Court Opinion

ID: 9797998
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:33:55.547811+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:00:05.541062
License: Public Domain

KENNARD, J.,
Concurring and Dissenting.—On the morning of January 29, 1996, the body of Thien Minh Ly was found on a high school tennis court. Ly, who was Vietnamese, had been stabbed repeatedly, 14 of the wounds entering his heart. About a month later, defendant confessed to stabbing “a *55jap” to death, saying the killing was “for racial movement [sz'c].” After his arrest, two lists of names and addresses of White supremacist groups, together with printed materials issued by or describing these groups, were found in defendant’s bedroom. Defendant was charged with Ly’s murder, and with two special circumstance allegations: (1) the crime was committed in the course of an attempted robbery (Pen. Code, § 190.2, subd. (a)(17)(A)),1 and (2) the victim was “intentionally killed because of’ his “race, color, religion, nationality, or country of origin” (id., subd. (a)(16)).
Police Sergeant Ronald Miller, the prosecution’s expert witness on White supremacy groups, testified at the guilt phase of defendant’s trial that some of the groups in which defendant had expressed interest were anti-Semitic. He described defendant as “definitely” being a White supremacist. On cross-examination, Miller acknowledged that he had never talked to defendant and did not know whether defendant belonged to any of the White supremacist organizations about which Miller had testified.
The jury found defendant guilty of the first degree murder of Ly; and it found true both special circumstance allegations. The jury returned a verdict of death. The majority affirms the judgment. I concur in the affirmance.
Unlike the majority, however, I am of the view that Sergeant Miller’s testimony about the anti-Semitic beliefs of some White supremacist groups was irrelevant in this case and therefore should not have been admitted. Nonetheless, defendant was not prejudiced, as I explain below.
I
Over defense objection, Sergeant Miller testified at trial to two of the major tenets of White supremacy groups: first, a belief in the “superiority of the White race” and a corresponding bias against all others; second, antiSemitism so extreme that White supremacists “label the Holocaust as a Jewish trick to gamer support and sympathy for the Jews throughout the world.” Responding to the prosecutor’s question about an organization called Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which appeared in a handwritten list of groups that was entered in defendant’s Bible, Miller described that church’s beliefs as “pseudo religion,” mentioning its belief that “all Jews are the descendants of Satan.” In Miller’s opinion, the church’s beliefs “fold[] right into the anti[-S]emitic” views common among White supremacists.
Examining a hand-decorated box found in defendant’s bedroom, Sergeant Miller identified Nazi swastikas and the paired-lightning-bolt insignia of the *56World War II German army’s elite SS corps, which Miller explained had been ordered by Adolf Hitler to exterminate “Jews, minorities, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists.”
The police found in defendant’s bedroom a letter to defendant from Brigadier General Jack Mohr. In his testimony, Sergeant Miller identified Mohr as a White supremacist leader. Also found in defendant’s bedroom, and introduced into evidence by the prosecution, was a copy of a letter from Mohr to the Reverend Jerry Falwell. The prosecutor in his closing argument to the jury, explained that in this letter Mohr castigated Falwell for being “too nice to the Jews.”
At the conclusion of the guilt phase, the trial court instructed the jury that in order to find the hate-murder special-circumstance allegation true it must find that “[t]he victim was intentionally killed and ... the murder was committed because of race, religion, nationality or country of origin of the victim.” To prove that a crime was committed “because of’ a victim’s protected characteristic, there must be evidence of a causal connection between a defendant’s perception of the protected group to which the victim belongs and the defendant’s infliction of injury on that victim. (See In re M.S. (1995) 10 Cal.4th 698, 717 [42 Cal.Rptr.2d 355, 896 P.2d 1365] [construing analogous language in § 422.6 and former § 422.7].)
Although Sergeant Miller here testified regarding the anti-Semitic views held by the Nazis and by various White supremacy groups in which defendant had shown considerable interest, there was no evidence, as the Attorney General acknowledged at oral argument, that defendant had ever expressed anti-Semitic views, and there was no evidence that defendant killed Ly, a Vietnamese man, because defendant perceived him to be of the Jewish faith. Thus, Sergeant Miller’s testimony on the anti-Semitic views of some White supremacists lacked any relevance to the hate-murder special-circumstance allegation pertaining to Ly’s murder and should not have been admitted into evidence.
According to the majority, Miller’s testimony about anti-Semitism was relevant to “the general subject of White supremacy.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 48.) If Miller’s testimony about White supremacist groups had been solely focused on their belief in the superiority of Whites over all other racial and ethnic groups, I would agree that the testimony was relevant. But I am not persuaded that Miller’s testimony regarding White supremacist groups’ hatred of Jews establishes hatred of other non-White groups, and therefore Miller’s specific testimony about anti-Semitism was irrelevant in this case, where the evidence shows that defendant killed Ly because of his race or country of origin. (See In re M.S., supra, 10 Cal.4th at pp. 730-731 (conc. opn. of Kennard, J.).)
*57II
Although the trial court erred by admitting Sergeant Miller’s testimony about the anti-Semitism of some White supremacist groups, the error was harmless, as discussed below.
Because the evidence showed that defendant was an admirer of White supremacist groups, Sergeant Miller’s testimony that many such groups are anti-Semitic may have caused the jury to infer that defendant had similar views. Although evidence tending to show that a defendant was anti-Semitic could be highly prejudicial in another case, here the evidence overwhelmingly showed that defendant was a racist who regarded non-Whites as subhuman and who, by his own admission, callously murdered victim Ly “for racial movement” because defendant thought Ly was a “jap” or a “Chino.” Given the compelling evidence that Ly’s murder was a racially motivated hate crime, the trial court’s erroneous admission of Miller’s testimony that some White supremacist groups were anti-Semitic was harmless under any standard of prejudice and could not have affected the outcome of either the guilt or the penalty phase of defendant’s trial.
Appellant’s petition for a rehearing was denied November 12, 2008.

 All further statutory references are to the Penal Code.