## Facts

- Ryan John Sanders was prosecuted for the killings of Travis Moore and Ashlee Richards and for tampering with evidence.
- A jury convicted Sanders of second-degree murder for Moore’s death and first-degree murder for Richards’s death; Sanders did not contest the evidence-tampering conviction on appeal.
- Sanders’s trial defense was that he acted in self-defense, or alternatively that he acted in the heat of passion and was guilty, at most, of manslaughter; the jury rejected those claims.
- Two days after the homicides, an investigating officer received a telephone call from Carmela Bacod.
- Bacod was unavailable to testify at Sanders’s trial.
- Sanders sought to introduce what Bacod told the officer during that call.
- According to Bacod, Richards had earlier told Bacod that Richards and Moore believed Sanders had stolen money from them (or from someone in their group) and that Richards and Moore planned to go to Sanders’s home to confront him.
- Bacod also told the officer that, in Bacod’s view, the confrontation was likely to be violent.
- Sanders offered Bacod’s account to support an inference that Moore and Richards went to Sanders’s residence intending a hostile confrontation (and possibly a robbery), which Sanders argued supported his self-defense and heat-of-passion theories.
- The superior court excluded the proffered testimony as inadmissible double hearsay.

## Issues

1. Whether the superior court erred by excluding Bacod’s out-of-court statements to police—repeating Richards’s alleged statements about a planned confrontation with Sanders—under Alaska Evidence Rule 803(3) or another hearsay exception.
2. Whether, given the two layers of out-of-court statements (Richards to Bacod, and Bacod to the officer), Sanders established a hearsay exception for each layer sufficient to admit the evidence.

## Decision

- The Alaska Court of Appeals affirmed the superior court’s ruling excluding the Bacod statements.
- The court concluded the proffer was double hearsay and that Sanders did not show a valid hearsay exception for each level of the statements.
- The court rejected Sanders’s reliance on Rule 803(3) as a basis to admit the proffered statements in the form and for the purposes Sanders sought, including because parts of the account conveyed assertions about past events or wrongdoing (the alleged theft), not just a then-existing intent or plan.
- Because the trial court’s exclusion of the evidence was not an abuse of discretion, the Court of Appeals affirmed Sanders’s convictions.

## Legal Principles

- Double hearsay is admissible only if each layer of hearsay fits an exception to the hearsay rule.
- Alaska Evidence Rule 803(3) permits evidence of a declarant’s then-existing state of mind (such as intent or plan), but it generally does not admit statements of memory or belief offered to prove the fact remembered or believed (such as an accusation that someone previously stole money).
- A witness’s out-of-court opinion about what might happen (for example, that a confrontation would “likely” turn violent) is not automatically admissible and still must satisfy a hearsay exception or another rule permitting admission.
- Appellate review of a trial court’s hearsay rulings is for abuse of discretion; exclusion is affirmed when the proponent fails to establish a proper basis for admission.

## Conclusion

The Court of Appeals upheld Sanders’s convictions, agreeing with the trial court that the proposed testimony about the victims’ alleged plan to confront Sanders was inadmissible double hearsay because Sanders did not establish an exception for both Richards’s statements to Bacod and Bacod’s statements to the investigating officer, and Rule 803(3) did not allow admission of embedded assertions about an alleged prior theft.


Sanders v. Alaska, No. A-10943, 2013 Alas. App. LEXIS 119 (2013)