Opinion ID: 2066722
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Whether the District Court Erred in Admitting Testimony Concerning a Photograph Showing the Defendant in Possession of Firearms.

Text: Over defendant's objection at trial, the State was allowed to introduce testimony of a police officer that a photograph of the defendant taken approximately seven weeks prior to the alleged murder showed him to be in possession of a Smith & Wesson model 422 pistol. None of the witnesses testified concerning other firearms that were shown to be in defendant's possession in the photograph, and the photograph was never shown to the jury. Evidence of experiments conducted by Department of Criminal Investigation lab technicians revealed that rifling characteristics produced by the Smith & Wesson model 422 were similar to the rifling found on a .22 caliber bullet recovered from Monty Williams' body. The district court instructed the jury that the testimony about the photograph was only to be considered with respect to whether defendant had access to a .22 caliber handgun. Defendant urges that the foundation laid for the testimony was insufficient to show that the gun in the photograph was in any way connected to the crime and that the evidence depicted in the photo was remote. The test of relevancy is whether the evidence offered would render the desired inference more probable than it would be without such evidence. State v. Knox, 536 N.W.2d 735, 738 (Iowa 1995). District courts enjoy a rather broad discretion in determining issues of relevancy. Id. Remoteness only renders evidence irrelevant if the elapsed time is so great as to negative any rational or logical connection between the facts sought to be proved and the evidence offered. State v. Zeliadt, 541 N.W.2d 558, 561 (Iowa App.1995). It would not be an unwarranted assumption to believe that a handgun possessed by defendant seven months before the killing would still be available to him at the time of the crime. In evaluating the trial court's decision to allow the testimony derived from viewing the photograph, we are mindful that this was a case in which there was a very close question as to the need for corroboration of accomplice testimony. It was the testimony of the alleged accomplices that defendant had used a gun of this general description. The bullets retrieved from the murder victim were from a gun of this general description. We believe that the testimony was properly allowed as corroborative evidence of the accomplices' testimony.