Opinion ID: 2599880
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Instructions on Uncharged Criminal Acts (Oliver)

Text: Defendants have argued on appeal that evidence of uncharged crimes was wrongly admitted to show their violent character and disposition. We now address Oliver's related contention that the trial court failed to adequately instruct the jury on how to evaluate such evidence. Oliver claims as an additional legal consequence that his due process rights were violated under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, and under parallel provisions of the state Constitution. The trial court instructed the jury that it could consider whether Lewis made threats against Mizell. However, the instruction also stated that such evidence was not admitted against Oliver and could not be considered against him. The court also gave an instruction closely conforming to the standard instruction, CALJIC No. 2.50 (5th ed.1988), on the manner in which the jury generally was to evaluate the other-crimes evidence admitted against one defendant or both. Specifically, the evidence could not be considered for dispositional reasons, but solely to establish intent, identity, knowledge, or means to commit a crime. (See Evid.Code, § 1101, subd. (b).) Oliver mainly argues that in four of the five incidents in which Lewis abused Mizell and threatened to kill her and her family, the evidence showed that Lewis not only made threats, but also engaged in physical violence. Thus, according to Oliver, the instruction's limiting command to consider incidents involving threats solely against Lewis left the jury free to consider four out of the five violent incidents against Oliver as well. Oliver has forfeited this claim. Because he did not seek clarification of the instructions concerning the threats and uncharged acts, he cannot complain about their lack of clarity on appeal. ( People v. Coffman and Marlow, supra, 34 Cal.4th 1, 122, 17 Cal.Rptr.3d 710, 96 P.3d 30.) Also, no error occurred. The instruction's reference to threats was not misleading, confusing, or incomplete. The jury could not have misapplied the instruction to Oliver's detriment. In the five incidents in question, namely, that Lewis threatened to kill Mizell with a knife and nicked her with it in September 1988, threatened to kill her and choked her in February 1989, threatened to kill her and held a knife to her throat in an alley in March 1989, assaulted and threatened to kill her in June 1989, and threatened to kill her on July 18, 1989, after she moved out, the testimony focused on Lewis's threats, whether or not those threats were made more real to Mizell by Lewis's use of physical violence. More to the point, there was no evidence that Oliver was present during any of the incidents in question. Hence, the jury had no basis on which to attribute Lewis's violent conduct to Oliver.