Opinion ID: 710248
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Welfare Evidence

Text: 47 Mr. Jones also objects to the district court's decision to permit testimony concerning the Jones' public aid history. Mr. Jones, as we have noted, did not receive any public aid prior to his arrest. Mrs. Jones had received such aid, but in amounts totalling less than $300 in the months prior to their arrest. The government's purpose in offering the evidence was to establish the lack of any legitimate source of income that might explain the $299 found in the pocket of Mr. Jones' bathrobe and thus to suggest that it likely represented the illicit proceeds of counterfeiting. Mr. Jones contends that the evidence was highly prejudicial, calculated to stir jury members' prejudice against persons who receive public aid. As this was an evidentiary matter, we review the district court's decision to allow the testimony for abuse of discretion. Hubbard, 61 F.3d at 1272. 48 We observed in United States v. Velez, 46 F.3d 688, 692-93 (7th Cir.1995), that the defendant's receipt of public aid was relevant to establish that the financial transactions in which he had engaged, including the purchase of a home, were likely funded by illegally derived money. Similarly here, the government offered evidence that the Jones had not recently received significant amounts of public aid as part of an overall effort to establish that the defendants had no apparent legitimate source of income which would explain the cash found in Mr. Jones' pocket. The probative value of such evidence was, we agree with Mr. Jones, somewhat limited. In contrast to Velez, the amount of money in question was not large. Three hundred dollars is not an extraordinary sum of money to carry on one's person, and the fact that the Jones were unemployed and not then receiving much public assistance does not rule out a variety of legitimate sources of the cash--Mr. Jones may have won it in a card game, it may have been a loan from a relative, or it may have been, as Mrs. Jones suggested, the proceeds of his work as a street vendor. At the same time, testimony about a defendant's public aid history regrettably may pose a danger that the defendant will be stigmatized in the eyes of the jury. 13 49 Ultimately, however, we cannot say that it amounted to an abuse of discretion for the district court to permit the testimony in this case. The government's theory was that Mrs. Jones, with her husband's assistance, was selling counterfeit bills from her home, a view of the case borne out by what Special Agents Waterford and Doyle observed in the course of their surveillance, the search of the Jones' home, and the arrest of Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Given the nature of the trafficking with which the Jones were charged, the source of the cash found on Mr. Jones' person after a day-long series of apparent sales of counterfeit was a significant issue in the case. This is particularly so in view of the fact that the only other genuine currency found in the house during the search (with the exception of the bills taped to sheets of paper for use as mock-ups) was the $20 that Ann Jones dropped as the officers entered the house. 14 The challenged testimony may have strayed beyond what was necessary to eliminate public assistance as the source of the money; at the same time, however, a limiting instruction designed to cabin the purposes for which the evidence could be considered might have been offered but was not. Cf. Tr. 1301-03.