Opinion ID: 752499
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: evidence of the victim's drug charge

Text: 140 In his fifth claim, Mr. Duvall asserts that his Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated because the trial court refused to allow Mr. Duvall to present evidence that Karla had pled guilty to a felony drug charge. At trial, the jury heard an audiotape of Mr. Duvall's confession to Sheriff Alexander. In his confession, Mr. Duvall stated that he killed his wife after she told him in a telephone conversation that she was resuming her use of illegal drugs. He explained that Karla was angry because he had called her doctor to cancel her prescription. Mr. Duvall stated that his wife told him that she had secured an alternate supply of the drug despite his efforts to prevent her from using drugs. 141 The defense sought to cross-examine Sheriff Alexander by introducing evidence that Karla Duvall had pled guilty to a felony drug charge. The trial judge sustained the state's objection: 142 I do want to point out for the Record a synopsis of conversations that occurred in Chambers yesterday following an objection by the State to Mr. Prince's attempt to elicit from the Sheriff evidence concerning drug usage of the decedent, Karla Duvall. The general objection was made on the basis of character evidence. We went into Chambers and reviewed the Statutes, including Section 2404 of Title 12, and at the end of all the conversations, the Court's ruling was that Mr. Prince could go into the general reputation and character of the decedent for drug use, but the sticking point was in reference to this charge that had been filed, which was a ... case that Mrs. Duvall had received a Deferred Imposition of Sentence, and the Court's ruling was that Mr. Prince could not elicit testimony concerning that, since it was not a conviction. 7 143 Tr. at 753. 144 As discussed above in Part IV, on habeas review we are not concerned with whether the trial court properly excluded evidence of Karla Duvall's drug charge under the Oklahoma rules of evidence. Hopkinson, 866 F.2d at 1200. Instead, to be eligible for federal habeas relief, a petitioner must prove that the state trial court's evidentiary ruling rendered the trial so fundamentally unfair as to constitute a denial of federal constitutional rights. Id. at 1197. Our inquiry hinges on the materiality of the excluded evidence to the defense. Matthews v. Price, 83 F.3d 328, 331 (10th Cir.1996). 145 We hold that the trial court's exclusion of the victim's drug charge did not render Mr. Duvall's trial so fundamentally unfair as to warrant habeas relief. As the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals noted in Mr. Duvall's direct appeal, the victim's death occurred approximately seven hours after the telephone call. Duvall, 825 P.2d at 627-28. Although the evidence may have had some relevance to Mr. Duvall's theory of provocation, the evidence would nonetheless be ineffectual in light of the other undisputed evidence that Mr. Duvall did not meet the requirements for an instruction on manslaughter or second degree murder, as discussed in Part III. The admission of Karla's drug charge would not have required the trial judge to instruct the jury on any lesser-included offense. The seven-hour cooling off period and the absence of any other evidence that would tend to support a charge of manslaughter or second degree murder rendered Karla's drug conviction immaterial to any issue in the case. As such, we conclude that the exclusion of Karla Duvall's drug conviction did not render the trial fundamentally unfair. We therefore conclude that Mr. Duvall is not entitled to habeas relief on this ground. 146