Court Opinion

ID: 9747174
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 15:00:12.080442+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:20.792320
License: Public Domain

Johnson, J.,
¶ 20. dissenting. I cannot agree with the majority’s holding that a defendant’s gun ownership is per se relevant to show that a defendant is a “drug dealer.” Although there may be specific instances in which gun evidence would be relevant to the State’s case against a defendant accused of selling drugs, this is not such a case. The State charged defendant with two counts of selling cocaine. A week after the second and final transaction upon which the charges were based, defendant acquired two firearms. Defendant neither used the guns as part of the drug transactions, nor even possessed the guns at the time the sales occurred. Nonetheless, the majority adopts the trial court’s conclusion that the gun evidence is probative of whether defendant was involved in the sales. I recognize that we have a broad standard for relevance, and that the trial court’s rulings on this issue will only be reversed on a showing that the court abused *429its discretion. Even under that deferential standard of review, I fail to see how the acquisition of firearms that occurs after and independently from a nonviolent drug sale tends to show that defendant sold drugs on the earlier occasions. Even if I were to accept this attenuated inference, I would still conclude that the after-acquired firearms should have been excluded because their slight probative value in this case is substantially outweighed by the prejudice and confusion of the issues that their introduction caused. I would hold that the guns were not relevant in the context of this case, and, moreover, the court’s refusal to exclude them under Vermont Rule of Evidence 403 was an abuse of discretion. Accordingly, I dissent.
¶21. The majority correctly notes that our rule-based relevance standard is broad. The majority is incorrect, however, in asserting that the “time gap between the drug sales and the possession of the guns” goes only to the weight the gun evidence should be given by the trier of fact. Ante, ¶ 10. Temporal remoteness may also be a bar to admissibility. Cf. State v. Winter, 162 Vt. 388, 396-97, 648 A.2d 624, 629 (1994) (holding that remoteness of evidence of accused’s prior crimes affects admissibility as well as weight). As the Reporter’s Notes to Rule 401 recognize, “evidence which is logically probative in a technical sense may still be irrelevant for the familiar reason that it is of a matter too remote in time or place.” Accordingly, we have held that questions of remoteness lie largely within the trial court’s discretion, except at the “extremes of relevance where the probative value of the evidence is... so slight as to require exclusion as a matter of law.” Bradley v. Buck, 131 Vt. 368, 371, 306 A.2d 98, 101 (1973).
' ¶ 22. In ruling on the motion to exclude, the trial court stated that it did not “feel that it’s that speculative; that an argument can be made that, you know, that firearms may be used in drug transactions,” and thus the guns had “some probative value as to the issue of whether [defendant] was involved in these transactions.” I agree that guns are sometimes used in drug transactions, either for the protection of the dealer or as tender in the exchange for drugs. It defies common sense, however, to suggest that guns that were not even in defendant’s possession at the time of the drug transactions somehow make it more likely that defendant participated in the earlier transactions.
¶ 23. Under Rule 401, evidence that does not pertain directly to an element of the crimes charged, such as the guns in this case, may still be relevant to the resolution of other factual disputes of “consequence.” But in this case, there is no logical connection between the guns and the evidentiary narrative relating to the drug charges. There *430is rio evidence that guns were used in the drug deals that defendant is charged with executing, or in any other drug deals for that matter. Nothing in the evidence suggests that defendant alluded to the guns in any way and at ány time prior to or during the drug deals. Similarly, the State has not suggested that defendant purchased the guns with proceeds from the drug sales, and thus that the guns represent fruits of defendant’s criminal enterprise. Instead, the State’s case is based on testimony from the police informant who purchased the drugs directly from defendant while wearing a recording device, and the police officers who facilitated and supervised the informant. The State also introduced the taped conversation that transpired between defendant arid the informant at the time of the second purchase, and the cocaine that the informant obtained after her encounters with defendant.
