Court Opinion

ID: 9520965
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 01:54:11.116426+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:47:23.221702
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE UNDERWOOD, dissenting: I am not as certain as my colleagues appear. to be that the evidence relating to the victim’s state of mind was inadmissible. (See the in-depth discussion of this question in United States v. Brown (D.C. Cir. 1973), 490 F.2d 758.) But, even assuming the court is correct in saying that it is not admissible, that error, as well as any error in the complained-of instruction, was, in my judgment, harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. (Chapman v. California (1967), 386 U.S. 18, 17 L. Ed. 2d 705, 87 S. Ct. 824; People v. Taylor (1984), 101 Ill. 2d 508, 517.) Given defendant’s admission that he and his wife were not sleeping together, that she had filed a divorce action, that she rebuffed his sexual advances that evening, that he held her head under water and watched the bubbles coming up, thereafter walked home without checking her condition, threw in the river the clothes he had worn that evening, and subsequently told the officers “I did it. You guys know I did it,” I cannot believe a jury would have returned a different verdict had the complained-of instruction language and the state-of-mind evidence been excluded. I would affirm the trial court’s judgment.