PORT ANGELES — Superior Court Judge Ken Williams heard arguments Wednesday morning during a hearing involving a woman charged with vehicular homicide that recordings of calls from the Clallam County jail are private and cannot be used as evidence.
The disputed recording is of a March 7 conversation between Amber Steim, her mother and Nichole Boucher.
Steim, 24, is charged with vehicular homicide while driving under the influence of alcohol in the March 6 death of Ellen J. DeBondt, 44, of Crescent Beach during a wreck on state Highway 112.
She also is charged with tampering with a witness.
Without the recording, there is no evidence for the charges of witness tampering, argued Ralph Anderson, Steim’s attorney.
Should be dropped?
Without that recording, the charge of witness tampering should be dropped, he said.
Steim faces a Dec. 5 trial.
Williams did not make a decision on the issue of the recording and said he would take the arguments under advisement, research law regarding the issue and return a decision at a later date.
About 30 of DeBondt’s friends and family were present at the hearing. DeBondt was a home health nurse affiliated with Olympic Medical Center.
The conversation was recorded on the Clallam County jail telephone system and is at the center of charges that Steim tried to get Boucher to change her testimony.
“The legal significance, of course, is that it would completely throw off the validity of the blood-alcohol test, which was taken after the fact,” Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Troberg has said.
Steim had a blood-alcohol level of 0.239 percent after the wreck, police said.
The legal limit in Washington state is 0.08 percent.
Automated recording
Troberg submitted a transcript of the conversation, which included an automated warning at the beginning of the conversation saying that calls from the jail are “subject to” recording or monitoring.
According to the transcript, Steim told Boucher three times to remember they drank alcohol after the wreck to deal with the physical pain of injuries.
Steim and her passenger, Boucher, had minor injuries, police said.
Troberg also submitted the transcript of an interview between Boucher and a State Patrol trooper, during which Boucher said she and Steim were either unconscious or insensible after the wreck and that at the time, she believed Steim might be dead.
Steim’s attorneys argued that the warning at the beginning of the call was not explicit enough and could have given her an expectation of the possibility of privacy.
Defense attorneys in written arguments cited court cases in which the recordings that were allowed were prefaced by warnings that calls “will be recorded.”
That is a more definite statement than the Clallam County recording, the attorneys said.
If Steim is convicted of both vehicular homicide and witness tampering, she faces a sentence of between three and four years in prison and a $50,000 fine, Troberg has said.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.