DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF FLORIDA

FOURTH DISTRICT

LIZETT ALEXIS ALLEN,

Appellant,

v.

STATE OF FLORIDA,

Appellee.

No. 4D20-1553

[April 21, 2021]

Appeal from the Circuit Court for the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, Palm 

Beach County; Caroline C. Shepherd, Judge; L.T. Case No. 50-2018-CF006210-AXXX-MB.

Carey Haughwout, Public Defender, Ross F. Berlin and Claire Victoria 

Madill, Assistant Public Defenders, West Palm Beach, for appellant.

Ashley Moody, Attorney General, Tallahassee, and Luke R. Napodano, 

Assistant Attorney General, West Palm Beach, for appellee.

FORST, J.

Appellant Lizett Allen appeals from her conviction and sentence for 

grand theft over $20,000 following a jury trial. Appellant raises five issues

on appeal, but we write only to address the third issue—that the trial court 

erred by prohibiting the introduction of relevant evidence. We agree with 

Appellant’s third contention and, as explained below, conclude that the 

evidence was relevant to the defense’s effort to establish a motive for the 

purported victim to fabricate her testimony against Appellant. The State 

has failed to establish that this error was harmless beyond a reasonable 

doubt, and we thus reverse and remand for a new trial.

Background

The State charged Appellant with grand theft over $20,000, alleging 

that Appellant routinely overcharged the credit card of the purported 

victim, who was a client at Appellant’s hair salon. The primary evidence 

against Appellant consisted of the purported victim’s testimony, bank 

records showing excessive charges with the funds going into Appellant’s 
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personal accounts, and a text message exchange between the purported 

victim and Appellant. 

The purported victim testified that she discovered the alleged 

fraudulent charges after checking her bank account statement in

February 2017. After this discovery, she called Appellant to determine 

why her account had been overcharged by substantial amounts. Appellant

told her that she had switched merchant accounts, and that the switch 

must have caused the errors. Appellant indicated that she would follow 

up with the purported victim and provide her with a case ID number from

the help-desk ticket she would file. However, instead of providing the 

purported victim with a help-desk ticket number, Appellant texted her a 

message stating “I’m so sorry can I call you in the morning and we will 

talk.” The purported victim agreed, but she also asked if the merchants

called back with an ID number. Appellant responded “no,” and then told 

the purported victim “I f****d up im so sorry my life went down the drain I 

will fix it can we talk when you come in at 3” and “I’m sorry I never thought 

it was that amount please let me fix it if you have to report it I understand.” 

The purported victim made a police report the next morning.

The purported victim explained that she and Appellant were friends, 

but that she never authorized the excessive charges. On crossexamination, defense counsel asked if she had ever purchased drugs from 

Appellant. The purported victim denied she had ever done so.

Following up on this line of questioning, defense counsel called 

Appellant to the stand. Appellant testified that she never charged the 

purported victim’s credit card without her consent and that the charges 

were all authorized. She explained that, after the first year of knowing the 

purported victim, first as a client and then as both a client and a friend, 

Appellant would acquire drugs for her. The two agreed that the drug 

purchases would be covered by charges to the purported victim’s credit 

card, which was on file at the salon. This payment method was intended 

to conceal the charges from the purported victim’s husband. 

Appellant further explained that the text message conversation 

introduced into evidence was a plan to “smooth over the explanation” to 

the purported victim’s husband. The messages were intended to show him 

that the overcharges were attributable to Appellant, and thus conceal the 

purported victim’s drug purchases. In furtherance of her defense of 

consent, Appellant attempted to testify that concealment of the purported 

victim’s drug purchases and use was necessary, as this drug use created 

friction between the purported victim and her husband and ultimately 

caused the purported victim’s divorce. When the State objected, defense 
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counsel maintained that Appellant overheard arguments between the 

purported victim and her then-husband related to the purported victim’s 

drug purchases and that their “marriage troubles” were related to the 

wife’s drug use. Despite defense counsel’s argument that testimony 

regarding the impact that the purported victim’s drug purchases had on 

her marriage went “to motive as to why she would make up an allegation 

that this was fraud and not purchasing drugs[,]” the trial court sustained 

the State’s relevancy objection to questions concerning the purported 

victim’s marriage and divorce.

 

Following Appellant’s testimony, the case proceeded to closing

arguments and the jury returned a verdict of guilty. This appeal timely

followed. 

Analysis

“The standard of review for admissibility of evidence is abuse of 

discretion. However, a trial court’s discretion is limited by the rules of 

evidence.” Harris v. State, 289 So. 3d 962, 966 (Fla. 4th DCA 2020) 

(quoting Orton v. State, 212 So. 3d 377, 378 (Fla. 4th DCA 2017)).

