United States v. Evans, Sr., No. 11-30367 (9th Cir. 2013)
Annotate this CaseIn two separate cases, the government charged defendant with being an alien in the United States after deportation, as well as misrepresenting his identity and citizenship to fraudulently obtain supplemental social security benefits, acquire food stamps, and make a claim of citizenship, and apply for a passport. Defendant was convicted of all charges and his primary defense to all the charges was that he was a citizen of the United States. The court concluded that the district court erred in invoking an inherent "gate-keeping" authority to exclude defendant's birth certificate pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 104(a) without relying on some substantive basis outside of Rule 104(a); the district court erred by concluding that no reasonable juror could determine that the birth certificate was "substantively genuine," and by excluding the birth certificate pursuant to Rule 403 without first assessing its probative value when taken as a true record of defendant's birth; and the district court's exclusion of the central piece of evidence for defendant's main defense to a critical element of all the charges in the two cases was violation of defendant's Fifth Amendment right to present a defense. Because the district court's error was not harmless, the court vacated all of the convictions and remanded for a retrial.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel vacated convictions in two cases in which the defendant’s primary defense was that he was a citizen of the United States and his primary evidence in support of his defense was a delayed birth certificate issued by the State of Idaho. The panel held that the district court erred in invoking an inherent “gate-keeping” authority to exclude the birth certificate pursuant to Fed. R. Evid. 104(a) without relying on some substantive basis outside of Rule 104(a). The panel held that the district court erred by concluding that no reasonable juror could determine that the birth certificate was “substantively genuine” (Fed. R. Evid. 104(b)), and by excluding the birth certificate without first assessing under Fed. R. Evid. 403 its probative value when taken as a true record of the defendant’s birth. The panel concluded that the district court’s exclusion of the central piece of the defendant’s main defense to a critical element of all the charges in the two cases was a violation of his Fifth Amendment right to present a defense, and the error was not harmless. Dissenting, Judge Gould would affirm because (1) Rule 104(a) lets the court preliminarily review whether a state document in the form of a belated birth certificate was procured by fraud, and illegitimate evidence may be held to be inadmissible due to its inaccurate nature; (2) the district court did not abuse its discretion by excluding the birth certificate under Rule 403; and (3) even if the district court abused its discretion on evidence rulings, he would not elevate this to the level of constitutional error and would conclude that any error was harmless.
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