¶ 24. When compared to the substantial direct evidence that defendant was in fact involved in the alleged transactions, and in light of the majority’s recognition of and reliance on the fact that gun ownership is common in Vermont, the gun evidence here is circumstantial evidence with infinitesimal probative value. In view of its after-the-fact remoteness and slight probative value, the gun evidence should have been excluded as a matter of law.
• ¶ 25. A close inspection of the cases cited by the majority in support of its “tools of the trade” per se relevance theory reveals several important distinctions between those cases and the instant case. Most of 'the cases the majority cites in support of its rationale involve drug conspiracies. Unlike the present case, where the prosecution has ample direct evidence of defendant’s involvement in the drug deals, prosecutors in conspiracy cases should receive greater latitude with circumstantial evidence, which is often the only type of evidence available to prove the conspiracy. See State v. Berger, 733 A.2d 156, 164 (Conn. 1999) (“Because of the secret nature of conspiracies, a conviction usually is based on circumstantial evidence.”); United States v. Infante, 404 F.3d 376, 385 (5th Cir. 2005) (“[BJecause secrecy is the norm in drug conspiracies, each element of the crime may be established by circumstantial evidence.”).
¶ 26. For example, in United States v. Martinez, 938 F.2d 1078(10th Cir. 1991), defendant was charged with cocaine distribution and conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The court admitted guns that were hidden in a house that defendant visited while under surveillance, along with a half pound of cocaine found there, to prove a “key point in support of [the prosecution’s] evidentiary hypothesis” that the house was a “‘stash’ house” where defendant procured his drugs on the day *431of the deals leading to his arrest. Id. at 1084. Thus, the court affirmed the district court’s decision to admit the items as probative of the defendant’s participation in the drug distribution business. Id. at 108$. ..
¶ 27. The defendant in United States v. Wiener, 584 F.2d 15 (2d Cir. 1976), was charged with one count of conspiracy and two counts- of possession with intent to distribute hashish. The court' affirmed admission of a gun found in his apartment on the day of his arrest. Id. at 18. The defendant’s apartment was the alleged “focal point” of his drug ring, and the gun was found in a bag with marijuana and hashish smoking paraphernalia. Id.
¶ 28. Similarly, in United States v. Price, 13 F.3d 711 (3d Cir. 1994), where defendant was one of several accused drug conspirators, the court upheld the admission of a prior gun conviction because it was “highly probative of the large scale of a narcotics distribution conspiracy and the type of protection the conspirators felt they needed to protect their operation.” Id. at 719 (quotations omitted). In. contrast, defendant in the instant case is charged only with two drug sales amounting to a total of less than $200.
¶ 29. By lifting broadly worded pronouncements out of these federal cases, without appreciation for the significant factual distinctions involved here, I fear that the majority has adopted a per se rule that guns are always relevant and sufficiently probative in drug sale cases. This Court is ordinarily wary of adopting per se rules in criminal cases. See, e.g., State v. Leggett, 167 Vt. 438, 444, 709 A.2d 491, 495 (1997) (declining to adopt per se rule requiring reversal whenever hearsay testimony is admitted without a finding of good cause to dispense with a probationer’s confrontation right); State v. Kirchoff, 156 Vt. 1, 8, 587 A.2d 988, 993 (1991) (rejecting per se approach to the privacy inquiry in open-fields search and seizure cases under Article 11). For example, in State v. Roy, 151 Vt. 17, 23, 557 A.2d 884, 888 (1989), we reviewed the position taken by several of our peer jurisdictions that the omission of an essential element of the offense from the charge to the jury is automatically plain error warranting reversal. In rejecting this approach, we stated our belief that “it would be bad policy to create a category of errors which are plain per se.” Id. It is equally bad policy to designate a category of evidence — guns — as relevant per se in cases where a defendant is charged with selling drugs — especially in Vermont where, as the majority and trial court noted, gun ownership is a trait common to many people who have nothing to do with the drug trade.
