Opinion ID: 2742964
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Impermissible Burden Shifting

Text: As the dissent in the Third District correctly observed, “the prosecutor was allowed to ask the detective at trial why he visited the defendant—to allow him to dispel any concerns that he did anything wrong” and the detective “also testified at trial that the defendant could provide no documentation to support his position that the money owed was a loan rather than a theft.” Id. (Ramirez, J., dissenting). When Warmington answered that he could not produce this evidence, Detective Abolsky testified that Warmington was “immediately arrested.” Id. We agree with the dissent below that this line of questioning clearly constituted impermissible burden shifting. The conflict cases illustrate this point. Just as in Hayes, where this Court held that State-elicited testimony involving a defendant’s pretrial failure to take steps to prove his innocence impermissibly shifted the burden of proof because that testimony “may have led the jury to believe that [the defendant] had an obligation - 13 - to test the evidence found at the scene of the murder and to prove that the hair and blood samples did not match his own,” Hayes, 660 So. 2d at 265, Detective Abolsky’s testimony regarding his pretrial investigation may have led the jury to believe that Warmington had a duty to produce exculpatory evidence. Indeed, the line of questioning in this case is strikingly similar to the questioning in the conflict cases, each of which correctly recognized, in accordance with this Court’s long-standing prohibition on burden shifting, that the testimony was improper. As an alternative argument, the State asserts that Warmington invited Detective Abolsky’s testimony by asserting, during the detective’s pretrial investigation, that he used the money he received from the Pistols to fund a loan to a third party. However, just as in the conflict cases, Warmington’s asserted defense—that he used the money to fund a loan to a third party and therefore did not commit theft—is not an affirmative defense for which he voluntarily assumed any burden of proof. Simply asserting a defense to a crime does not create any issue for which a defendant “carries [the] burden of proof.” Id. (citing Jackson, 575 So. 2d at 188). Therefore, in the absence of an affirmative defense for which the defendant carries the burden of proof, which was not present in this case, the narrow exception allowing the State to comment on the defendant’s failure to produce exculpatory evidence is inapplicable, and accordingly, we reject the State’s alternative argument. - 14 - For all these reasons, we conclude that the State’s questioning of Detective Abolsky could have erroneously led the jury to believe that Warmington carried the burden of introducing exculpatory evidence and, therefore, impermissibly shifted the burden of proof from the State to Warmington. Accordingly, we now must analyze whether this error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. See Jackson, 575 So. 2d at 189.