Opinion ID: 2630568
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: the exclusion of rescission and resale evidence

Text: ¶ 38 Defendants also maintain that the trial court erred in excluding evidence that defendants offered to repurchase the property after the fraud was discovered, and that, four years after the transaction in question, it sold the property at a substantial profit. A trial court's rulings with regard to the admissibility of evidence are generally accorded substantial deference: [t]rial courts have wide latitude in making determinations of relevance, probativeness, and prejudice. State v. 633 East 640 North, 942 P.2d 925, 929 (Utah 1997). The rules of evidence explicitly allow trial courts to exclude evidence when its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of... confusion of the issues ... or misleading the jury. Utah R. Evid. 403. Had the evidence the defendants proposed been admitted, plaintiff would undoubtedly have wished to introduce its own evidence regarding the money it had already spent improving the property prior to its discovery of the fraud and the use to which it might have put its money had it not been fraudulently induced to buy the property. Admitting the proposed evidence could very well have led to the confusion of the jury and to increasingly speculative evidence of what might have been had appellants not defrauded appellee. The trial court was well within its discretion to avoid this result by excluding the evidence.