Opinion ID: 1801680
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Jury Viewings of the Crime Scenes

Text: Defendant contends the trial court erred prejudicially by granting, over his objection, the prosecution's motion to allow the jury to view the various crime scenes in Sonoma County. In supplemental briefing, defendant argues that the court erred by failing to obtain his personal waiver of his presence during certain portions of the jury's view of the crime scenes. (35) The trial court may allow the jury to view the place in which the offense is charged to have been committed, or in which any other material fact occurred. (§ 1119.) We review for abuse of discretion a trial court's ruling on a party's motion for a jury view. ( People v. Lawley (2002) 27 Cal.4th 102, 158 [115 Cal.Rptr.2d 614, 38 P.3d 461].) Here, the jury toured the exterior of Polly's home in Petaluma and the surrounding neighborhood and had a nighttime and daytime viewing of the Pythian Road site where defendant's car had become stuck in a ditch on the night of Polly's kidnapping. Because of the potential prejudice posed by an unofficial memorial erected at the site where Polly's body had been recovered in Cloverdale, the trial court did not allow the jury to visit the site; instead, the jurors observed the location from a spot roughly one-half mile away. In light of the notoriety of the case and security concerns, defendant attended the viewing while secured in a police van with tinted, closed windows. As a result, although defendant accompanied the jury for each viewing, he could not fully hear any comments and could not see some portions of the viewings. Consequently, the trial court obtained from defendant's counsel waivers of defendant's audible appearance for the jury's viewing of the exterior of Polly's home in Petaluma and its nighttime viewing of the Pythian Road site. Defendant's counsel also waived defendant's personal appearance during the jury's daytime viewing of the latter site, as the police van containing defendant was parked in a place where defendant could not see the site. We find no error in the trial court's decision to permit the jury viewings of the crime scenes under the described conditions. The court reasoned that the probative value of seeing the locations in person could not be duplicated by photographs or witness testimony, and that the viewings would allow the jury to better gauge the distances involved between the locations at issue. Defendant fails to demonstrate any prejudice outweighing the trial court's sound reasons for permitting the jury viewings of the crime scenes. (36) As to the trial court's failure to obtain a personal waiver from defendant pertaining to his inability to see or hear some aspects of the jury viewings, it is true that a trial court must obtain a personal waiver of a defendant's appearance at a jury's viewing of a crime scene (§ 977; People v. Moon (2005) 37 Cal.4th 1, 20-21 [32 Cal.Rptr.3d 894, 117 P.3d 591]; see also People v. Garcia (2005) 36 Cal.4th 777 [31 Cal.Rptr.3d 541, 115 P.3d 1191]); but the court's failure to obtain such a waiver is statutory error, reversible only if there is a reasonable probability that the result would have been more favorable to defendant without the error ( People v. Moon, supra, 37 Cal.4th at pp. 20-21). Here, because defendant provides no basis for concluding that the result of his trial would have been different if he had been able to see all aspects of the jury viewings, any error under section 977 was harmless. ( Moon, at p. 21.)