Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
Table of Contents
Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
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This compendium includes significant criminal cases by the U.S. Supreme Court & N.C. appellate courts, Nov. 2008 – Present. Selected 4th Circuit cases also are included.
Jessica Smith prepared case summaries Nov. 2008-June 4, 2019; later summaries are prepared by other School staff.
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In this Wayne County case, defendant appealed his conviction for felony cruelty to an animal, arguing plain error in admitting a written hearsay statement under Rule of Evidence 803(5). The Court of Appeals agreed, ordering a new trial.
In March of 2021, a Wayne County Sheriff’s Office deputy responded to the report of a dog being shot with a small caliber rifle. The primary witness to the shooting was a witness who “had memory issues, was legally blind, and was drunk at the time of the shooting.” Slip Op. at 7. This witness was unable to read or write, so he dictated a statement to his son in the presence of the deputy; after the witness’s son transcribed the statement, the witness signed it. No one read the statement back to the witness to confirm its accuracy. At trial, the prosecution published the witness’s written statement to the jury under Rule 803(5) after he testified he could not remember the events in question. The witness also testified that he was legally blind, drunk at the time he allegedly saw defendant shoot the dog, drunk at the time he was giving the statement to his son for transcription, and suffered from short-term memory issues. No other direct evidence was admitted tying defendant to the dog’s shooting.
The Court of Appeals first explained that under the third prong of Rule 803(5), a recorded recollection like the transcribed statement here must be adopted by the witness while “the facts were fresh in his memory.” Id. at 10. The court then applied the analysis from State v. Spinks, 136 N.C. App. 153 (1999), explaining “[the witness’s] signature on the statement is inadequate to satisfy the third prong of Rule 803(5) when: (1) it was never read back to him for adoption; (2) his in-court testimony contradicted the statements contained therein; and (3) he could not recall the events described.” Slip Op. at 12. The court then established this error was prejudicial, as “[w]hen [the witness’s] hearsay statements are excised from consideration, we can identify no remaining direct evidence that tends to show or identifies [defendant] as [the dog’s] killer.” Id. at 14. This represented a probable impact on the jury’s verdict and justified a new trial.
In this Buncombe County case, defendant appealed his conviction for first-degree murder, arguing five separate errors by the trial court and contending the cumulative prejudice of those errors entitled him to a new trial. The Court of Appeals found no error.
In June of 2017, the victim was shot in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Asheville by a man in a black hoodie. At the time of the shooting, defendant was sixteen years of age. A witness from the scene later identified defendant as the man in the hoodie, picking his photograph out of a selection of potential subjects. The witness also gave a written statement of the events to detectives. Another witness, defendant’s cousin, also identified him as the shooter during a recorded interview with detectives. At trial, both witnesses were called to testify. Defendant’s cousin testified she was unable to recall the events around the shooting, and the prosecutor moved to have the recording of her interview played for the jury under Rule of Evidence 803(5). Over defense counsel’s objection, the trial court permitted playing the video. The detectives also testified regarding the interviews of both witnesses. Defendant was subsequently convicted and appealed.
Defendant argued the first error was a failure to instruct the jury on the lesser-included offense of second-degree murder. The Court of Appeals disagreed, explaining that the prosecution had proven each element of first-degree murder, and no evidence was admitted negating any element. Walking through defendant’s points, the court noted (1) despite defendant’s claim that he used marijuana earlier in the day of the shooting, voluntary intoxication only negated specific intent if the defendant was intoxicated at the time the crime was committed; (2) no case law supported the argument that defendant’s age (16 years old) negated the elements of first-degree murder; (3) provocation by a third party could not excuse defendant’s actions towards the victim; and (4) defendant’s statement to a witness that he was “angry” at the victim but only intended to fight him did not prevent a finding of premeditation and deliberation where no evidence was admitted to show his anger reached a level “such as to disturb the faculties and reason.” Slip Op. at 19.
The second error alleged by defendant was a special jury instruction requested by defense counsel on intent, premeditation, and deliberation for adolescents. The court explained that while defense counsel’s requested instruction might be supported by scientific research, no evidence was admitted on adolescent brain function, and “[d]efendant’s age is not considered nor contemplated in the analysis of premeditation and deliberation, therefore, this instruction would be incorrect and likely to mislead the jury.” Id. at 22.
The third alleged error was playing the interview video and introducing the photo lineup identification provided by defendant’s cousin. Defendant argued she did not testify the events were fresh in her mind at the time of the recording, and the interview and lineup did not correctly reflect her knowledge of the shooting. The court disagreed with both arguments, explaining that the trial court found the recording was made two days after the shooting and concluded it was fresh in her memory. The court also explained that the witness did not disavow her statements, and provided a signature and initials on identification paperwork, justifying a finding that her testimony and identification were correct. Defendant also argued that admitting the interview and identification were improper under Rule of Evidence 403. The court disagreed, explaining that the interview was highly probative of defendant’s motive, outweighing the danger of unfair prejudice.
Considering the fourth alleged error, that the identification evidence from the first witness was tainted by impermissibly suggestive interview techniques by the detectives, the court noted that defendant did not present arguments as to why the procedures were unnecessarily suggestive. Although defendant did not properly argue the first step of the two-step determination process for impermissibly suggestive techniques, the court addressed the second step of the analysis anyway, applying the five-factor test from State v. Grimes, 309 N.C. 606 (1983), to determine there was no error in admitting the witness’s identification of defendant. Slip Op. at 31.
