Opinion ID: 1172140
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Admission at Guilt Phase of Defendant's Use of Racial Epithets

Text: (8) During his police interviews, defendant on three occasions used racial epithets to refer to the murder victim, Ewing, who was Black, or to other Blacks. When the trial court ruled these interviews admissible, defendant moved to have the epithets excluded from any evidence presented concerning the interviews. The court denied the motion, and the epithets were presented to the jury as part of the evidence concerning the statements made by defendant during the interviews. Defendant contends that the epithets should have been excluded under Evidence Code section 210 as irrelevant and, even if relevant, should have been excluded under Evidence Code section 352 and the due process clause of the federal Constitution because their probative value was substantially outweighed by the danger of undue prejudice. Defendant also contends that admission of the epithets caused the jury to punish him for his speech in violation of the First Amendment of the federal Constitution. The trial court did not abuse its discretion in refusing to exclude defendant's racial epithets. Contrary to defendant's conclusion, his use of the epithets was not irrelevant. (See Evid. Code, § 210.) Defendant used them to describe the victim specifically in two instances and to describe members of the victim's race generally in the third instance. As defendant puts it in his brief, these statements showed that he despised [Ewing] and mocked [Ewing] for the color of his skin. Expressions of racial animus by a defendant towards the victim and the victim's race, like any other expression of enmity by an accused murderer towards the victim, is relevant evidence in a murder or murder conspiracy case. Among other things, it is evidence of the defendant's prior attitude toward the victim, a relevant factor in deciding whether the murder was deliberate and premeditated because it goes to the defendant's motive. (See People v. Hawkins (1995) 10 Cal.4th 920, 956 [42 Cal. Rptr.2d 636, 897 P.2d 574]; People v. Nicolaus (1991) 54 Cal.3d 551, 577-578 [286 Cal. Rptr. 628, 817 P.2d 893] [defendant's antireligious and anti-Christian statements properly admitted in prosecution for murder of his Christian wife].) In addition, the racial epithets were not so inflammatory that their probative value was substantially outweighed by their potential for undue prejudice. (Evid. Code, § 352.) The unfortunate reality is that odious, racist language continues to be used by some persons at all levels of our society. While offensive, the use of such language by a defendant is regrettably not so unusual as to inevitably bias the jury against the defendant. Here, the racial epithets were only a small portion of the evidence concerning defendant's interviews with the police, and the prosecutor did not ask any follow-up questions or otherwise focus attention on them. The prosecutor did not argue that defendant should be convicted because he was a racist. The prosecutor made only a passing reference in the guilt phase closing argument to the epithets, not as evidence of defendant's racism but as evidence of defendant's duplicitous nature by contrasting the insult of the epithets with defendant's solicitous reference in his trial testimony to the unfortunate demise of Ewing. Accordingly, there is no reason to believe that the jury here reacted to defendant's racial epithets by convicting him for what he called Ewing, rather than for what he did to Ewing. For the same reason, the admission of the epithets was not so prejudicial that it denied defendant a fair trial in violation of his right to due process. Furthermore, the admission of the racial epithets did not violate defendant's right under the First Amendment of the federal Constitution not to be punished for his speech. Defendant relies on Dawson v. Delaware (1992) 503 U.S. 159 [112 S.Ct. 1093, 117 L.Ed.2d 309], a capital case in which the United States Supreme Court held that the introduction at the penalty phase of evidence of the defendant's membership in a White racist prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood, violated the defendant's First Amendment rights. In Dawson, however, the evidence had no relevance because both the victim and the defendant were White, and there was no possible racial motivation for the killing. ( Id. at p. 166 [112 S.Ct. at p. 1098].) Nor did the evidence have any other relevance, for it presented only the defendant's abstract beliefs and did not attempt to link those beliefs to any factor relevant to sentencing, such as the defendant's future dangerousness. ( Ibid. ) The Dawson court, however, was careful to note that the Constitution does not erect a per se barrier to the admission of evidence concerning one's beliefs and associations at sentencing simply because those beliefs and associations are protected by the First Amendment. ( Dawson v. Delaware, supra, 503 U.S. at p. 165 [112 S.Ct. at p. 1097].) The high court concluded that such evidence is admissible if relevant to some issue that is being tried, noting that it had previously approved the use of evidence of racial intolerance ... where such evidence was relevant to the issues involved. ( Id. at p. 164 [112 S.Ct. at p. 1097], citing Barclay v. Florida (1983) 463 U.S. 939 [103 S.Ct. 3418, 77 L.Ed.2d 1134].) Here, as explained previously, the evidence was relevant to the issues being tried, and thus its use did not violate the First Amendment.