Court Rejects Evidentiary Rulings in Upholding Murder One Conviction

State v. Fraga, Minn.S.Ct., 6/28/2017.  Two juries have convicted Mr. Fraga of first degree murder.  The Supreme Court reversed the first conviction because the trial court seated an actually biased juror.  Read about that here.  This go round Mr. Fraga complains about various evidentiary rulings, which are reviewed under either abuse of discretion or plain error.  Although it takes her twenty-eight pages to do so Chief Justice Gildea has little trouble in rejecting these trial errors.

Mr. Fraga killed S.R., his two year old niece.  In addition to evidence of the charged homicide, the state presented evidence from one of Mr. Fraga's children, identified only as "Child B." Child B initially denied knowing anything about S.R.'s death, or about Mr. Fraga sexually abusing her in the past.  Three years after S.R.'s death, Child B admitted that Mr. Fraga had sexually abused her and that she had witnessed Mr. Fraga kill S.R.  Mr. Fraga disputed all of this, including killing S.R.  His lawyers impeached Child B with her previous inconsistent statements, even though she admitted to those statements during her direct testimony, but they also wanted to improve upon that impeachment by playing the three recorded interviews of  Child B.  The defense said that playing the recordings would assist the jury in evaluating Child B's credibility.  Among other things, the defense said, the recordings would rebut Child B's claim that she had lied during these interviews because she was afraid.

The trial court said, no, that under Rule 403 the probative value of playing the three some hours of recordings was outweighed by its potential to confuse the issues, mislead the jury, cause undue delay or waste of time, or needlessly present cumulative evidence: 

After reviewing the recordings, the district court denied Fraga’s request to play the entire 2.3 hours of audio and video interviews. In explaining its ruling, the court observed that Child B had admitted the prior inconsistent statements, and it concluded that the probative value of the recorded interviews was outweighed by the considerations of Minn. R. Evid. 403 (noting that evidence may be excluded where its probative value is substantially outweighed by its potential to confuse the issues, mislead the jury, cause undue delay or waste of time, or needlessly present cumulative evidence).

This ruling, Mr. Fraga said, violated his constitutional right to present a complete defense, as well as various other evidentiary rules.  The court doesn't reach the constitutional claim because it concludes that the proffered recordings didn't comply with any rule of evidence that the court could conjure up.

Mr. Fraga made other evidentiary challenges to the conviction, none of which did the court accept.  Of some note, in a pretrial ruling, the defense sought to exclude testimony that Mr. Fraga sold "adult videos" and possessed one such video.  The state believed that Child B might testify that Mr. Fraga had a "box of adult videos" so evidence that he sold them and that police did find one such video tended to corroborate Child B's expected testimony. The trial court agreed and denied the defense request.  It turned out, however, that neither the state nor the defense asked Child B about adult videos.  Instead, evidence that Mr. Fraga sold adult videos came in, without objection, from another witness, (as did evidence that police found one such video).  The failure to object to the receipt of this evidence from a different witness allowed the Chief to cherry pick the pretrial objection and ruling as a "conditional" ruling: it's admissible in anticipation of Child B's expected testimony.  When that didn't happen the defense should have objected to the other witness's testimony; not having done so sent review of this claim into "plain error" land, where Mr. Fraga could not show that the error, if any, impacted his substantial rights.