Court Opinion

ID: 9591711
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:06:58.123641+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:11:33.874108
License: Public Domain

COYNE, Justice
(concurring specially).
I concur in the affirmance of defendant’s conviction of first degree murder, Minn.Stat. § 609.185 (1994), and attempted first degree murder, Minn.Stat. § 609.17 (1994). I write separately only to add facts which confirm the harmlessness of any error in the admission of the stipulated portion of Pearson’s testimony and in the admission of identification testimony by a witness who might have been influenced by a suggestive pretrial identification procedure.
Pearson’s testimony at his trial for McKnight’s murder took Pearson past the door of the house at 2817 Bryant Avenue North and into the kitchen where the armed robbery and murder took place. Pearson also testified that he carried an automatic. It is true that he attempted to shift the blame for the actual shooting onto defendant, who Pearson said not only had a revolver but that he fired at McKnight and McDonald. Passing off blame for the actual shooting on defendant Jones does not, however, in my opinion, make Pearson’s statement non-self-inculpatory. We have previously ruled that a defendant who knows that his accomplice carries a gun during the commission of a burglary is liable for assaults committed by the accomplice in furtherance of the burglary. In short, Pearson’s admission that he, as well as defendant, was armed when they confronted McKnight and McDonald and robbed them, surely exposes Pearson to conviction for felony murder regardless whether it was he or defendant Jones who pulled the trigger. The error in admitting the stipulated inference that Pearson was present at 2817 Bryant lies not in what was admitted but in the exclusion of the admission that Pearson entered the kitchen and that he came armed to the encounter. Had the excluded portion been admitted there would be no question that the stipulation met the Williamson requirement for reliability. Moreover, the relevance of the statement to defendant’s culpability would have been quite clear.
Although there can be hardly any doubt that if the display of the defendant’s photograph was accomplished in the manner described by Larkin, the pretrial identification procedure was impermissibly suggestive, and Larkin’s identification testimony should have been excluded. Of all the eyewitnesses Lar-kin seems to have been the only one to whom defendant Jones and Pearson were strangers. Donaldson, who lived in the house at 2817 Bryant, certainly was well acquainted with her sometimes upstairs tenants; she had initially declined to name them because she did not want to become “involved.” After the shooting Moorman, who was Ms. Donaldson’s boyfriend, left the house and drove away in the company of Jones and Pearson; he testified that Jones was the person who fired at McKnight and McDonald. McDonald, who survived the pointblank shooting, also identified defendant Jones as the shooter. In view of the wealth of strong, error-free evidence that it was defendant who shot McKnight and McDonald, any error in admitting Larkin’s tentative identification of defendant as one of the two men who ordered her to leave the house could not reasonably have affected the verdict and was clearly harmless beyond any reasonable doubt.
Accordingly, I join the majority in affirming defendant’s conviction.