Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia Finds Trial Court Erred in Refusing Defendant’s Stipulation to His Prior Conviction

Similar to its federal counterpart, West Virginia Rule of Evidence 403 provides that

The court may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of one or more of the following: unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading the jury, undue delay, wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence.

Rule 403 is a liberal rule of admissibility, pursuant to which a court may exclude evidence only if its probative value is substantially outweighed by one or more of the enumerated danger. As such, most relevant evidence is admissible unless it triggers some specific rule of exclusion. That said, in Old Chief v. United States, 519 U.S. 172 (1997), the Supreme Court recognized that, in certain circumstances, a party must accept a stipulation to evidence that would otherwise satisfy the Rule 403 balancing test. A good example of Old Chief in action can be seen in the recent opinion of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia in State v. Jackson, 889 S.E.2d 77 (W.Va. 2024).

In Jackson, Tremaine Lamar Jackson was convicted of four felonies, including being a felon in possession of a firearm, stemming from an incident in May 2020 that resulted in Troy Williams’s death after he was shot in the chest. At trial,

Mr. Jackson…offered to stipulate to his prior [2017] felony conviction [for voluntary manslaughter]. The State refused to accept Mr. Jackson’s offer to stipulate because it previously attempted, unsuccessfully, to elicit this stipulation from Mr. Jackson. The State argued that accepting the stipulation during trial would be unfair because, absent an earlier stipulation, it had prepared to prove the 2017 conviction by Detective Weaver’s testimony and the sentencing order, which it viewed as the best evidence of an element of the felon in possession charge. The circuit court overruled Mr. Jackson’s objection and allowed the State to question Detective Weaver about the prior conviction. While Detective Weaver did not testify about the factual details of the prior conviction, and the court instructed the jury on the limited purpose for the evidence, the State still elicited testimony that Mr. Jackson had a prior felony conviction for voluntary manslaughter. Furthermore, the court admitted into evidence the 2017 sentencing order, which noted the use of a firearm in committing the offense. The jury received a copy of the 2017 sentencing order with the admitted trial exhibits for use during its deliberations. The jury convicted Mr. Jackson on all four counts of the indictment, with a recommendation of mercy for the first-degree murder charge.

In reversing Jackson’s convictions, the state supreme court concluded that

In this case, no deadline for producing stipulations was set by the trial court. Furthermore, because Mr. Jackson’s offer to stipulate to his prior conviction for voluntary manslaughter was refused, the jury had evidence of the name and nature of that offense, including the fact that it was committed with a firearm. While the State produced this evidence to establish that Mr. Jackson was a felon in possession of a firearm, he was also being tried for first-degree murder and for using a firearm in the commission of that murder. Given these charges, providing the jury with details of Mr. Jackson’s prior conviction produced an unreasonable risk that his convictions were based upon improper grounds, i.e., that he acted in conformance with his prior illegal conduct or that he is simply a bad person worthy of punishment. In other words, “‘the only reasonable conclusion [is] that the risk of unfair prejudice…substantially outweigh[ed] the discounted probative value of the record of conviction.’” Nichols, 208 W. Va. at 443, 541 S.E.2d at 321 (quoting Old Chief, 519 U.S. at 191, 117 S. Ct. at 655, 136 L. Ed. 2d. 574). As such, the circuit court abused its discretion by refusing Mr. Jackson’s offered stipulation and unfairly prejudiced him by that error.

-CM