United States v. Givens

Givens pled guilty to bank fraud and received a sentence of 18 months of imprisonment and four years of supervised release. On July 14, 2011, Givens was released and his supervised release began. In November 2013, Givens’s probation officer petitioned to revoke his supervised release. The officer claimed that Givens attempted to drive his car into Queen. During the revocation hearing, Givens sought to impeach Queen by using hearsay evidence. The district court refused to admit that evidence and revoked Givens’s supervised release. The Sixth Circuit affirmed, employing the “abuse of discretion” standard and stating that the case does not turn on whether Queen testified accurately that Givens assaulted him. Rather, it turns on whether the court was within its discretion to exclude evidence that might have called Queen’s testimony into question. The court characterized Givens’ proffered “police report, and the follow-up Secret Service [report] of Mr. Queen” as a report that a church pastor had called the police to tell them that one of his members said that Queen had harassed her and “just a bunch of hearsay.” View "United States v. Givens" on Justia Law