Court Opinion

ID: 9714954
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 05:50:04.912+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:29.927768
License: Public Domain

RANDALL, Judge
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. I would reverse Vanhouse’s conviction based on the admission of the prior conviction. Vanhouse was on trial for first-degree criminal sexual conduct for acts he was accused of committing in 1999. At trial, the district court ruled that appellant could be impeached with a 1984 second-degree criminal sexual conduct conviction. I find that the evidence was stale, of little or no probative value, and highly prejudicial to a fault. Appellant’s jury confirmed that.
After submitting the case to the jury for deliberations, the jury returned with the following questions: What behavior constitutes second-degree criminal sexual conduct? Does such an act involve a minor? What was the nature of Van House’s conviction in 1984? The court replied that it could not answer the questions and that the jury could consider only evidence at trial.
First, by law, the 1984 conviction was stale. Evidence of prior convictions may be admissible to impeach if the underlying offenses are less than ten years old, punishable by imprisonment in excess of one year, and the “court determines that the probative value of admitting this evidence outweighs its prejudicial effect.” Minn. R. Evid. 609(a).
Fourteen years had passed between the prior conviction and the date of the acts involved in the current conviction. This lengthy time period between incidents *722makes the relevancy of the evidence tenuous at best. To guard against the danger of juries convicting criminal defendants of crimes based on the prejudicial effect of alleged prior misconduct, we have established reasonable time limit safeguards for impeachment of past crimes. See Minn. R. Evid. 609(b) (establishing ten-year time limit for admission of prior convictions for impeachment purposes). The assumption on which the ten-year limit is based is “that after such an extended period of time the conviction has lost its probative value on the issue of credibility.” Id. 1989 advisory comm. cmt.
That should have put the district court on guard and cautioned it to look at the next criteria, was the prior conviction one of dishonesty or just some generic felony. If the prior conviction involved dishonesty or false statement, it is admissible regardless of the punishment or probative value-prejudicial effect determination. Minn. R. Evid. 609(a)(2). Second-degree criminal sexual conduct is, by definition, not a crime of dishonesty and, thus, the district court was required to move on to the next criteria, “probative versus prejudicial.”
To determine whether the probative value outweighs the prejudicial effect, the court should consider:
(1) the impeachment value of the prior crime, (2) the date of the conviction and the defendant’s subsequent history, (3) the similarity of the past crime with the charged crime (the greater the similarity, the greater the reason for not permitting use of the prior crime to impeach), (4) the importance of defendant’s testimony, and (5) the centrality of the credibility issue.
State v. Jones, 271 N.W.2d 534, 538 (Minn.1978).
The length of time between the two incidents, 14 years, immediately red flags the issue of relevancy versus prejudice. What does something that happened 14 years ago have to do with what is charged today, other than to show that the accused actor today acted in conformity with something he did before? That is forbidden by the law. It has been settled law for decades that it is impermissible to introduce prior conduct to show conformity now on the pending charge.
Evidence of a prior crime may be used to show an element of the current crime such as motive, identity and intent. State v. Profit, 591 N.W.2d 451, 461 (Minn.1999). But it is impermissible to use such evidence as propensity evidence because it creates an undue prejudicial effect that the jury will convict appellant based on his prior bad acts. Old Chief v. United States, 519 U.S. 172, 180-82, 117 S.Ct. 644, 650-51, 136 L.Ed.2d 574 (1997) (holding evidence of prior bad acts transforms those acts into bad character, “raising the odds” that defendant did charged act “or, worse,” promotes “preventive conviction” regardless of guilt for alleged propensity to commit bad acts and noting “risk that a jury will convict for crimes other than those charged — or that, uncertain of guilt, it will convict anyway because a bad person deserves punishment — creates a prejudicial effect that outweighs ordinary relevance” (quotation omitted)); Michelson v. United States, 335 U.S. 469, 475-76, 69 S.Ct. 213, 218-19, 93 L.Ed. 168 (1948) (holding evidence of prior bad acts “overpersuade[s]” jury to prejudge and deny defendant fair opportunity to defend against charged offense and noting courts exclude such evidence to “prevent confusion of issues, unfair surprise and undue prejudice”); State v. Townsend, 546 N.W.2d 292, 296 (Minn.1996) (holding prolonged description of pri- or-crimes evidence irrelevant and only improperly “inflame[d] the jury”); State v. DeWald, 464 N.W.2d 500, 504 (Minn.1991) (noting preventing “conviction based on *723prejudice created by evidence of other crimes is the underlying purpose” for excluding such evidence).
Then, the district court disregarded the third Jones factor, the similarity of the crimes. Simply because appellate courts have previously allowed impeachment by conviction of similar crimes does not mean that the exception swallows the rule. See State v. Ihnot, 575 N.W.2d 581, 588 (Minn.1998) (finding no abuse of discretion in admitting a third-degree criminal sexual conduct conviction for impeachment in a trial for first-degree criminal sexual conduct); State v. Frank, 364 N.W.2d 398, 399 (Minn.1985) (affirming decision to allow impeachment by two prior rape convictions in trial for first-degree criminal sexual conduct). Having acknowledged those cases, the third of the five Jones factors still cannot be ignored because of the above-stated danger that juries will use the prior convictions to assume that the defendant today acted in conformity with something wrong that he did before.1
After examining the five Jones factors, it is clear to me that the evidence of the 1984 conviction was far more prejudicial than probative. I do not need to analyze the fabled judicial myth “harmless error.” Appellant’s jury tapped the judicial system on the shoulder and said, “Hey, it wasn’t harmless error, it was the whole case!”
The jury did not come back and ask the judge about how to consider impeachment evidence as it affects credibility. Instead, they wanted to know what 1984 behavior led to a charge of second-degree criminal sexual conduct; they wanted to know did that 1984 conviction involve a minor, as, of course, the present charge does; and then they wanted even more information about appellant’s 1984 conviction. The district court gave the jury the “non-answer,” stating it could not answer the questions, and the jury was instructed to consider only evidence admitted at trial. The jury, of course, knew that, evidence of the 1984 conviction had been admitted at trial and made the common sense assumption that, therefore, they could use it for whatever purpose they wanted, including the rationale that “if he did it before, it sure helps to prove (substantively) that he did it today.”
It is not often that a jury in a criminal case will come back into court and fill in the record as to whether the claimed error was “harmless” or not. Here, appellant’s jury did just that.
I dissent and would reverse the conviction and remand the case for a new trial without the admissibility of the 1984 prior conviction.

. The prosecution is only allowed to introduce bad-character evidence if the defendant opens the door, which appellant did not, and the state makes no claim that he did. Thus, when the door is not opened by the defendant, the prosecution is forbidden to introduce bad-character evidence to show that if defendant did something wrong in the past, he is likely to have done it now (in the crime charged).