Court Opinion

ID: 9714944
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 05:49:50.045468+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:29.876249
License: Public Domain

FARRELL, Associate Judge,
concurring:
I join the court’s opinion and write briefly only to explain my understanding of what we mean when we say “Drew and Toliver are mutually exclusive.” Ante at 1047. I think we mean nothing more than that when Drew evidence is at issue, we apply one set of rules of admissibility, and when Toliver (or “immediate circumstances”) evidence is involved we apply a simpler test, for a reason I explain later.
Certainly the two doctrines do not conceptually exclude one another. That would be true if Toliver proof were purely evidence of the criminal act charged, not at the same time proof of another crime: the same criminal act is not an “other act.” But no one would argue that appellant’s repeated apparent sales of drugs in the minutes before he dropped the eleven ziplock bags with cocaine were the same act (rather than part of the same “series of acts”) as his possession of those bags. Factually the acts were different, and they are defined differently as crimes. Moreover, the sales fit neatly into one of the categories of evidence traditionally admissible under Drew: they explained appellant’s intent in possessing the eleven bags, something the jury naturally would have inquired about since that was a central element of the crime charged. So the admissibility of the sales as Toliver evidence does not exclude their relevance under Drew. Evidence that “explains the immediate circumstances surrounding,” is “intimately entangled with,” or “completes the story of’ the crime charged — all formulations of the Toliver principle — may be just as telling on issues like identity and intent, to which Drew analysis looks, as it is to explain why the officers approached a defendant and arrested him (i.e., to rebut a claim of harassment or unjustified accosting).
Yet, even when Toliver evidence is not strictly “intrinsic” to the charged crime because it also points to other criminal activity, we admit it without the standard Drew safeguards provided that, like any other relevant evidence, it is more probative than prejudicial. And the reason we do so is a judgment that it is, presumptively, more probative than prejudicial. By requiring that the act both “aris[es] out of the same transaction or series of transactions as the charged offense,” Toliver, 468 A.2d at 960 (citations omitted), and takes place in close temporal and spatial proximity to the charged act, see ante at 1047 n. 4, we ensure a very high degree of relevance of the evidence as proof of the crime charged. At the same time, that proximity affords strong protection against the danger underlying Drew’s limitations, which is that the jury will withdraw attention from the act charged and its attendant circumstances and convict for broader reasons of character or propensity shown by repeated criminal behavior.