Opinion ID: 2330570
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Procedural Posture and Trial Court Findings

Text: Before trial, Warrior filed a discovery request, seeking, in part, the State's production of the criminal record[s] of all non-police and non-medical witnesses for the State and [a]ll evidence exculpatory to the defendant. Sometime after the jury reached its verdict, the State informed defense counsel about its discovery of Moore's 1994 juvenile adjudication for burglary, an adjudication of which the State was previously unaware. One of the arguments in Warrior's posttrial Motion for Acquittal or in the Alternative for New Trial claimed that because the State failed to provide information of this adjudication before or during trial, Warrior was prejudiced because she was not able to use this conviction involving dishonesty or false statement as a means of impeaching [Moore's] credibility as a witness. The exact timing of the State's discovery of this information is not clear from the record. The State simply asserted in its response to Warrior's motion for new trial that [t]he State disclosed this information to Defendant upon receiving a copy of Moore's Pre-Sentence Report. At the hearing on Warrior's motion for new trial, the prosecutor explained that before trial the State had entered Moore's name into two national computer databases available to law enforcement, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and the Interstate Identification Index (Triple I). (NCIC is a computerized index of criminal justice information. United States v. McKenzie, 779 F.Supp.2d 1242, 1243 [D.N.M. 2011]. Triple I is a criminal history database. Dempsey v. City of Baldwin, 143 Fed. Appx. 976, 980 n. 7 [10th Cir.2005] [unpublished opinion].) Unfortunately, Moore's juvenile adjudication, which occurred approximately 14 years earlier, did not show up on the computer search. The trial judge made the following findings regarding this evidence: I think Mr. Moore was a substantial witness here, and he testified at length that he had lied to the police on several occasions. He was very forthcoming about that, as he pretty much had to be. Of course, he was as most people do when they are charged with a crime ... not going to tell the police that he was involved in this case.... [A]ccording to the evidence that the Court heard and this jury heard, he was the least culpable of the three people involved in this by a long shot and he was the logical person for the State to make a deal with. They made that deal. He was cross-examined at length about the deal. I don't believe that the prior conviction from 14 years back as a juvenile was withheld by the State. I think it was in actual likelihood overlooked by the State, and I don't believe that it would have had any impact, given the other instances of him being untruthful. So I don't believe it is a basis, given the total weight of the evidence here, to grant a new trial. So the motion will be denied.