State v. Conley

Charles Conley (defendant) was convicted of selling LSD, a hallucinogen. The trial court admitted Exhibit 1 into evidence, which was a brown envelope containing 18 orange pills wrapped inside of a cellophane sack from a cigarette pack. Jenkins, an informant, testified that Conley sold orange pills to Jenkins that were wrapped in a cellophane sack and that Jenkins gave them to an officer. The officer testified that the officer gave the cellophane-wrapped pills to Captain Severns. Both Jenkins and the officer testified that Exhibit 1 looked like the pills that they had handled. Captain Severns testified that Exhibit 1’s brown envelope was the brown property envelope Severns had used to store the cellophane-wrapped pills, labelled as containing 20 orange sunshine pills in a cellophane wrapper, and delivered to an unspecified man at the crime laboratory. Rector, a chemist at the laboratory, testified that the laboratory’s standard operating procedure was for an evidence coordinator to assign a case number to any material brought to the laboratory for testing and place the material in the appropriate file. Rector testified that when Rector removed the brown evidence envelope from a filing cabinet, a laboratory case number was on the envelope. Rector then wrote his initials on both the envelope and the cellophane wrapper. Rector used two of the pills in the analysis, then put the remaining 18 pills, wrapper, and brown envelope inside a sealed envelope. The envelope was stored in a locked area until Rector brought it to trial. Conley appealed, arguing in relevant part that the government (plaintiff) had failed to establish a chain of custody for the pills because the person Severns gave the pills to at the laboratory did not testify.