Court Opinion

ID: 9598753
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 01:11:30.524927+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:25:18.237888
License: Public Domain

Justice Mitchell
dissenting.
The defendant’s experts testified that his status as a pedophiliac was an important part of what they felt was his impaired capacity to appreciate the criminality of his acts at the time he killed the ten-year-old child victim in the present case. On cross-examination by the State, each of those experts specifically testified that the defendant’s many prior convictions for taking indecent liberties with children was an important factor in the diagnosis of pedophilia. Ordinarily such evidence is admissible under N.C.G.S. § 8C-1, Rule 705, which provides that an expert may testify to the facts on which the expert’s opinion is based. The majority concludes, however, that the probative value of this evidence was substantially outweighed by danger of unfair prejudice and that the trial court abused its discretion by failing to exclude it under N.C.G.S. § 8C-1, Rule 403. I do not agree.
The majority finds that the testimony during the cross-examination of the defendant’s experts that the defendant’s convictions were an important basis for their diagnosis of pedophilia *424had no tendency to weaken that diagnosis in the eyes of the jury. Although that is one possible view of the evidence in question, I believe a jury reasonably could have found the evidence to weaken the reliability of the diagnosis of the experts. Therefore, I believe that the majority has inadvertently invaded the province of the jury by applying the findings the majority would make from the evidence while failing to recognize that the evidence would support contrary findings.
It appears to me that the State was attempting to convince the jury that the two expert witnesses in question would testify that anyone who had been convicted of numerous offenses of taking indecent liberties with children is a pedophiliac and, inevitably, unable to appreciate fully the criminality of his conduct in murdering a child. If the jury so found, the jury reasonably could have given the experts’ testimony less credibility than it would have given that testimony absent the State’s cross-examination concerning the weight the experts gave the defendant’s prior crimes.
The majority further says that because the prosecutor referred to the defendant during closing arguments as a “child molester,” the State conceded the defendant’s pedophilia and challenged only whether his pedophilia contributed to his actions. Regardless of whether the prosecutor argued (1) that the defendant was not a pedophiliac or (2) that pedophilia did not impair his capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct in killing the child victim in the present case, I believe the jury reasonably could have found the evidence of the defendant’s prior convictions for taking indecent liberties with children relevant and probative as to either of those points.
The fact that the prosecutor referred to the defendant as a “child molester” did not, as the majority contends, amount to conceding that the defendant suffered from the medical condition of pedophilia. Quite the contrary, the State was attempting to convince the jury that the defendant was a criminal — a “child molester” — and not simply a mentally ill pedophiliac whose capacity to appreciate his criminal conduct was impaired. For these reasons, I believe that the majority errs in holding that the trial court abused its discretion by failing to exclude the evidence of the defendant’s prior convictions for taking indecent liberties with children. The evidence was admissible under Rule 705 and its pro*425bative value was not outweighed by any danger of unfair prejudice so as to require its exclusion under Rule 403.
For the foregoing reasons, I respectfully dissent from the decision of the majority.
Justice MEYER joins in this dissenting opinion.