Court Opinion

ID: 9753484
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:15:34.338657+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:00:29.766820
License: Public Domain

Dooley, J.,
concurring. The concurring opinion of Justice Skoglund prompts this additional concurring opinion on the important question of the scope of the character evidence rule of V.R.E. 404 in domestic *143assault criminal cases. Although I am concerned that the prohibition on the misuse of character evidence as expressed in V.R.E. 404(a) should not be undermined by the use of specious alternative rationales for admission, I do not believe that concern should govern in the narrow circumstances of the admission of prior incidents of domestic violence with the same victim as testified to by that victim. Thus, I cannot join in Justice Skoglund’s call that we reject the reasoning of State v. Sanders, 168 Vt. 60, 716 A.2d 11 (1998), or that we amend V.R.E. 404 to adopt the Sanders holding in the evidence rule.
At the outset, I believe that following Justice Skoglund’s analysis requires us to overrule State v. Sanders, a very recent unanimous opinion of this Court. Although Justice Skoglund points out two possible alternative rationales for Sanders, neither is adopted by the opinion. The first is that the prior bad act evidence was relevant to show that the victim felt intimidated and threatened by defendant’s action. We explicitly decided not to reach or ground the decision in Sanders on that rationale. See 168 Vt. at 62, 716 A.2d at 13. The second is that the evidence was admissible because the victim in Sanders recanted her statement describing the domestic assault for which defendant was charged. In fact, the Sanders opinion indicates that the victim recanted only her statements about the prior abuse. Id. at 61, 716 A.2d at 12. Although we discussed the recantation evidence as supporting the context rationale, it would not make sense to read Sanders as allowing evidence of prior bad acts only if the victim recants her statement that the prior bad acts occurred.
I believe that Sanders is a narrow opinion, as I discuss below. For three reasons, I would not overrule it.
First, the evidence here and in Sanders is “character” evidence only in the broadest sense of the word. It shows only that defendant has a violent relationship with this victim. See generally 22 C. Wright & K. Graham, Federal Practice & Procedure: Evidence § 5233 (1978 & Supp. 2001) (discussing alternative definitions of character). It is not intended to show that defendant is violent generally or that he is violent in relations with women generally. Thus, we noted in Sanders that the “purpose of establishing defendant’s history of abusing the victim is not to show his general character for such abuse, but to provide the jury with an understanding of defendant’s actions on the date in question.” 168 Vt. at 62, 716 A.2d at 13.
*144I note there is a tendency here to confuse propensity evidence with character evidence. We could say that a bank robber has a propensity to rob banks with lots of money, rather than a broke savings and loan, but we would not call that a character trait. Rule 404(a) restricts character evidence and not propensity evidence. Rule 404(b) does prohibit propensity evidence but only in instances where the evidence shows a character trait. See V.R.E. 404(b) (evidence of other wrongs is inadmissible to “prove the character of a person in order to show that he acted in conformity therewith”). If our evidence rules prohibited all propensity evidence, some of the most' important and probative evidence in many criminal trials would be excluded.
Second, as the concurring opinion points out through its citation to a number of law review articles, acts of domestic violence rarely' occur in isolation, and Sanders is specifically limited to domestic violence eases. More important, jurors know this dynamic. They understand that after fourteen years together, a couple does not get into an extremely violent episode in which the husband is banging the wife’s head against the wall solely because of a dispute over her screening his calls and with no history of such actions. In the jurors’ experience, the event they are hearing about is highly unlikely without a context. If we exclude the context evidence, we invite the jurors to speculate over the real cause of the dispute, and they may speculate that she did something to “deserve” his retaliation under the circumstances or that she exaggerated the nature and severity of his violence. As Sanders points out, the lack of context is a particular problem in the all-too-frequent situation where she recants her claim that he battered her in the instance before the court. 168 Vt. at 63, 716 A.2d at 13.
I do not believe we face the same circumstances for most other crimes. I doubt there is a serious risk that jurors will speculate that a bank robbery did not occur, because they haven’t heard about others. Even with a well-known DUI recidivism problem, I doubt that jurors’ deliberation is affected by lack of evidence about prior incidents. It is no accident that advocates for battered women are particularly seeking a broad policy of admissibility in this area. See L. De Sanctis, Bridging the Gap Between the Rules of Evidence and Justice for Victims of Domestic Violence, 8 Yale J.L. & Feminism 359 (1996); Comment, Beating Again and Again and Again: Why Washington Needs a New Rule of Evidence Admitting Prior Acts of Domestic *145Violence, 75 Wash. L. Rev. 973 (2000); Comment, The Search for the Truth: Admitting Evidence of Prior Abuse in Cases of Domestic Violence, 20 U. Haw. L. Rev. 221 (1998).
Finally, admission here does not seriously raise the risk of abuses underlying Rule 404(a). The risk is that the jury will give undue weight to evidence of prior criminal conduct and convict on the offense before them because the defendant is shown to be the type of person who would commit the crime, or to punish for the prior, uncharged, behavior. See 22 Wright & Graham, supra, § 5239, at 436-38. This case is a swearing contest between the victim, with the physical evidence on her side, and defendant. All depends on the relative credibility of the parties to the events. It is logically possible, but highly unlikely, that the jury would believe the victim about the prior violence, disbelieve her about the violence involved in the charge before it, but convict defendant anyway because he is a bad actor who must have done something or because the jury wants to punish him for the prior violence. If the jury is unlikely to misuse the evidence in this way, it makes no sense to exclude it.
On the other hand, excluding the evidence leads to an inadequate credibility determination. The jury knows that the victim is not telling all she knows and may determine she lacks credibility because of the incompleteness of the testimony. As we noted in Sanders, a single act of domestic violence taken out of its situational context is likely to be seen as incredible.
I recognize that the calculus may be different when the State offers an additional witness to prove the prior uncharged misconduct. As we held in State v. Winter, 162 Vt. 388, 401, 648 A.2d 624, 632 (1994), that situation should be addressed by applying V.R.E. 403, evaluating the State’s need for the additional witness in light of the other evidence and the likely effect on the trial.
I think State v. Sanders is correctly decided. I would not overrule it.