Opinion ID: 64224
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Evidence of Guilt by Association

Text: When, as here, the defendant does not move for a mistrial, we review the failure of the district court to grant a mistrial sua sponte for plain error only. [2] To establish plain error, the defendant must show that (1) there is an error, (2) the error is clear or obvious, and (3) the error affects his substantial rights. [3] An error is considered plain, or obvious, only if the error is clear under existing law, whether in existence at the time of trial or announced during the pendency of the defendant's direct appeal. [4] If all three criteria are met, we may exercise our discretion to correct the error, regardless of waiver for failure to move, if the error seriously affects the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings. [5]
No reasonable prosecutor could have been unaware that the complained-of testimony elicited from Detective Nayola on redirect was inadmissible and highly prejudicial. In this and all other circuits, a defendant's guilt may not be proven by showing he associates with unsavory characters. [6] We have held that evidence that one is married to, associated with, or in the company of a criminal does not support the inference that that person is a criminal or shares the criminal's guilty knowledge. [7] An associate's attendance at a friend's criminal trial, which is a constitutional right enjoyed by savory and unsavory characters alike, is no better evidence of a defendant's guilt. Careful prosecutors presumably heed our admonition in United States v. Singleterry against attempting to obtain convictions based on guilt-by-association evidence. [8] There, we said that [t]o appear as counsel in federal court is a privilege which may be forfeited. [9] There is no excuse for such blatant disregard of the bounds of acceptable questioning. The precise issue presented by McCall in this appeal, however, is not whether the effort by the prosecutor to elicit guilt-by-association evidence was itself improper, but whether the failure of the district court to declare a mistrial sua sponte was plain error, irrespective of the district court's exclusion of the evidence and curative instruction. Our cases do not support a conclusion of plain error here. In United States v. Pando Franco, we upheld the refusal of a district court to order a mistrial after the government attempted to elicit similar evidence. [10] As the word refusal indicates, the defendant had moved for a mistrial, so our review was for abuse of discretion, a deferential standard but less deferential than plain error. In these types of cases, we consider three factors before answering the ultimate question of error, viz., whether the tainted evidence substantially affected the jury's verdict. These factors are (1) the magnitude of the prejudicial effect of the statement; (2) the efficacy of any cautionary instruction; and (3) the strength of the evidence of the defendant's guilt. [11] The guilt-by-association testimony in this case is undoubtedly more prejudicial than that in Pando Franco, and the curative instruction given in this case was not as efficacious as that given in Pando Franco. But the other evidence of McCall's guilt is quite strong: eyewitness testimony, corroboration from audio and video sources, law enforcement testimony, and evidence from the search of McCall's home. When that evidence is viewed in the very limited perspective of our plain error review, it trumps any differences between the relative magnitudes of the prejudicial effect (smaller) and efficacy of the curative instruction (greater) in Pando Franco and this case. We hold that the failure of the district court to declare a mistrial sua sponte was not plain error.