Opinion ID: 2517801
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Admission of hacker excerpt from defendant's letter to Oberman

Text: During her testimony for the People, Celebration Oberman read to the jury, without defense objection, passages from two letters, previously marked for identification as People's exhibits 72 and 73, that defendant had written her from jail. From exhibit 73, postmarked December 4, 1989, Oberman read: `If any of your friends attack me, tell them that you like your toy boys to be darkly handsome and charming and dangerous, hackers, murderers, pirates, and that I fit the bill.' From exhibit 72, postmarked December 19, 1989, Oberman read: `Sorry I don't know more about kitchens. I do know about hacking, however; and I could easily hack you a cart to make pizzas.' At the conclusion of the People's case, defendant objected on relevance grounds, and under Evidence Code section 352, to admission of these letters, and in particular to admission of the pages containing the passages Oberman had readpages now marked for identification as People's exhibits 72-A and 73-A, respectively. Counsel urged that the term hacking in exhibit 72-Athere used in connection with making a pizza cartdid not pertain to any trial issue, but was highly prejudicial given the facts of the case. As to exhibit 73-A, in which defendant said he fit the bill as a hacker[ ], murderer[ ], [and] pirate[ ], counsel asserted that even if hacker[ ] was not related to the pizza cart reference in exhibit 72-A, its use next to the word murderer[ ] produced a prejudicial effect far in excess of its probative value. The court ruled that exhibit 72-A, the pizza cart passage, would be excluded on 352, in that the hacking reference there, read in context, appeared not connected to the case. However, the court admitted exhibit 73-A as an admission of guilt, i.e., that defendant was a murderer, a hacker, that kind of stuff, and [t]hat's why it's going in. In his trial testimony, defendant stated that hacker was a computer term which had come to have a pejorative connotation, but originally meant a person who would elegantly solve a problem by hacking at it but persistently trying to find a solution. He said that while he and Oberman were in Palm Springs, he had read to Oberman, a computer illiterate, from a book about hackers as computer heroes, and as a result, she had come to call defendant her little hacker. Defendant now urges that, by admitting exhibit 73-A, the trial court abused its discretion under Evidence Code section 352. He asserts the trial court admitted this exhibit even though it recognized that hacker was not used in a murderous context. In particular, he insists, by placing before the jury defendant's self-reference as a hackeran inflammatory term for purposes of this particular casethe court denied him his Eighth Amendment right to a reliable capital trial. We find no abuse of discretion. At the outset, defendant is mistaken that the trial court saw no sinister implication to defendant's use of hacker in exhibit 73-A. On the contrary, as indicated above, while the court considered that the hacking reference in exhibit 72-A was probably innocent, it ruled that the hacker reference in exhibit 73-A could be considered an admission of guilt. The court properly concluded that exhibit 73-A was probative on this issue. Though the meaning of the disputed passage was perhaps open to interpretation, a sinister construction was reasonable. Under these circumstances, it was for the jury to make the determination. (See, e.g., People v. Kraft (2000) 23 Cal.4th 978, 1032-1035, 99 Cal.Rptr.2d 1, 5 P.3d 68 ( Kraft ).) Nor, as the trial court implicitly found, was the evidence so uniquely inflammatory that its potential for unfair prejudice clearly outweighed its probative value. Indeed, by admitting this letter excerpt, the prosecution simply asked the fact finder to interpret the defendant's own bragging words. There is no basis to conclude the trial court erred by admitting exhibit 73-A. Moreover, any error was harmless by any applicable standard. The jurors had already heard the disputed passages, read to them from the witness stand by Oberman. Under these circumstances, and beyond a reasonable doubt, later admission of exhibit 73-A into evidence cannot have affected the guilt or penalty outcome. No basis for reversal appears.