*432¶ 30. Relevance rulings are case-specific by their very nature, and should remain so. I agree that there may be future drug cases where evidence of a defendant’s gun possession may be relevant and highly probative of the issues involved, but this is not one. By adopting the “tools of the trade” theory into our law in a case where defendant did not possess the tools in question until a week after the crime was committed, the majority creates a broad, generally-applicable presumption in favor of relevance without regard to the remoteness issues that may arise in future cases.
¶ 31. Curiously, the State has made no attempt to support the “tools of the trade” rationale on appeal, omitting any mention of this theory from its brief. Instead, it suggests alternative grounds for admission of the gun evidence, urging this Court to affirm “even where the trial court... reaches the right result for the wrong reason.” See State v. Willis, 145 Vt. 459, 477, 494 A.2d 108, 118 (1985) (“A trial court may achieve the correct results for the wrong reasons.”). Because I agree with the State’s apparent concession that the trial court erred in admitting the guns as “tools of the trade,” I have also considered whether any other basis supports the trial court’s evidentiary decision. After reviewing the trial record, I conclude that the trial court’s alternative reasons for admitting the gun evidence were also based on legal errors, and that probative weight assignable to the additional ground raised by the State for the first time on appeal is overcome by the substantial potential for prejudice and confusion of the issues that resulted from introduction of the gun evidence. Accordingly, I cannot conclude that the court’s decision was harmless.
¶ 32. On appeal, the State argues two grounds for admission of the guns: (1) that one of the guns was relevant to the attempting-to-elude charge because it was in defendant’s car at the time the police arrested him, thus explaining his motivation in fleeing; and (2) that the gun found in his closet was relevant to show that defendant, who admitted to owning the gun, also owned the marijuana found nearby. The majority correctly points out that the gun evidence was not relevant to the charge for attempting to elude a police officer because it is a strict liability offense for which no showing of intent is required, and furthermore, that the jury lacked background information necessary to understand why the guns would motivate defendant to flee. Ante, ¶ 10 n.l. Accordingly, the trial court erred by assigning the gun evidence probative weight based on its relevance to the attempting to elude charge. As to the State’s new argument, I agree with the majority and the State that one of the two guns was relevant to, and *433probative of, the possession of marijuana charge. But I cannot conclude that the trial court’s Rule 403 analysis would still have resulted in admission of the gun evidence if the only weight properly on the scale had been its relevance to show possession of the marijuana.4
¶ 33. As the majority notes, defendant did not deny owning the gun found in the closet with the marijuana. Thus, the gun tends to show that defendant had access to and perhaps control over the closet where the marijuana was found, making it more likely that the marijuana belonged to defendant. The State could, however, have easily proved its case on this charge without the gun evidence. The detective who discovered both the gun and the marijuana while executing the search warrant for the home testified that the closet could be accessed only through defendant’s bedroom; that the closet contained male clothing; and defendant was the only male living in the home.
¶ 34. Despite these facts, the gun evidence was substantially more prejudicial to defendant’s case than it was probative of the issues germane to the possession-of-marijuana charge. The trial court and the majority frame the issue of gun ownership as a neutral factor that cannot be considered, in and of itself, as prejudicial in a state like Vermont, where many people own guns. But this approach flatly ignores the context of this case. The references to the guns in the State’s case-in-chief imply that, once armed, defendant presented a danger to the community. The State first mentioned the guns in its opening statement, saying that six days after the second controlled drug buy, “[t]he Southern Vermont Drug Task force runs into a problem. They find out that the Defendant has acquired two firearms, and because of this, they decide to shut down this drug operation and arrest the defendant.” During direct examination of Detective *434Gazzaniga, the guns were again mentioned in the same context, explaining why the police moved to arrest defendant. The State covered the same ground with Detective Barsi, who also testified that the decision to arrest Lee was based, in part, on the fact that defendant had obtained two firearms. Detective Barsi also testified about one of the guns, describing it as a handgun, but noting that it “fires a much larger round than I would normally anticipate from a handgun.”
