Opinion ID: 3154559
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Kingdom City Shooting

Text: The district court granted a motion in limine to exclude evidence of a shooting incident in Missouri that involved certain of Mr. Redifer’s co-conspirators. At trial, when discussing the contents of a notebook found in her bedroom, a government witness made an incidental reference to the shooting. The district court denied the defendants’ motion for a mistrial based on the reference. Mr. Redifer now argues that given this reference, “[t]he jury could now assume or infer [that he] was involved with or associated with persons involved in robbery and shootings thereby making him a general bad actor.” Aplt. Opening Br. at 21. We discussed this issue in detail in connection with Mr. Hohn’s direct appeal. In our decision in that case, we stated: [A]t trial, as the government was questioning a witness concerning the contents of a notebook found in her bedroom, the witness identified names in the notebook as “names of the people that were involved in the shootout in Kingdom City.” R., Vol. 2 at 1305. The defendants immediately moved for a mistrial based on the witness’s reference to the Missouri shooting. The district court determined that the government had inadvertently elicited the comment. As a curative matter, it called each of the jurors individually into the courtroom and informed each juror that the statement was being stricken from the record and that they should disregard it. The court also reminded the jurors that the names mentioned in the notebook were not those of the defendants. Finally, it asked each juror three questions: whether they could disregard the statement as instructed; whether they were still able to be fair and impartial to all parties in the case; and whether they were still able to decide the case based solely on the evidence admitted at trial and the court’s instructions. Each juror answered all three questions affirmatively. The district court then denied the motion for mistrial. 10 We review the district court’s denial of the motion for mistrial for an abuse of discretion. United States v. Morgan, 748 F.3d 1024, 1039 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, ––– U.S. ––––, 135 S.Ct. 298, 190 L.Ed.2d 217 (2014). Where inadmissible evidence is admitted, “a cautionary instruction is ordinarily sufficient to cure any alleged prejudice to the defendant and declaring a mistrial is only appropriate where a cautionary instruction is unlikely to cure the prejudicial effect of an error.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Here, the shooting reference was unintentionally elicited, and the district court very carefully instructed and questioned each juror about the reference, satisfying itself that “the character of the testimony [was not] such that it [would] create so strong an impression on the minds of the jurors that they [would] be unable to disregard it in their consideration of the case, although admonished to do so.” Id. at 1040. Denial of the motion for a mistrial was therefore not an abuse of discretion. Hohn, 606 F. App’x at 907-08. The same reasoning applies here. The district court not only struck the offending testimony and gave the jurors a cautionary instruction, it took the extraordinary step of questioning each juror individually concerning the inadvertently elicited testimony to insure that it did not unduly prejudice the defendants. For the same reasons stated in our previous decision, the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Mr. Redifer’s motion for a mistrial based on the reference to the Kingdom City shooting.