Court Opinion

ID: 9465251
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 00:40:28.066001+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:03.851343
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Judge,
dissenting:
I would reverse. I agree with most of what is said in the court’s opinion, but must dissent because I believe defendant Gandara was prejudiced by the erroneous admission of evidence relating to happenings on July 5, 1977. The one count on which Gandara was tried related to a transaction on July 12, 1977, and no other. Gandara was the sole defendant in the trial, although the jury was advised that Chavez was also charged. Chavez was proved to have sold heroin to Government undercover agents, and as the court says, the evidence was convincing that Gandara was the source of supply who brought the heroin to Chavez immediately before the sale. There was no conspiracy count.
The prosecutor offered to prove by a “cooperating individual” that on July 5 Chavez told this informant that Gandara was his source of supply. The trial court refused to admit this but allowed evidence to go to the jury that on July 5 Gandara was seen on the street talking to Chavez, and after he was gone, Chavez sold heroin to the informant; also that Chavez said he had a source. The court told the jury that Gandara was not charged with anything that occurred on July 5, but he was admitting the evidence for whatever weight the jury might “feel it has as a circumstance bearing upon what happened on July 12th.”
The Government says, and I agree, that the statement of July 5 that Gandara was the source of supply might well have been admitted. Then it might have proven a joint venture in the heroin business, to which Gandara and Chavez were parties. The court seemed to believe divulging the identity of the supplier did not further the “conspiracy,” as did the fact Chavez had one, but it is to be presumed that, in a business transaction, parties will know what to divulge to bring about a meeting of minds. Naming the supplier added a nugget of information for “artistic verisimilitude.” If allowed to hear this, the jury could have seen at once what bearing the testimony, if believed, had on the events of July 12.
With it left out, the purpose of showing what was shown about July 5, became a mystery. It reads like some gossip column item where a forthright charge might incur a libel suit, so statements are put in juxtaposition to suggest the charge to the reader by innuendo. That Gandara was present on the street, talking to Chavez, before the July 5 sale had no tendency to make it more likely than not, that he had anything to do with that sale. That Chavez had a supplier had no such tendency either. Yet put the items in juxtaposition, and the jury is set to wondering why. If Gandara were the supplier of July 5, but some mysterious operation of the rules of evidence kept this from being divulged, that would explain everything. Thus by innuendo was suggested to the jury what they were not told directly, that Gandara was the supplier on July 5.
The plain, simple, old-fashioned rule is that evidence of crimes other than the one described in the indictment is inadmissible. There are exceptions, but none applicable here. The Government argued two theories, both of which the court rejects. One is the conspiracy theory. The other it rejects sub silentio, i. e., that the street conversation of July 5 tended to refute the claim Gandara was going to make when he testified in his own defense, that he knew Chavez only casually. If this evidence had been left for rebuttal, more plausibility would have inured to this rebuttal theory; but in *1163any event, we all often have street conversations with persons we know casually, or not at all. The jury could not have inferred that the July 5 conversation related to the July 12 sale, as this latter sale was initiated by conversations on July 11. I think the overwhelming thrust of the testimony as to the July 5 sale was to make the jury believe that Gandara had committed a crime on July 5, and having been so wicked as to do this, of course he was more likely to have committed a similar one on July 12. Any other connection of the July 5 incident as testified to with the issues of the case would require an imaginative juryman to perceive.
I add that the Government does not rely on a harmless error theory; rather it seems to believe the evidence as to July 5 was needed because the evidence as to July 12 was circumstantial so far as it implicated Gandara. And it does not seem to be denied that Gandara properly objected to all the evidence relating to July 5, not just that which might be called hearsay, though he did mistakenly characterize as hearsay a part of the July 5 transaction testimony that was not hearsay at all. In other words, the hearsay exclusion is not the only one which, however inartistically, Gandara invokes.