Opinion
Court of Appeals No. A-10343 Trial Court No. 1KE-08-630 Cr No. 5791
01-11-2012
STEVEN D. LAWRENCE, Appellant, v. STATE OF ALASKA, Appellee.
Appearances: Sarah T. White, contract attorney for the Public Defender Agency, and Quinlan Steiner, Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Appellant. James Scott, Assistant District Attorney, Ketchikan, and John J. Burns, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee.
NOTICE
Memorandum decisions of this court do not create legal precedent. See Alaska Appellate Rule 214(d) and Paragraph 7 of the Guidelines for Publication of Court of Appeals Decisions (Court of Appeals Order No. 3). Accordingly, this memorandum decision may not be cited as binding authority for any proposition of law.
MEMORANDUM OPINION
Appeal from the District Court, First Judicial District,
Ketchikan, Michael A. Thompson, Judge.
Appearances: Sarah T. White, contract attorney for the Public
Defender Agency, and Quinlan Steiner, Public Defender,
Anchorage, for the Appellant. James Scott, Assistant District
Attorney, Ketchikan, and John J. Burns, Attorney General,
Juneau, for the Appellee.
Before: Coats, Chief Judge, and Mannheimer and Bolger,
Judges.
MANNHEIMER, Judge.
Steven D. Lawrence was convicted of assaulting his girlfriend. In this appeal, he argues that the trial judge committed error by allowing the State to introduce evidence of an earlier assault that Lawrence committed against a previous girlfriend. For the reasons explained here, we conclude that this evidence was properly admitted, and we therefore affirm Lawrence's conviction.
Underlying facts
On July 26, 2008, a Ketchikan cab driver, Lynn Perish, drove Sherry Yeltatzie to her residence. During the cab ride, Yeltatzie told Perish that, earlier that evening, she and her boyfriend had "split up" after an argument.
When the cab arrived at the residence, Yeltatzie went inside to get money to pay the fare while Perish waited. Yeltatzie started to come back outside, but then a man grabbed her violently and pulled her back into the apartment. Upon seeing this, Perish contacted the Ketchikan police.
When the police arrived at the apartment, Yeltatzie was naked and her boyfriend — Lawrence — was holding her down on the bed. Yeltatzie told the police that Lawrence had accused her of being unfaithful. He called her a whore, and he said that he was going to "check" to see if she had been cheating on him. At that point, according to Yeltatzie, Lawrence pulled off her clothes, pushed her to the ground, banged her head repeatedly on the floor, punched her in the face, and choked her.
The police observed that Yeltatzie's lip was cut and swollen, and that there were scratches and areas of redness on her neck. Lawrence was arrested and charged with fourth-degree assault based on this incident.
Following the assault, Yeltatzie went to the emergency room to seek treatment for an escalating headache and neck pain. She also went to court to obtain a domestic violence protective order against Lawrence. Yeltatzie told the emergency room doctor and the magistrate who heard her application for a protective order that she had been assaulted.
But when Yeltatzie testified at Lawrence's trial, she recanted her earlier statements to the police, to the emergency room doctor, and to the magistrate. She denied that Lawrence had assaulted her. Instead, she claimed that she had been very intoxicated, and that the injuries to her lip and neck were either self-inflicted or the result of falling down.
To bolster its case, the State presented evidence that Lawrence had been convicted of assaulting another girlfriend in a similar manner six years earlier. That girlfriend, Erin Anderson, testified that Lawrence assaulted her after she tried to leave the relationship. According to Anderson, Lawrence forced her into a vehicle and brought her into the apartment they had been sharing. Lawrence accused Anderson of being unfaithful. He called her a whore, he pulled her clothes off, and he told her that he was going to "check" to see if she had been unfaithful. (Lawrence was convicted of assault and coercion based on this incident.)
The trial judge, Superior Court Judge Michael A. Thompson, admitted this evidence under Alaska Evidence Rule 404(b)(4). This rule provides that when a defendant is on trial for a crime involving domestic violence, the State can attempt to prove the defendant's character for committing acts of domestic violence by offering evidence of the defendant's other crimes involving domestic violence — whether against the same person or any other person.
Lawrence does not dispute that his assault on Anderson was a crime involving domestic violence. However, he argues that Judge Thompson abused his discretion by failing to properly investigate whether this evidence had true probative value, and by failing to properly weigh the danger that this evidence would unfairly prejudice the jury against Lawrence.
In Bingaman v. State, 76 P.3d 398 (Alaska App. 2003), this Court extensively analyzed Evidence Rule 404(b)(4), and we outlined the factors that trial judges must consider when deciding whether evidence of other crimes of domestic violence should be admitted under this rule. To summarize that lengthy discussion, we held that trial judges must determine whether the State's offered evidence tends to prove a character trait that is truly relevant to determining the likelihood that the defendant committed the crime currently charged. Id. at 409-412. If the trial judge finds that the evidence is relevant, the judge must then weigh the probative value of the evidence against its potential for unfair prejudice or confusion of issues. Id. at 415-16.
In the trial court, Lawrence argued that the proposed evidence of his prior assault against Anderson was more prejudicial than probative. Lawrence pointed out that the assault had occurred years earlier, and that it involved a different victim. Lawrence also argued that the earlier assault involved a "different pattern of conduct". But regardless of any arguable differences between the earlier assault on Anderson and the current assault on Yeltatzie, there were substantial similarities between the two incidents.
In both instances, (1) Lawrence assaulted a woman at a time when Lawrence and the woman were ending a romantic relationship; (2) Lawrence accused the woman of infidelity and called her a whore; (3) he tore off the woman's clothing; and (4) he told the woman that he was going to "check" her to see if she had been unfaithful. It is true that Lawrence digitally penetrated Anderson but he apparently did not penetrate Yeltatzie. However, Lawrence's assault on Yeltatzie was interrupted by the arrival of the police.
Moreover, the primary question facing the jury was whether to believe Yeltatzie's original accusations of assault or, instead, to believe Yeltatzie's recantation at trial. In this context, evidence that Lawrence had committed a strikingly similar assault on another woman who was breaking up with him was obviously relevant to the jury's decision.
Given these circumstances, Judge Thompson concluded that the earlier assault on Anderson was "so factually similar" to the assault on Yeltatzie "that it [was] difficult to ... find [the earlier assault] to be anything but probative." He also concluded that the prior incident was not so remote in time as to lose its probative value. Nevertheless, Judge Thompson concluded that it would be unfairly prejudicial to allow the State to present evidence that the earlier assault had included an act of digital sexual penetration, so the judge excluded that aspect of the earlier assault.
Judge Thompson may not have gone through the Bingaman factors in a checklist fashion. But as this Court explained in Bennett v. Anchorage, 205 P.3d 1113, 1119 (Alaska App. 2009), "Bingaman does not hold that trial judges must, in every case, explain their analysis of each and every Bingaman factor." It is clear that Judge Thompson's ruling was based on his case-specific conclusion that the earlier assault was relevant, and that (with the exception of the digital penetration) evidence of the earlier assault was more probative than prejudicial. And, given this record (i.e., the facts of Lawrence's case and the facts of the prior assault), we find no abuse of discretion in the judge's ruling.
The judgement of the district court is AFFIRMED.