Opinion ID: 181300
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Marijuana Use & Legal Gambling

Text: At one point, Moore testified that he, Tanner, and a number of other people, had attended a meeting in a hotel room on a riverboat casino. Moore admitted that he had smoked marijuana at that meeting. Tanner argues that this testimony implicated him as a gambler and a drug user and constituted propensity evidence inadmissible under Rule 404(b). Tanner failed to object to this testimony at trial, so our review is once again only for plain error. Given that the meeting Moore attended was held at a licensed casino, the jury could easily have assumed that any gambling was legal. On review for plain error, then, we could reverse only if we were willing to say that testimony concerning legal gambling were so plainly indicative of Tanner's propensity to violate the law that its exclusion would have probably resulted in his acquittal. See Collins, 604 F.3d at 487. We simply cannot say that. Many law-abiding Americans visit legal casinos each year. It seems wholly unlikely that anyone would conclude that their visits show a latent propensity to break the law. Nor was it error to allow Moore to testify about his personal drug use on that occasion. Moore testified only that he had smoked marijuana after someone at the meeting had handed him a joint. He did not indicate that Tanner had provided the marijuana or that Tanner was even aware that Moore was smoking marijuana. Contrary to Tanner's assertions in his briefs (based on a citation to an unrelated part of the trial record), Moore did not testify that Tanner himself had smoked any marijuana. Thus, any bad acts were those of witness Moore, and Moore alone. Witness Moore's acts simply cannot be considered evidence of defendant Tanner's propensity to commit crime, however. Rule 404(b) forbids the use of a person's prior bad acts only to show that same person's later action in conformity therewith.