Finally, the court considered defendant’s argument that it was error to permit the detectives to offer improper lay opinions about the witnesses’ “forthcoming” and “unequivocal” participation in identifying defendant. Id. at 32. Defendant failed to object at trial, so the court applied a plain error standard to the review. The court did not believe that the statements were comments on the witnesses’ credibility, but even assuming that admission was error, the court concluded that admission was not plain error due to the other evidence of guilt in the record. Because the court found no error in any of the five preceding arguments, the court found no cumulative prejudice justifying a new trial.
Judge Murphy concurred, but concurred in result only for Parts II-E (Detective’s Statements) and II-F (Cumulative Prejudice). Id. at 35.
In this first-degree murder and discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle in operation case, the Court of Appeals determined that the trial court did not commit reversible error on evidentiary issues and that there was no cumulative error. Defendant was jealous of Demesha Warren’s relationship with the victim, Kenneth Covington, and fatally shot Covington while Covington was driving Warren’s car after visiting the store on an evening when he and Warren were watching TV together at her apartment.
(1) Because certain prior statements made by Warren to an investigator correctly reflected her knowledge at the time she made them, the trial court did not err by admitting the statements as past recorded recollections under Rule 803(5). One statement was recorded by the investigator on the night of the murder and the other was an email Warren later provided to the investigator. At trial, Warren remembered speaking with the investigator on the night of the murder and giving him the email but could not remember the content of either communication because of trauma-induced memory loss. While Warren did not testify that the content of the recording correctly reflected her knowledge at the time, she did not disavow it and characterized the content as “what [she] had been through” and “just laying it all out.” This was sufficient for the Court to conclude that Warren was relaying information that reflected her knowledge correctly. As for the email, evidence suggesting that Warren dictated the email and signed and dated it when providing it to the investigator was sufficient to show that it correctly reflected her knowledge at the time.
(2) The trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting testimony of the State’s expert on gunshot residue (GSR) because the expert followed the State Crime Lab’s procedures as required to meet the reliability requirement of Rule 702(a). The defendant argued that the expert did not follow Lab protocol because the expert analyzed a GSR sample taken from the defendant more than four hours after the shooting. The trial court found, and the Court of Appeals agreed, that the expert actually did follow Lab protocol which permits a sample to be tested beyond the four-hour time limit when the associated GSR information form indicates that collection was delayed because the person from whom the sample was collected was sleeping during the four-hour time window, as was the case here. The Court determined that the defendant failed to preserve another Rule 702(a) argument related to threshold amounts of GSR elements.
(3) The trial court did not abuse its discretion by allowing an investigator to provide lay opinion testimony identifying a car in a surveillance video as the defendant’s car based on its color and sunroof. The Court of Appeals explained that it was unnecessary for the investigator to have firsthand knowledge of the events depicted in the videos to provide the lay opinion identification. Rather, in order to offer an interpretation of the similarities between the depicted car and the defendant’s car, the investigator needed to have firsthand knowledge of the defendant’s car, which he did because he had viewed and examined the car following the shooting.
(4) The trial court erred by admitting testimony from a witness concerning statements Warren had made to the witness describing the defendant confronting Warren about her relationship with the victim and Warren’s belief that the defendant had killed the victim. The trial court admitted the testimony of those statements as non-hearsay corroboration of Warren’s testimony, but this was error because the statements were inconsistent with and contradicted Warren’s testimony. While error, admission of the statements was not prejudicial because the jury heard other admissible evidence that was consistent with the erroneously admitted statements.
(5) The trial court did not err by admitting a witness’s testimony recounting the victim’s statement to the witness that the victim was afraid of the defendant because the defendant had threatened to kill him as a statement of the victim’s then-existing state of mind under Rule 803(3). The fact of the threat explained the victim’s fear and, thus, the statement was “precisely the type of statement by a murder victim expressing fear of the defendant that our Supreme Court has long held admissible under Rule 803(3).”
(6) The trial court erred by admitting evidence that an investigator recovered a .45 caliber bullet from the defendant’s car because the bullet had no connection to the murder, which involved .40 caliber bullets, and therefore was irrelevant under Rules 401 and 402. However, this error did not amount to prejudicial plain error because it “did not draw any connection between Defendant and guns that had not already been drawn.”
(7) Finally, the Court rejected the defendant’s contention that the cumulative effect of the individual errors required a new trial, explaining that “the errors individually had, at most, a miniscule impact on the trial” because the facts underlying the erroneously admitted evidence came in through other means and there was extensive other evidence implicating the defendant in the murder.
In this murder case, the trial court did not err by admitting into evidence prior written statements made to the police by the defendant’s brothers, Reginald and Antonio, pursuant to the Rule 803(5) recorded recollection exception to the hearsay rule. The statements at issue constitute hearsay. Even though Reginald and Antonio testified at trial, their written statements were not made while testifying; rather they were made to the police nearly 3 years prior to trial. Thus they were hearsay and inadmissible unless they fit within a hearsay exception. Here, and as discussed in detail in the court’s opinion, the statements meet all the requirements of the Rule 803(5) recorded recollection hearsay exception.
The trial court did not err by allowing the introduction of a video recording of the State’s witness being interviewed by law enforcement as substantive evidence where the statement fell within the Rule 803(5) hearsay exception for past recollection recorded. The court rejected the notion that the video had been introduced to refresh the witness’s recollection.
An audio recording can be admitted under the Rule 803(5) exception for recorded recollection. However, the statement at issue was not admissible under this exception because the witness did not recall making the statement and when asked whether she fabricated it, the witness testified that because of her mental state she was “liable to say anything.”