Court Opinion

ID: 9753371
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:11:31.905466+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:35.355080
License: Public Domain

FARRELL, Senior Judge,
with whom Judge FISHER joins, concurring:
I join Judge Fisher’s opinion entirely, and write only to point out that appellant turned aside repeated opportunities before trial to limit the prejudice he now claims resulted from the jury learning that he or his confederate had shot the security guard during the North Carolina store robbery.
Preliminarily, the fact that appellant, either himself or jointly as an aider and abettor, used a gun to commit the North Carolina robbery that was the same weapon used to kill David Valentine a month earlier was undeniably probative evidence of his identity as Valentine’s killer. The trial judge, in other words, was not compelled to rule that the circumstantial evidence appellant cites — the DNA on the clothing outside the store, and finding the murder weapon in the vent in Ward’s North Carolina apartment — was an adequate substitute for evidence that placed the murder weapon in appellant’s hand not long after the crime.
Nevertheless, the issue of whether the prosecutor needed to present evidence, either by testimony or via the store surveillance videotape, that appellant or Leaks had fired the gun or shot the security guard was the subject of repeated in li-mine discussions between Judge (now Chief Judge) Satterfield and the parties before the case was transferred to Judge Dixon for trial. From the beginning Judge Satterfield had been concerned to know how, if possible, the jury could be made to know that the gun had been used to carry out the North Carolina robbery but without learning that the gun had been fired, or at least that the store guard had been shot. He repeatedly ordered the attorneys to look for ways to “sanitize the prejudicial impact” of both a testimonial and video depiction of the robbery. In response, the prosecutor proposed, in writing, several alternatives including one that would have an eyewitness other than the security guard testify “that two armed bandits entered the premises shooting, but without eliciting that the victim was shot.” And the prosecutor brought to court still-photographs from the surveillance video that purported to “show the two perpetrators committing the robbery, but do not show the victim being fired upon and struck.” Yet, in response to Judge Satter-field’s urging him to “[s]tart looking at the [proposed] alternatives,” appellant’s counsel rejected all of them because each “talks *1152about a robbery,” when the defense’s position was that “all evidence of the robbery is inadmissible”- so that there was “no need to try to sanitize.”
This notwithstanding, Judge Satterfield went another mile by inquiring whether the government’s need “to really put those guns in the defendant’s hands” in North Carolina could not be met by a stipulation that appellant had actually possessed the gun found in the vent in Ward’s apartment. The prosecutor replied that he would want to “see the actual stipulation” to be sure it contained an admission that “those weapons were brought to North Carolina ... and put in that air vent by [appellant and Leaks] personally.” But there the matter was left, because when the prosecutor at the next proceeding (the case having since been transferred to Judge Dixon) referred to Judge Satter-field’s suggested stipulation that Jones had “had the gun and ... put it in the air vent,” defense counsel was silent on the issue. Counsel did later propose, for the first time, that the shooting evidence could be limited to the fact “that the .45 was fired in the store” but not that “the firing took effect on another person,” but he combined this with an insistence that “the fact that Mr. Jones confesses [to Devone Hines] to having shot the security guard” should also be excluded.
Judge Dixon ultimately allowed both videotape and testimonial evidence describing the North Carolina shooting, and it would overstate the evidence to say that his ruling was influenced by appellant’s previous rejection of “sanitizing” measures short of exclusion. The fact remains, though, that Judge Satterfield, in weighing the in limine matter of admissibility, invited appellant to propose or join in alternatives that could have significantly lessened the prejudice he now insists denied him a fair trial. Indeed, the judge focused on and invited suggestions for avoiding the very prejudice appellant cites on appeal. See Reply Br. for App. at 8 (“the shooting evidence, not the robbery evidence, was more prejudicial than probative”). Since Judge Satterfield was not obliged to impose any of these alternatives sua sponte (much less to exclude the armed robbery evidence altogether), there is an element of self-inflicted pain in appellant’s present complaint of prejudice, when he rejected the chance to shape the manner in which the proof was put before the jury.
To this Judge Ruiz replies mainly that it is not Judge Satterfield’s action but Judge Dixon’s “ruling that is challenged on appeal” (post at 1157) and that, in any case, it was the trial judge’s responsibility, not the parties’, “to control the admission of evidence and carefully balance its probative value and prejudicial effect” (post at 1157). But while both points are strictly correct, when viewed in the context of a case where appellant’s help was actively sought to avoid unfair prejudice, they reduce to a sideshow key in limine hearings of the kind Judge Satterfield conducted.