Appellate Court Prohibits Impeachment of Defendant by Evidence of an Unspecified Prior Conviction.

State v. Utter, Jr., Minn.Ct.App., 9/15/2009. 

 

9/11/2011 Update:  The Minnesota Supreme Court overruled this opinion, State v. Hill.    Here’s the original post if you still want to read it.

Mr. Utter, Jr. spent just shy of two years chatting up L.S. about his affair with L.S.’s wife.  L.S. eventually got tired of it so he got himself a restraining order.  It didn’t help much as the calls kept coming.  A month of so after getting the restraining order, Mr. Utter, Jr., called L.S. yet again, which prompted the state to charge him with violating a harassment restraining order.

At trial, the state said that if Mr. Utter, Jr. testified it would seek to impeach him with a previous conviction of violating an order for protection.  The trial court more or less punted the request, ruling that the state could impeach Mr. Utter, Jr. by telling the jury that he had a felony conviction of a certain date.  Mr. Utter, Jr. testified anyway.

In making its ruling the trial court didn’t go through the Jones factors litany,  State v. Jones, 271 N.W.2d 534 (Minn. 1978), which are:

(1) the impeachment value of the prior crime, (2) the date of the conviction and the defendant‟s subsequent history, (3) the similarity of the past crime with the charged crime (the greater the similarity, the greater the reason for not permitting use of the crime to impeach), (4) the importance of defendant‟s prior testimony, and (5) the centrality of the credibility issue.

It turns out that whether evidence of an unspecified prior conviction is admissible for impeachment purposes hasn’t come up here.  Michigan won’t have it.  Kentucky and Wisconsin, among others, think it’s fine.  South Dakota, along with a few other states, leaves it to the trial court’s discretion.

Minnesota joins ranks with the minority view, which rejects a “mere fact” rule that allows the use of an unspecified prior conviction.  Otherwise:

to allow the admission of unspecified prior convictions would render meaningless our long line of cases emphasizing the importance of admitting only those convictions that assist the fact finder in measuring a witness‟s credibility and veracity

The error is also prejudicial, resulting in a remand for a new trial.  The appellate court noted that the trial court exacerbated its error by giving the jury a Spreigl instruction, instead of an impeachment instruction.