Court Opinion

ID: 9496171
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:19:12.139631+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:23.843422
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Senior Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I am required to dissent.
The petitioner was deprived of his constitutional right to present a complete de*63fense. Wade was convicted of the murder of Manny Bryant in New York Supreme Court, Kings County, in 1995. But the trial court refused to permit a defense witness, Darryl Folk, to testify that he had seen Gene, a “high” member of the Paradise Gang, try to kill Manny Bryant some three or four weeks before Bryant was killed. This refusal occurred in the context of a trial in which, of the two prosecution witnesses who testified that Wade was the killer, one was a member of the Paradise Gang who was beaten up by the gang on the night after the Bryant shooting and the other was a drunk who had been drinking the day of the shooting and later dramatically changed his description of the shooter’s build from “thin” to “chubby.”
The trial court denied Wade the opportunity to present Folk’s testimony on the ground that there was no “clear connection” between the shoot-out testimony and Bryant’s murder. The appellate court based its denial of Wade’s appeal on a long line of New York case law including, but not limited to, People v. Aulet, 111 A.D.2d 822, 490 N.Y.S.2d 567 (1985), which used the phrase “clear link” to describe the evidentiary showing necessary for admission of testimony on third-party culpability. The appellate court found that “in this case, the defendant failed to show a clear link between the third party [Folk] and the crime.” People v. Wade, 245 A.D.2d 473, 666 N.Y.S.2d 467, 468 (1997).
The “clear link” phraseology has since been abandoned by the New York Court of Appeals in People v. Primo, 96 N.Y.2d 351, 355, 728 N.Y.S.2d 735, 738, 753 N.E.2d 164 (2001). There, the Court of Appeals held the standard governing the admissibility of evidence of third-party culpability is “better described in terms of conventional evi-dentiary principles,” where relevant evidence may be excluded if its “probative value is outweighed by the prospect of trial delay, undue prejudice to the opposing party, confusing the issues or misleading the jury.” Id.
In my view, the evidence of the shooting at Manny Bryant by Gene of the Paradise Gang had none of these effects. I therefore think the evidence, as contained in Folk’s testimony, should have been admitted based on its probative value. I also note that the federal district judge who heard this habeas petition said that, had he been the trial judge, he would have admitted it.
The constitutional right to present a defense is clear and unequivocal, there being “few rights ... more fundamental than that of an accused to present witnesses in his own defense.” Chambers v. Mississippi 410 U.S. 284, 302, 93 S.Ct. 1038, 35 L.Ed.2d 297 (1973). The Compulsory Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment mandates that an accused may “‘put before a jury evidence that might influence the determination of guilt.’ ” Taylor v. Illinois, 484 U.S. 400, 408, 108 S.Ct. 646, 98 L.Ed.2d 798 (1988) (quoting Pennsylvania v. Ritchie, 480 U.S. 39, 46, 107 S.Ct. 989, 94 L.Ed.2d 40 (1987)). While the right to present evidence in one’s defense is subject to “reasonable restrictions,” United States v. Scheffer, 523 U.S. 303, 308, 118 S.Ct. 1261, 140 L.Ed.2d 413 (1998), I believe it was an unreasonable application of Supreme Court law in this case to exclude the highly relevant evidence of the victim’s being shot at by a gang member only three to four weeks before the ultimate shooting, especially because one identifying witness was beaten up by the gang the day after the shooting and prior to identifying Wade as the killer. I would therefore grant Wade’s petition for habeas corpus.