Court Opinion

ID: 9663744
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 23:49:39.47061+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:55.903467
License: Public Domain

Levin, J.
(concurring). I concur in Judge Targonski’s opinion with the following additional comment concerning the issue dealt with in Part I of his opinion.
The defendant, Pearline Rapier, does not claim that her estranged husband’s alleged sexual exploitation of young girls created a justifiable fear on her part that he might commit a sexual assault q» her. She argues, rather, that she should have been allowed to prove the sexual acts for the purpose of establishing the nature of the dispute between her and her husband, that her husband had a motive to threaten to kill her and to carry out that threat, and that, therefore, she was justifiably fearful of him.
If the defendant had apprised the trial judge not only of the evidence of the sexual acts, but had also made him — as she has us — aware that before the shooting she had brought to the prosecutor’s attention, and that her husband was fearful she *307might in the future continue to press, charges which could bring about his conviction of a crime, statutory rape, punishable by a sentence of life or any term of years, the evidence would, in my opinion, have been admissible. She did not, however, contend at the trial that the sexual acts, which had occurred several years before the shooting, might motivate her husband to harm her now out of fear of criminal prosecution for those acts.
I agree with my colleagues that the judge was not obliged to admit the evidence on other grounds. Evidence that a man has taken sexual advantage of young girls would not tend to establish that he is justifiably to be feared as a man who might commit an act of violence on an adult.
In ruling on the admissibility of evidence a judge may properly exclude evidence of limited relevancy of a kind likely to cast more heat than light on the issues in the case. Compare People v Hall, 19 Mich App 95 (1969); "But relevance is not always enough. There may remain the question, is its value worth what it costs?” McCormick, Law of Evidence, § 152, p 319.
The judge did not reversibly err in excluding the evidence of the sexual acts, which occurred several years before the shooting, even if those acts explained the intense bad feeling that led eventually to the fatal altercation since the defendant did not offer to show that the sexual acts, as distinguished from the bad feeling engendered by those acts, were a continuing source of friction between the parties.