Opinion
Court of Appeals No. A-11851 No. 6350
06-15-2016
JOSEPHINE K. GUTHRIE, Appellant, v. STATE OF ALASKA, Appellee.
Appearances: Callie Patton Kim, Assistant Public Defender, and Quinlan Steiner, Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Appellant. Stephen R. West, District Attorney, Ketchikan, and Craig W. Richards, 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. Trial Court No. 1KE-13-649 CR
MEMORANDUM OPINION
Appeal from the District Court, First Judicial District, Ketchikan, Kevin G. Miller, Judge. Appearances: Callie Patton Kim, Assistant Public Defender, and Quinlan Steiner, Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Appellant. Stephen R. West, District Attorney, Ketchikan, and Craig W. Richards, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee. Before: Mannheimer, Chief Judge, Allard, Judge, and Suddock, Superior Court Judge. Judge MANNHEIMER.
Sitting by assignment made pursuant to Article IV, Section 16 of the Alaska Constitution and Administrative Rule 24(d).
Josephine K. Guthrie was convicted of fourth-degree criminal mischief for damaging her ex-boyfriend's car and throwing his remote car key across the street and into some water.
At trial, Guthrie's defense was that her ex-boyfriend, Michael Quick, was scheming to gain leverage in a custody battle over their young child, and that he lied to the authorities about Guthrie's damaging his car and car key. To support this defense, Guthrie's attorney wished to offer the testimony of Ketchikan Police Officer Mark Sivertsen.
Sivertsen was one of the officers who responded to an incident between Guthrie and Quick that occurred about sixweeks prior to the episode at issue in this case. According to the defense attorney's offer of proof, Sivertsen would testify that, during this earlier incident, Quick reported that Guthrie had destroyed his clothing, but Sivertsen could not find any evidence that Quick's clothing had, in fact, been destroyed.
The district court declined to allow the defense attorney to present this testimony. The court ruled that the testimony had little probative value, that it had substantial potential for unfair prejudice, and that its only real evidentiary value was to suggest that Quick had lied to the police on an unrelated prior occasion. (See Alaska Evidence Rule 608(b), which forbids litigants from trying to establish a witness's character for untruthfulness by introducing evidence of the witness's specific acts of untruthfulness.)
We conclude that even if the trial court's ruling was mistaken, any error was harmless.
When Quick took the stand at Guthrie's trial, Guthrie's attorney cross-examined him about this incident as well as others. Quick acknowledged that he had complained to the police about Guthrie "at least seven or eight" times, and that he had also called the Office of Children's Services once. With respect to the incident involving Officer Sivertsen, Quick said that he told the police that Guthrie had ripped a piece of his artwork, not his clothing. Quick also acknowledged that, on this earlier occasion, the police told him that his problems with Guthrie "[were] civil, and they couldn't do anything."
Quick's own testimony about these matters provided evidentiary support for Guthrie's theory that Quick was using the police (and the child protection authorities) to harass Guthrie and to gain advantage in the child custody matter — and that, after the police told him that his problems with Guthrie were "civil", and that these problems were not police matters, Quick realized that he would have to invent a story involving even more serious misconduct if he wanted the authorities to do anything. This is, in fact, how Guthrie's attorney asked the jurors to view Quick's testimony when the attorney delivered the defense summation.
Given this record, we are convinced that the challenged evidentiary ruling, even if mistaken, had no appreciable affect on the jury's verdict.
See Love v. State, 457 P.2d 622, 634 (Alaska 1969) (holding that, for instances of non-constitutional error, the test for harmlessness is whether the appellate court "can fairly say that the error did not appreciably affect the jury's verdict"). --------
Accordingly, the judgement of the district court is AFFIRMED.