Usually, it’s the defendant who wants to exclude evidence that he had previously been convicted of a crime. In People v. Hicks, however, it was the prosecutor who convinced the trial court to keep out that evidence. It’s not as odd as it sounds. The defendant was being retried for second degree murder after a first jury hung on that charge but convicted him of, among other things, gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, and the defendant didn’t want the second jury to think he would go free if it acquitted him of murder.
In a 6-1 opinion by Justice Ming Chin, the Supreme Court today holds that the trial court properly excluded evidence of the first-trial convictions, but says it would be OK to instruct the jury that cases are sometimes tried in segments and that the jurors cannot “speculate about whether the defendant may have been, or may be, held criminally responsible for his conduct in some other segment of the proceedings.” The court also concludes the failure to give that type of cautionary instruction was not prejudicial.
Justice Goodwin Liu dissents, saying that the jury should have been told the defendant had already been convicted of manslaughter and also that the error was prejudicial. His test is that the parties “should have been put, to the extent possible, in the same position at the retrial as at the first trial.”
The court affirms the Second District, Division Five, Court of Appeal. 2/5 had disagreed with a 2014 opinion by the Fourth District, Division Two, which the Supreme Court disapproves. The court also disapproves a 2016 4/2 opinion.
