Opinion ID: 2621809
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the dropped object and the small knife

Text: {9} There are two other facts which bear on the possibility that Defendant acted in self-defense when he stabbed the victim. The first is the testimony of Cora Wyatt that while the two men were arguing she saw the victim drop an object that Defendant kicked away. This took place, however, before and at a place other than where the ultimate altercation occurred. It did not happen within the area demarked by detectives as the crime scene. No argument that the object was a weapon which prompted Defendant to attack was made by defense counsel. The second fact is the discovery of a key chain with a small knife on it found in the grassy area north of where the victim finally collapsed. The knife was said to have had blood on it, but apparently no tests were ever run to see whose blood it might have been. Defendant argues for the first time on appeal that the jury may have inferred that this knife may have been used to kill the victim or that the victim may have employed it against Defendant. Except for one brief reference to the item by Detective Barnes, it was never referred to during trial again. We think the failure of defendant to take up either of these two factsthe dropped object or the small knifeindicates that he did not believe them to be, or lead to, even slight evidence of self-defense. Defendant's obligation is to introduce evidence that [would] raise in the minds of the jurors a reasonable doubt about the matter. State v. Parish, 118 N.M. 39, 44, 878 P.2d 988, 993 (1994). Defendant is attempting to raise a reasonable doubt in the mind of this Court, having failed, or even failed to try, to do so below. Furthermore, there is no dispute on the point that the dropping of the object took place well before Defendant might have been under attack such that he was responding to the attack when the stabbed he victim. Also, the victim did not collapse at the place of the altercation, and the knife was found away from and beyond the point where the victim did collapse. There is no testimony or other evidence linking the dropped object with the found knife, and the facts are not amenable to any possible reconstruction of events which could lead to the conclusion that the victim used a knife to initially attack Defendant. Considering the general failure on the part of Defendant to get the issue before the jury or to inject the suggestion that the facts indicated he acted in self-defense, we have no difficulty concluding there was effectively no evidence of self-defense as to the matters of the dropped object and the knife, see Cooper, 128 N.M. 428, 993 P.2d 745, 1999-NMCA-159, ¶ 7, and that there was no evidentiary foundation at trial for the presentation of the issue to the jury.