Opinion ID: 75950
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: redaction of the whites-only policy

Text: 60 The Outlaws Constitution states that only white males may be members. During its search of various Outlaws clubhouses, the FBI seized copies of the Outlaws Constitution, four of which contained this provision. In the first indictment against Bowman, the Government included the whites-only policy among its allegations. The court struck this allegation as irrelevant. At trial, the Government introduced the seized Constitutions, attempting to show a unity of purpose among the various Outlaws chapters. Bowman objected to the documents and asked the court to strike the whites-only policy from them. (R.10 at 174-75 & 202; R.12 at 12; R.29 at 6.) The court refused to do so. When the Government published the documents on an overhead projector at trial, the whites-only policy was visible to the jury. (R.10 at 177.) Bowman argues on appeal that the district court should have stricken the whites-only policy and that its admission was inflammatory and prejudicial. We review the district court's evidentiary rulings for an abuse of discretion. United States v. Mills, 138 F.3d 928, 935 (11th Cir.1998). 61 Bowman mounts his attack under Federal Rule of Evidence 403, which states that, [a]lthough relevant, evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, or misleading the jury, or by considerations of undue delay, waste of time, or needless presentation of cumulative evidence. Fed.R.Evid. 403. Since Bowman was not charged with any racially-motivated crimes, his allegiance to a racist organization is not relevant to his guilt or innocence in this case. Still, the repetition of the policy was not entirely irrelevant since it tended to show the uniformity of the Outlaws enterprise. But there was other evidence of this uniformity, as many of the constitutional provisions were repeated; each of the constitutions for instance, included the requirements that Outlaws must be twenty-one years-old and own their own motorcycles. Because it was cumulative, the evidence of the whites-only policy had limited probative value. 62 This limited probative value was, in our view, outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice. The uneasy racial history of criminal law in the United States has yielded a simple rule-of-thumb: There is no place in a criminal prosecution for gratuitous references to race, especially when a defendant's life hangs in the balance. Elementary concepts of equal protection and due process alike forbid a prosecutor to seek to procure a verdict on the basis of racial animosity. Smith v. Farley, 59 F.3d 659, 663 (7th Cir.1995). In this case, the Government, whose interest is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done, Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88, 55 S.Ct. 629, 633, 79 L.Ed. 1314 (1935), should have scrupulously avoided the possibility that the jury's verdict might be clouded by racial issues. Furthermore, the court could have, and should have, prevented the injection of racial issues by simply redacting the whites-only policy. 63 Nevertheless, the whites-only policy comprised but a single phrase in a single sentence on each of four documents admitted into evidence. Over the course of the trial, these four phrases became buried in the mountain of documentary evidence against Bowman, which included thousands of documents and photographs. Furthermore, over fifty witnesses testified regarding Bowman's criminal activity. Since the evidence against Bowman was overwhelming, and the whites-only policy was but a brief flicker in Bowman's month-long trial, the admission of the policy, while error, did not affect Bowman's substantial rights. See Fed.R.Crim.P. 52.