Court Opinion

ID: 9627593
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:48:18.91042+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:47.467417
License: Public Domain

BISTLINE, Justice,
dissenting On Denial of Defendant-Appellant’s Petition For Rehearing.
Counsel representing the defendant has submitted a sound analysis explaining why this Court should grant a rehearing, or at the least, in the interest of keeping Idaho case law reasonably unjumbled consider modifying the Court’s opinion in some particulars — especially in the area of fair trial rights being infringed upon by admission of evidence of uncharged crimes. Citing McCormick on Evidence 451-53 (2d ed. 1972), he reminds us:
[Tjhere is danger that if judges, trial and appellate, content themselves with merely determining whether the particular evidence of other crimes does or does not fit one of the approved classes, they may lose sight of the underlying policy of protecting the accused against unfair prejudice. The policy may evaporate through the interstices of the classification.
[T]he problem is one of balancing, on the one side, the actual need for the other-crimes evidence in light of the issues and the other evidence available to the prosecution, ____
Brief of Appellant, 3. The “necessity” of tying the Arizona shells to the Idaho murder of Patterson, and this Court’s conclusion that without that evidence the State could not link the .38 calibre bullets in the Arizona officer’s body with the .38 calibre bullet in Patterson’s brain, is criticized:
[T]hat linkage was overwhelmingly demonstrated by the firearms testimony of the state’s expert. He thoroughly demonstrated that (1) the .38 calibre bullets recovered from both bodies were fired from the same weapon, and (2) the .38 calibre shell casings recovered at the Ari*901zona scene along Smith’s flight path bore the identical firing pin characteristics as that recovered from the murder scene, and further (3) both were most likely fired from a .38 handgun of the make and model obtained by Donald Smith in Texas shortly prior to the events in issue.
Brief of Appellant, 4. Other portions of the brief are equally persuasive. Hence it is dismaying that there is no thought that the opinion for the Court might indeed be overbroadly stated in regard to the admission of other-crimes evidence.
Counsel concludes with a paragraph with which I would not have thought any member of the Court would so readily or summarily disagree:
It is submitted, once again, that the State of Idaho crossed over the line in its eagerness to convict. The Valley County jury was provided with testimony and argument of the most damning sort in a murder trial. They were told expressly and repeatedly that Smith was a cop killer; they were provided graphic and gruesome details of that death; the message was clear and compelling no matter how cautionary the trial court might otherwise instruct. As Imwinkelreid put it: ‘... juries aware of other misconduct employ an entirely different calculus of probabilities to determine guilt or innocence,’ and are readily ‘imbued with the commonly held ... notion, once a crook, always a crook.’ Ibid, at p. 1487-88.
Unless this Court concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that such testimony did not contribute to the jury’s verdict, a new trial is in order.
Brief of Appellant, 9 (emphasis in original). As one member of the Court, I have always thought that we do not sit to pass moral judgment upon a defendant, but rather to examine closely the application of the law to the specific and particular facts.