“A party is given wide latitude to develop motive or bias in a witness’s 

testimony.” Roman v. State, 165 So. 3d 723, 725 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015)

(citing Mardis v. State, 122 So. 3d 950, 953 (Fla. 4th DCA 2013)). “The 

ability to expose an improper impetus for a witness’ testimony is an 

essential component of the right to a jury trial.” Jones v. State, 678 So. 2d 

890, 892 (Fla. 4th DCA 1996). “Included in the types of matters that 

demonstrate bias are prejudice, interest in the outcome of a case, and any 

motivation for a witness to testify untruthfully.” Id. As explained by this 

court in Elder v. State, 296 So. 3d 440 (Fla. 4th DCA 2020): 

“[W]here evidence tends in any way, even indirectly, to 

establish a reasonable doubt of [the] defendant’s guilt, it is 

error to deny its admission.” Rivera v. State, 561 So. 2d 536, 

539 (Fla. 1990). Put differently, “[i]f there is any possibility of 

a tendency of evidence to create a reasonable doubt, the rules 

of evidence are usually construed to allow for its 

admissibility.” Vannier v. State, 714 So. 2d 470, 472 (Fla. 4th 

DCA 1998).

Id. at 446 (alterations in original).

Here, Appellant sought to testify that the purported victim’s divorce was 

precipitated by substance abuse issues. Following the State’s relevancy 
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objection, defense counsel explained that the desired testimony was an 

important component of establishing a motive for the purported victim to 

testify untruthfully. Counsel explained that, during her deposition, the 

purported victim indicated “basically that she got divorced because of her 

drug use.” Additionally, defense counsel provided a proffer of the 

questions that were to be addressed to Appellant and her expected 

responses, with the plan being to elicit testimony that Appellant had firsthand knowledge that the purported victim and her husband argued about 

the former’s drug use and “how much money was being spent” on drugs, 

and that this was “a primary reason for [the couple’s] divorce.”

We agree with Appellant that the above-noted desired testimony was 

relevant to Appellant’s defense that the purported victim fabricated the 

allegations against Appellant to hide the true nature of the charges from 

her husband. The testimony regarding the purported victim’s marriage

and divorce was integral to Appellant’s defense strategy of explaining the 

purported victim’s motive to lie to her husband (and in turn to law 

enforcement and the jury)—to cover up her drug purchases. As such, the 

evidence was relevant and should not have been excluded by the trial 

court. 

As the evidence was relevant, the pertinent question now becomes 

whether the exclusion was harmless. A proper harmless error analysis 

involves more than a mere weighing of the evidence, the “harmless error 

analysis . . . requires appellate courts to first consider the nature of the 

error complained of and then the effect this error had on the triers of fact.” 

Daughtry v. State, 804 So. 2d 426, 428 (Fla. 4th DCA 2001) (alteration in 

original) (quoting Goodwin v. State, 751 So. 2d 537, 540 (Fla. 1999)). “The 

harmless error test . . . places the burden on the state, as the beneficiary 

of the error, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the error complained 

of did not contribute to the verdict or, alternatively stated, that there is no 

reasonable possibility that the error contributed to the conviction.” State 

v. DiGuilio, 491 So. 2d 1129, 1135 (Fla. 1986). 

In the instant case, the State has not met this burden. One of the most 

incriminating pieces of evidence against Appellant, other than the direct 

testimony of the purported victim, was the text message exchange between 

Appellant and the purported victim where Appellant admits that she made 

a mistake and appears to confess to stealing the money. At trial, Appellant 

attempted to explain that the messages were fabricated to deceive the 

purported victim’s husband and that such an elaborate ruse was 

necessary because the purported victim’s marriage was at risk, resulting 

in Appellant hiding the drug purchases by falsifying salon purchases and 

then pretending to have “made a mistake.” 
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Additionally, the State implicitly recognized the importance of this 

evidence and argument for Appellant’s defense. During closing 

arguments, counsel for the State ridiculed the defense theory, noting:

All right. Let’s talk about facts not in evidence, right? She 

just got up here and said drugs caused the divorce of this 

marriage. That’s not a fact in evidence. It’s made up. You 

didn’t hear that from the stand. That’s made up. If she wants 

to talk about facts not in evidence, let’s start with that. 

Thus, the State first argued to the trial court that Appellant’s testimony 

that drug use caused the divorce should be excluded because it was not

relevant, and then during closing it argued to the jury that this defense 

theory was not relevant because it was excluded. The fact that the State 

chose to respond to Appellant’s defense theory by noting “[y]ou didn’t hear 

that from the stand” underscores the relevance of the excluded testimony. 

Accordingly, we cannot say that the exclusion of Appellant’s testimony was 

harmless and are compelled to reverse and remand for a new trial. 

In so doing, we caution the prosecutor to exercise additional discretion 

when addressing the jury during closing arguments. Comments such as: 

“[w]ell, that’s a hot one, right?,” and “I think this case is obvious, I hope 

you think it is, too,” are inappropriate and do not assist the jury in 

analyzing, evaluating, or applying the evidence to the facts of the case. See 

Williamson v. State, 994 So. 2d 1000, 1012 (Fla. 2008). Rather, the first

comment injected unnecessary sarcasm into the argument and the latter 

comment improperly apprised the jury of the prosecutor’s personal 

opinion. As we are reversing due to the improper exclusion of relevant 

evidence, we need not decide whether these remarks, in conjunction with 

other questionable comments, deprived Appellant of a fair trial and rose to 

the level of fundamental error. 

Conclusion

Because Appellant’s testimony regarding the nature of the purported 

victim’s marriage as it related to the latter’s alleged drug purchases was 

improperly excluded and the error was not harmless, we reverse and 

remand for a new trial. 

Reversed and remanded for a new trial.

WARNER and DAMOORGIAN, JJ., concur.
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* * *

Not final until disposition of timely filed motion for rehearing.