¶ 35. These repeated references to the guns unmistakably suggest that defendant is a dangerous person, who police arrested at a specific point in time out of fear that he might put the guns to illegal and violent use. The context here is not neutral gun ownership for skeet shooting or deer hunting. The jury would likely assign great credibility to this testimony coming from experienced police officers. While I do not question the validity of the officers’ assessment of the situation or the propriety of the actions they took in response, the admission of the evidence powerfully prejudiced the jury against defendant by raising the specter that he was preparing to commit a violent act.
¶ 36. Moreover, although one of the guns may be relevant to showing ownership of the marijuana, the other neutral evidence cited above accomplishes the same function as the gun evidence admitted over defense objection. Accordingly, under Rule 403, the cumulative nature of this highly prejudicial evidence must also be weighed against its probativeness. The combination of prejudice and cumulativeness tips the 403 scales toward the side of exclusion.
¶ 37. When viewed in light of defendant’s sole hope of acquittal at trial.— the entrapment affirmative defense — the admission of the gun evidence and its presentation by the State at trial cannot be considered harmless error. The purpose of the entrapment affirmative defense, as recognized in Vermont, is to “deter improper governmental activity in the enforcement of the criminal laws.” State v. Wilkins, 144 Vt. 22, 29, 473 A.2d 295, 298 (1983). Entrapment will be found where the inducement or persuasion employed by the police is so great that even a hypothetical reasonable person, i.e., one who is not otherwise ready to commit the criminal offense charged, would succumb to such persuasion and commit the crime. Id. at 30, 473 A.2d at 299. The focus of the legal and factual entrapment inquiry is, therefore, on the conduct of law enforcement in setting up the sting operation that produced direct evidence of defendant’s participation in the two controlled drug buys. State v. George, 157 Vt. 580, 583-84, 602 A.2d 953, 955 (1991) (citing Sebesta v. State, 783 S.W.2d 811, 814 (Tex. Crim. *435App. 1990) (“This is purely an objective test, and the trier of fact’s vision should focus solely upon the State’s actions.”)).
¶ 38. After using the gun evidence to suggest that defendant’s acquisition of firearms was a prelude to violence, thus necessitating urgent police intervention, the State effectively distracted the jury from considering the proper boundaries for law enforcement in drug-related investigations. Defendant conceded that he was a drug user, and claimed that he only made the sales at issue to placate the police informant, who also happened to be the mother of defendant’s girlfriend and the person that was providing defendant with a place to live. Admission of the gun evidence compromised the jury’s ability to consider whether repeated requests for drugs made by this informant, who had substantial influence over vital aspects of defendant’s life, amounted to improper police inducement or coercion, i.e., entrapment.
¶ 39. Defendant’s gun possession was remote in both time and place from the drug counts at issue here, and, therefore, not relevant to them. Under these circumstances, and in view of the prejudicial testimony that resulted from the admission of the gun evidence, I would reverse and remand for a new trial, holding that the trial court erred in admitting the gun evidence in this case, and that such error was not harmless. I would reverse defendant’s drug sale convictions, and remand for a new trial on those two counts. I am authorized to state that Justice Skoglund joins in this dissent.

 The majority complains that this dissent engages in its own Rule 403 balancing, implying that this is a usurpation of the trial court’s function. To some extent balancing in the appellate court is unavoidable when the trial court factors errors of law into its Rule 403 balancing. The majority and the dissent agree that the trial court erred by finding evidence of the gun in the car relevant to and probative of the attempting-to-elude charge. The transcript shows that the trial court factored this error into its Rule 403 balancing. Thus, in reviewing the trial court’s decision, both the majority and the dissent have to reassess the balancing, taking into account the error. The majority and dissent disagree on the question of whether the trial court incorporated a second error of law into its balancing by concluding that the gun evidence was both relevant to and probative of the question of whether defendant “was involved in these [drug] transactions.” Accordingly, the dissent and majority reach different conclusions after conducting our own respective reassessments; this is a difference in result, not process.