Court Opinion

ID: 9585162
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:57:05.163497+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:33:19.830235
License: Public Domain

*424Justice Exum
concurring in result.
I would decide this case by holding that the kidnapping and rape cases in which the victim was Catherine Rutherford were improperly consolidated for trial with the assault with intent to commit rape in which the victim was Debbie Elerick in violation of G.S. 15A-926; but since in a trial of the Elerick case the offenses against Mrs. Rutherford would have been admissible in evidence against the defendant or in a trial of the Rutherford cases the offense against Mrs. Elerick would have been likewise admissible, the defendant was not prejudiced by the erroneous consolidation.
I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that the Rutherford offenses and the Elerick offense are joinable under G.S. 15A-926(a) as part of a “single scheme or plan.” My view of the law on this point is as stated in my dissent in State v. May, 292 N.C. 644, 666, 235 S.E. 2d 178, 191-92 (1977):
“When, however, another crime is offered as conduct tending to show defendant’s plan to do an act which in turn tends to prove that the act was done, there must be more than merely some similarity between the other crime and the crime sought to be proved. The incidents must be so strikingly alike in detail that evidence of both raises a reasonable inference of the existence of a plan out of which both sprang. ‘But where the conduct offered [to prove a plan] consists merely in the doing of other similar acts, it is obvious that something more is required than that mere similarity, which suffices for evidencing Intent. . . . The added element then, must be, not merely a similarity in the results, but such a concurrence of common features that the various acts are naturally to be explained as caused by a general plan of which they are the individual manifestations’ 2 Wigmore on Evidence § 304 at 202 (3d ed. 1940). (Emphasis the author’s.)”
The two incidents here are quite dissimilar in the modus operandi employed by the defendant. In the Elerick case defendant gained admission to the victim’s apartment by posing as a painter employed by the apartment management. In the Rutherford cases, however, the victim was hitchhiking and picked up by defendant on the highway. The dissimilarity in the two cases negatives the existence of any common plan or scheme out of *425which the defendant’s attacks against the two women sprang. To say, as the majority does, that both attacks arose out of defendant’s plan to satisfy his sexual impulses in effect nullifies one of the purposes of the new joinder statute which, the majority recognizes, was enacted in part to preclude the joinder of crimes merely on the basis that they are of the same class or type of offense.
In the Elerick case, however, defendant’s offenses against Mrs. Rutherford would be admissible to help prove the intent with which defendant assaulted Mrs. Elerick. Similarly, in the Rutherford cases the offense against Mrs. Elerick would be admissible on the question of consent. Notwithstanding the statement quoted by the majority from State v. Johnson, 280 N.C. 700, 704, 187 S.E. 2d 98, 101 (1972), these propositions demonstrate that the erroneous consolidation was harmless.