State v. Smith: The state charged Vincent Smith with possession of a firearm by an ineligible. Police executed a search warrant at Smith’s sometime girlfriend; he did not live there – he was also not there at the time of the execution of the warrant - but police found clothing for an adult male, a prescription bottle in Smith’s name, correspondence to Smith but at a different address from girlfriend’s address, and a current Minnesota identification card in Smith’s name but also with a different address from girlfriend’s address. Police also found a .25 caliber handgun in between the box spring and mattress of a bed in girlfriend’s room. When girlfriend denied that the gun was hers she offered up the opinion that “it must be Vincent’s.”
At trial, the court permitted the prosecutor to introduce as Spreigl evidence Smith’s prior conviction of the same crime and a photograph taken before the present charge that showed Smith at girlfriend’s residence standing with another person near a table on which handguns were displayed. The jury found Smith guilty. The Court of Appeals reversed and remanded for a new trial.
The Opinion is Judge Shumaker at his scholarly best; indeed, you can already visualize the power point presentation coming soon to a CLE near you. Coincidently, the Opinion goes in the defendant’s favor.
The Opinion invites a more vigorous defense objection to either late or absent notice of Spreigl evidence, as required by the rule (requiring that the prosecutor give notice of the intent to offer such evidence and to disclose what the evidence will be offered to prove). Without explaining just why, Shumaker dismisses the defense objection to faulty/missing notice as inadequate.
The prosecution stated that the Spreigl evidence would be offered to prove the identity of Smith as the possessor of the gun found in the bed. This is a permissible purpose under the rule. State v. Ness, 707 N.W.2d 676 (Minn. 2006) requires that the trial court conduct an exacting analysis of the evidence that is being offered in support of that purpose in order both to ascertain “the purpose for which the evidence truly is offered,” Ness, and to determine if that supporting evidence is relevant under Rule 401. Here, Smith’s admission to possessing a gun when he was ineligible to do so, and the photographs showing that he was in the presence of guns at the same location and at a time not remote from the date of the search satisfies the relevancy test of Rule 401.
Even though this evidence is relevant, Spreigl evidence must also be sufficiently probative, which is not the same thing. The probative value of the prior firearms conviction depends on the similarity of the two acts. The more similar are the circumstances of each act, the more compelling is the inference that the same person was involved in each. In this instance, there is no similarity beyond the name of the crime and the possession of a handgun. (The Opinion lays out why this is so.) Consequently, the jury would “and likely did” use the prior conviction improperly for character purposes, a purpose prohibited by Rule 404. That is to say, the potential prejudice to the defendant outweighs the probative value.
Shumaker quotes a definition of “unfair prejudice” from a U.S. Supreme Court case. “The term ‘unfair prejudice,’ as to a criminal defendant, speaks to the capacity of some concededly relevant evidence to lure the fact finder into declaring guilt on a ground different from proof specific to the offense charged.” Old Chief v. United States, 519 U.S. 172, 180, 117 S. Ct. 644, 650 (1997).
The photographs suffer the same fate because they irreversibly blur the distinction between being in the presence of guns and being in possession of them. It was not illegal for Smith to be in the presence of firearms so long as he did not “possess” them. The photographs, however, were so “bluntly compelling” that the jury was unlikely to make that presence/possession distinction; the result is again to use the photographs improperly for character purposes.
The Court is quick to say that “mere possibility” of improper jury use of the evidence is not the test; rather, it is “the substantial and demonstrable danger that it would in fact do so because of the nature of each Spreigl item.”
So, this is a great read; print off a copy of it and spend some time on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment