Opinion ID: 4192155
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: what affirmatively appears

Text: With “the entire cause” examined, then, what “affirmatively appears”? This case was a pure contest of credibility and character. Though charged with the murder of Melvin, the defendant’s trial was more about his abuse of Louise—and what that uncharged misconduct said about the kind of person he was. Did the defendant kill 27 Puzzlingly, the jurors were not provided with a written copy of the court’s instructions and, when they requested as much during deliberations, the court, without explanation, only agreed to give them a copy of the two instructions it provided on the elements of each charged offense (first-degree and second-degree murder). 28 What I have summarized in this opinion is but a glimpse of the trial court’s apparent difficulties in instructing the jurors and carrying out other procedural matters in this trial; a full cataloging is not needed here, but the record well reflects them, and they are troubling. At oral argument before this Court, the prosecutor suggested that they might be attributable to the fact that the judge who ended up presiding over this trial was a former probate-court judge who was standing in and had not previously presided over a murder case. How exactly these circumstances came to pass, and whether they may account for the court’s difficulties, the record doesn’t show—nor does any of that matter. The jurors, the defendant, and Mr. Weathers deserved better from our courts than what the record here betrays, particularly with a matter as grave as murder on the line. 23 Melvin? By the time of trial, there simply wasn’t any hard evidence that either side could offer to guide the jurors on that question. There were 30-year-old memories and beliefs and inferences, but no substantiation, and no lucid reason why the defendant would have snuck into Louise’s house in the dead of a random winter’s night for no purpose other than to plunge a knife through Melvin’s chest while he slept. So the prosecution asked the jurors a different question: Was the defendant a murderer? Was he the sort of man that had such malice and violence inside him? And the prosecution focused intently on proving that he must be—because, just look what he did to Louise. Of course, there wasn’t any hard evidence on this secondary question, either, and so the parties found the friends and memories they could. The Kountz family found more, but the defendant found some, and each presented to the jurors what they had. From these proofs, the jurors were tasked with determining the defendant’s guilt. They were given legal rules for making that assessment, rules which were to shape and bind how they could, as a matter of law, answer the questions posed to them and determine whether the defendant’s guilt of the crime charged had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Rules which would, in turn, assure us, as appellate courts, that the decision reached was not merely one of passion or bias, but of law. And rules which we correspondingly, and duly, presume the jurors follow with rigorous, near-panacean precision. See, e.g., People v Breidenbach, 489 Mich 1, 13; 798 NW2d 738 (2011); People v Dupree, 486 Mich 693, 711; 788 NW2d 399 (2010); People v Graves, 458 Mich 476, 486; 581 NW2d 229 (1998); People v Abraham, 256 Mich App 265, 279; 662 NW2d 836 (2003); People v Crawford, 232 Mich App 608, 619; 591 NW2d 669 (1998) 24 (“A court must instruct the jury so that it may correctly and intelligently decide the case.”). The court correctly instructed the jurors on the role these rules must play in their verdict. But the court then botched the rules themselves—namely, by failing to inform the jurors that, as a matter of law, the defendant’s character evidence could in itself give rise to a reasonable doubt that would foreclose a finding of guilt. Instead, the jurors heard about a phantom cross-examination of the defendant’s witnesses regarding his bad character and about the “other acts” testimony the prosecution had offered to prove that bad character (and through it, his guilt). As is beyond dispute at this point, this was a mistake; the defendant was entitled to have the jurors informed of the potential legal significance of his evidence of good character, not to have them needlessly reminded of his alleged bad character. The panel detailed why this mistake, given both its nature and the weight and strength of the untainted evidence otherwise presented to the jurors, was not harmless to the jurors’ verdict and thus required a new trial under Lukity. Lyles (On Remand), unpub op at 3-6. The majority, however, seems to think that this mistake simply couldn’t have been that bad. I don’t see why—or how the panel reversibly erred in applying Lukity to conclude otherwise. First, I agree with the panel that “the nature of th[is] error” was, in a word, big. It deprived the jurors of instruction on whether and how they could consider the only affirmative evidence the defendant could and did offer on what became the core question at his trial: whether he was the kind of man who would commit the crime charged. And to make matters worse, the instruction instead gestured the jurors toward the 25 prosecution’s evidence to that effect. It thus strikes me as perfectly apt to say, as the panel did, that the court’s misinstruction “eviscerated the significance of [the] defendant’s character evidence” and, with it, his “best defense to th[e prosecution’s] evidence of his past violence,” 29 id. at 3, 5—thereby tainting the jurors’ consideration of that evidence in reaching a verdict on his guilt. 29 In criticizing the panel’s reasoning on this point, the majority calls out this language, but incompletely. It says the panel concluded “that ‘[d]efendant’s best defense . . . was his evidence regarding his peaceful character,’ ” when in fact, as noted above, the panel’s full statement was more targeted—that his “evidence regarding his peaceful character” was his “best defense to [the prosecution’s] evidence of his past violence” and was “rendered largely ineffective by the trial court’s failure to properly instruct the jury on its use.” Lyles (On Remand), unpub op at 5 (emphasis added). The panel elsewhere spoke more broadly regarding the defense’s strategy at trial, which was “to deny responsibility for the murder,” “argue[] that there was no evidence tying [him] to” it, and “bolster the credibility of [those] denials, and . . . refute the prosecution’s evidence of [his] past violence, by introducing evidence that [he] was a peaceful individual.” Id. at 4. I see no flaw in any of these characterizations. The majority also questions why, if the defendant’s character evidence were so important to his defense, his counsel didn’t raise it in her opening or closing arguments to the jurors. The record before us doesn’t make that clear. Maybe she was counting on the court’s jury instructions to do the important work with respect to this evidence, or had some other strategic reason. (If that were so, however, one might have expected an even more strenuous objection by counsel to the court’s failure to correct its misinstruction.) Or maybe—and as seems more likely, all things considered—she simply mishandled this key aspect of the defendant’s case, just like the trial court did. That is a question for another day (and one to be answered under a different standard of prejudice than what governs here, see Strickland v Washington, 466 US 668, 694; 104 S Ct 2052; 80 L Ed 2d 674 (1984)). In any event, I fail to see how counsel’s handling of this evidence in arguments, deficient or not, affects whether the evidence, on the record before us, did constitute the “best defense” the defendant had to the prosecution’s attack on his character, which was central to his trial. To the contrary, counsel’s failure to argue this evidence to the jurors only exacerbated the harm from the court’s failure to instruct them on the evidence and the potentially dispositive legal effect it could have on their determination of guilt. 26 But how much harm could there really have been from this? Not much, the majority says. The jurors, after all, heard and were permitted to consider the defendant’s character evidence; the error here was “only” a misinstruction about that evidence. Given their presumptive import to a verdict, however, jury instructions, and errors therein, can’t be brushed aside quite so easily; indeed, the harm from an instructional error can be so inherently pervasive as to categorically require a new trial, no matter how cleanly the evidence may have come in. See, e.g., People v Cain, 498 Mich 108, 117 n 4; 869 NW2d 829 (2015) (listing “defective reasonable-doubt instructions” among the errors that have been deemed to be structural). And here, while the jurors were presented with the defendant’s character evidence, they were given no legal guidance, no rule, regarding whether and how they could consider this evidence in reaching a verdict. More specifically, and most importantly, they were not told that the evidence could itself legally determine that verdict. This is no small thing. Attempting to make it smaller, the majority points to other instructions the jurors did receive—that “[a] reasonable doubt is a fair, honest doubt growing out of the evidence or the lack of evidence,” and that they, as jurors, must consider and weigh all the evidence in reaching a verdict. These are generic rules—fundamental and important, to be sure, but not necessarily adequate in themselves to meet the instructional needs of every case. If they were, it seems there would never be any need to provide, nor any harm from failing to provide, the many, more specific instructions that build them out— that inform the jury how they can consider and weigh the particular types of evidence in a given case, and how that evidence can and cannot prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the sort of information imparted by M Crim JI 5.8a(1), and neither these general 27 instructions, nor any others the jurors heard, provided it. We presume the jurors follow the rules, not that they already know them. And if anything, the rules the court did provide to the jurors only made the harm from this omission worse. The jurors did, after all, receive instructions akin to M Crim JI 5.8a(1); they simply were given only the ones that governed the prosecution’s proofs. The defendant, they were told, could be convicted based on the prosecution’s “identification testimony alone,” if they believed it proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His move out of state, on the other hand, couldn’t alone prove his guilt, but it could be taken to show his “consciousness of guilt.” And he could be convicted, they also learned, without any proof of motive. If they were looking for motive, however, they could consider the evidence of the defendant’s “improper acts” against Louise, which could also be considered to show “th[e] environment” Melvin was in, “the complete picture of the defendant’s history” in that regard, and—as suggested by the court’s subsequent misinstruction—“that the defendant did not have good character.” They were told to “carefully balance that testimony . . . so [as] not to prejudice yourself against this defendant and this murder,” but they were not told (per the model instructions) that they “must not convict the defendant here solely because you think [he] is guilty of other bad conduct.” As the majority notes, the propriety of these instructions (or, for that matter, of the evidence to which they pertained) isn’t before us here. But as part of the “entire cause,” their relationship with the instant error is. And these (mis)instructions made that error’s harm all the more palpable. Amidst all this exposition on the legal meaning and effect of the prosecution’s evidence, not a word about that of the defendant’s—as if his evidence had none. 28 No matter, says the majority, because “[e]ven if the jury had been properly instructed, it is not more likely than not that [the] defendant’s character evidence would have been sufficient to create a reasonable doubt, given the prosecution’s evidence[.]” The court’s misinstruction, however, cannot be so readily isolated from the jurors’ assessment of the proofs, given how fundamentally it compromised the jurors’ ability to weigh those proofs in reaching their verdict; they simply did not know that the defendant’s evidence could, legally speaking, be enough in itself to defeat the prosecution’s case. To have this legal effect, the defendant’s evidence only had to cast a reasonable doubt over the prosecution’s proofs in the eyes of one juror. Why could the defendant’s evidence not have done so? What “weight and strength,” to use Lukity’s terms, did the “untainted evidence” possess that prevented it? Let’s review that evidence: The recounted memories of a shadow in a dark house that reminded Louise’s teenage daughters, in that moment of violence, of the man who had replaced their father and beat their mother. The recounted memories of the girls’ frantic announcement of that suspicion to their neighbors right afterward. A few other memories about that night 30 years ago and the man’s suspected place within it, recounted solely by the daughter who hated him and ensured he was now being brought to trial. The recounted memories of a phone call before that night in which the defendant said he’d “get” Melvin—though no one could say why. The defendant’s flight from town at some point, either because he did “get” Melvin or because he feared the Kountzes were out to get him. Was this evidence enough, as a matter of law, to sustain the defendant’s conviction? We haven’t been asked that question, but perhaps. Does it leave ample room for a juror, upon hearing testimony about the defendant’s peaceful character, to 29 reasonably doubt his guilt? Absolutely. But, the majority continues, that good-character evidence was “extremely weak” and “far outweighed” by the bad-character evidence of the defendant’s abuse of Louise. I lack the majority’s confidence in that assessment. The prosecution certainly produced more pages of testimony on the topic than the defendant did, but that testimony does not strike me as clearly or inherently more objective or reliable. The jurors may very well have seen strength in the prosecution’s numbers and credited the accounts of abuse provided by Louise’s friends and family. They also may have discounted those memories, in whole or in part, as too old, too unsubstantiated, or too distorted by a long-festering contempt for the defendant and a desire that he be punished somehow, some way, for whatever he’d done to Louise. Likewise, the jurors may have found little import in Kim Harden’s memories of a man whom she knew long ago, but whom she didn’t really see with Louise all that much—or they may have found some objectivity and reliability in the opinions of this long-time school principal who had known the defendant very well but wasn’t mixed up in the strife between him and the Kountzes. The record doesn’t betray what the jurors, together or separately, might have thought about all this character evidence—just that they were only instructed by the court on how to think about the prosecution’s bad-character evidence in determining guilt. Twice. And even if the jurors did, as the majority does now, credit the prosecution’s character evidence over the defendant’s, what does that tell us about the harm to their verdict from the court’s misinstruction about that evidence? The jurors may have believed the defendant was a “vicious abuser” of Louise, or even a bad person overall, and a proper instruction on the defendant’s evidence may not have changed these 30 impressions. But the jurors were not tasked with rendering a verdict on any of that. Rather, to convict the defendant, they still had to get from this other-acts evidence, and any impressions of the defendant it conjured, to the unanimous conclusion that he was guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, of murdering Melvin. The instructions traced the legal paths the jurors could take through the prosecution’s proofs to that conclusion. We don’t, and can’t, know which path they each may have taken. But we do know none of them was told that the defendant’s evidence could provide its own path to a different outcome. And what assurance is there in the record that, had the jurors been apprised of this path— provided it as a rule—none would have followed it? That, ultimately, is the core of our inquiry here: how reliably can we say, on the record before us, that these 12 jurors would have unanimously agreed on the defendant’s guilt for murdering Melvin, had the court not misinstructed them on the reasonable doubt that could, as a matter of law, arise from the defendant’s character evidence alone. We, of course, are not those jurors, and harmlessness review does not require or invite us to be; what matters is the reliability of their verdict, not our own agreement with it. 30 Did 30 See, e.g., People v Mateo, 453 Mich 203, 221; 551 NW2d 891 (1996) (discussed approvingly in Lukity, and explaining, inter alia, that “courts analyzing preserved error in terms of their view regarding whether the defendant is guilty have been wrong,” as “[t]he defendant’s right to a fair trial by jury requires that preserved error be reviewed in terms of its effect on the factfinder”). Accord Sullivan v Louisiana, 508 US 275, 279; 113 S Ct 2078; 124 L Ed 2d 182 (1993) (“Harmless-error review looks, we have said, to the basis on which the jury actually rested its verdict. The inquiry, in other words, is not whether, in a trial that occurred without the error, a guilty verdict would surely have been rendered, but whether the guilty verdict actually rendered in this trial was surely unattributable to the error. That must be so, because to hypothesize a guilty verdict that was never in fact rendered—no matter how inescapable the findings to support that verdict might be—would violate the jury-trial guarantee.”) (quotation marks and citation omitted). 31 the defendant kill Melvin? I don’t know. Will a new set of jurors, properly instructed, conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that he did? I don’t know that, either. But even if I knew those things, they wouldn’t answer the question before us. Here is what I do know—what affirmatively appears to me, after examining this entire cause: The jurors were asked to assess the defendant’s guilt for a 30-year-old murder on the basis of unsubstantiated memories and character inferences drawn from sources of questionable reliability. These proofs teemed with doubt—a doubt which the defendant encouraged through the presentation of his own character evidence. The court provided the jurors with rules they must, and presumptively did, follow in measuring that doubt and deciding whether they could, as a matter of law, still convict the defendant in spite of it. But the court only provided rules for the prosecution’s proofs. It did not instruct the jury that the defendant’s proofs—his evidence of good character, the only evidence he presented—could, alone and as a matter of law, create a reasonable doubt and foreclose a finding of guilt. Instead, the jurors were reminded again about the prosecution’s evidence on that central issue at trial while the defendant’s proofs went wholly without mention, as if they didn’t warrant it, legally or factually. Did this failure to inform the jurors of the potentially dispositive legal effect of the defendant’s evidence undermine the reliability of their guilty verdict? Is it more probable than not that, had this rule been given to the jurors, it would have made a difference to at least one of them in how they viewed that evidence? That one of them would have realized that, when it came to their legal determination of guilt, the defendant’s evidence could be worth not only something, but everything? That the doubt it generated could be, in itself, the “reasonable” sort countenanced by the law to foreclose a finding of guilt? And that, 32 because of this, the defendant—for whatever else he did or whatever else he was—should and could not be convicted under the law for the 1983 murder of Andrew “Melvin” Weathers? On these proofs, in this cause, I say yes. The court’s error was not harmless. A new trial is needed to ensure that any verdict on this charge is reliable under the law. 31 This was also the conclusion of the Court of Appeals panel. Its work on this question was careful and correct. It did what we asked, and well. We should leave its work in place. We should allow a new trial to go forward. We should deny leave. I dissent. Bridget M. McCormack David F. Viviano Richard H. Bernstein 31 Indeed, if the court’s error as to M Crim JI 5.8a(1) doesn’t require relief in this case, I struggle to think of a case in which such an error would. At oral argument, the prosecutor was similarly stumped on this point. Of course, that wasn’t of particular concern to the prosecutor, as she had urged us—in both of this case’s trips to this Court— to dispense with the instruction entirely, as legally unnecessary and improper. Both times, we declined this invitation. The model instruction comports with the law in this state, and a party is entitled to have it presented to the jury when the evidence supports it. The court’s failure to provide it here was indisputably erroneous and subject to review for harmlessness. But, with the majority’s ruling here, I am not sure if any force is left to that legal conclusion, or if this Court now has effectively done, through harmlessness review, what the prosecutor really wanted us to do. What meaning is there to assigning error, after all, if there can never be any consequence to that error? Or, as this Court has elsewhere wondered, “What is the point in applying a harmless error rule if the error is always going to be harmless?” People v Francisco, 474 Mich 82, 91 n 10; 711 NW2d 44 (2006). 33