Opinion ID: 2594572
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Excluding Admission of Evidence of Aiming During Prior Crime

Text: The trial court ruled that defendant could not impeach Castillo with an inquiry whether, some 14 years before his testimony, he had been convicted of a felony: possessing narcotics for sale while armed with a .22-caliber pistol. The court allowed defendant to inquire about Castillo's conviction for drug possession for sale, but not about any element of the offense that he was armed. It ruled that evidence of being armed would be substantially more prejudicial than probative under Evidence Code section 352. Defendant claims that the court erred in excluding the evidence under Evidence Code section 352. In particular, he asserts, knowing about Castillo's prior gun possession might have led the jury to wonder about Castillo's criminal sophistication and whether Castillo's story that defendant and Ronaldo Ayala killed Rositas, Zamora, and Dominguez, was true. He argues that depriving him of the opportunity to raise that question was error. We disagree. In ruling on the question whether evidence is substantially more prejudicial than probative, the trial court enjoyed broad discretion. (Evid.Code, § 352.) [T]he latitude section 352 allows for exclusion of impeachment evidence in individual cases is broad. The statute empowers courts to prevent criminal trials from degenerating into nitpicking wars of attrition over collateral credibility issues. ( People v. Wheeler (1992) 4 Cal.4th 284, 296, 14 Cal.Rptr.2d 418, 841 P.2d 938.) And the truth-in-evidence provision of the California Constitution (art. I, § 28, subd. (d)), contrary to defendant's claim, did not limit the court's power to exclude the evidence under section 352. The provision itself so provides. One might conclude, of course, that it would not unduly consume time or confuse the jury to allow defendant to inquire into the arming aspect of Castillo's conviction. But we are required to defer to the trial court's ruling. Given that the conviction was 14 years old and the fact that Castillo was armed would not have revealed any further character trait that would have been particularly telling for impeachment purposes, we are unable to say that the trial court abused its discretion in ruling as it did. [5]