opportunity to present a complete defense, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process guarantee.
- The court determined that the conviction could not stand where the jury never heard highly probative, reliable third-party confessions that directly exculpated Morales.

## Legal Principles

- Due process protects a criminal defendant’s right to present a complete defense; evidentiary rules cannot be applied mechanistically to exclude reliable, materially exculpatory evidence.
- Reliable third-party confessions that are strongly against the declarant’s penal interest may be constitutionally required to be admitted when central to the defense.
- Indicia of reliability include repetition to multiple listeners, spontaneous or candid circumstances (including seeking spiritual or legal counsel), and direct exposure of the declarant to serious criminal liability.
- Evidentiary privileges are significant but may be subject to constitutional scrutiny when their application prevents the jury from hearing critical, trustworthy exculpatory evidence.
- On federal habeas review, relief is warranted where a state court’s exclusion of such evidence is an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law and renders the trial fundamentally unfair.

## Conclusion

The federal court ordered habeas relief because the state court’s exclusion of a deceased third party’s repeated, reliable murder confessions prevented Morales from presenting a complete defense, undermining the fairness of the conviction under the Due Process Clause.


Morales v. Portuondo, 154 F. Supp. 2d 706 (S.D.N.Y. 2001)