United States v. Armajo

38 F.4th 80

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.Shayne Kyle ARMAJO, Defendant – Appellant.

No. 21-8021

United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.

FILED June 23, 2022

O. Dean Sanderford, Assistant Federal Public Defender (Virginia L. Grady, Federal Public Defender, with him on the briefs), Denver, Colorado, for Defendant-Appellant.

Timothy J. Forwood, Assistant United States Attorney (L. Robert Murray, Acting United States Attorney with him on the brief), Cheyenne, Wyoming, for the Plaintiff-Appellee.

Before HARTZ, SEYMOUR, and BALDOCK, Circuit Judges.

SEYMOUR, Circuit Judge.

Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, a party may introduce evidence of another's prior bad acts if it is presented for a proper purpose. See Fed. R. Evid. 404(b). Mr. Armajo, on trial for stabbing his uncle, sought to present evidence of his uncle's prior assaults in order to bolster a self-defense claim. We consider whether the district court abused its discretion when it ruled that this was a permissible use under Rule 404(b) but nevertheless excluded most of the proffered evidence under Rule 403 because its probative value was substantially outweighed by the risk of undue prejudice.

I

On the day of the stabbing, Shayne Armajo and his uncle, Eli Armajo, were headed to their shared home after a day spent drinking, smoking marijuana, and arguing. As they traveled down a country road in a remote portion of Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation, things came to a head when Eli declared he had "had enough" of his nephew and pulled the truck over so they could "duke it out."¹ Rec., vol. III at 696–97. What happened next is disputed.

At trial, Eli testified that he got out of the truck, met Shayne at the tailgate, and started swinging. Eli landed several blows, bloodying Shayne's face and breaking his glasses. Shayne then pulled out a buck knife and began slashing. Eli tried to fend him off, but Shayne knocked Eli to the ground and stabbed him twice in the leg. According to Eli, Shayne then returned to the truck and drove away, leaving Eli bleeding by the side of the road. Fortunately, a passerby spotted him, and authorities were able to get him to a hospital. He was treated and released the next day.

The jury never heard directly from Shayne regarding his version of events. In the aftermath of the stabbing, he told investigators he had no memory of what happened, and he did not testify at trial. Nevertheless, his counsel tried to cast the stabbing as self-defense. Counsel suggested Shayne had good reason to fear his uncle. Although Eli was older, he was substantially heavier and still vigorous, bragging at trial that he could lift a 700-pound log. And Eli had shown himself capable of doing Shayne serious harm in the past. A Bureau of Indian Affairs officer testified that he arrived at the scene of a reported fight between the two in 2018 and found Shayne covered in his own blood, having been beaten by his uncle, who was drunk. Shayne was sent to the hospital in an ambulance, and Eli was charged with battery and taken to jail.

Shayne's attorneys also highlighted evidence that it was Eli, not Shayne, who was the aggressor on this occasion. Eli had, by his own admission, instigated the fight and landed several blows on Shayne. Investigators found Shayne's broken glasses at the scene, stained with his blood, and they found more blood spattered across the steering wheel of Eli's truck. When Shayne awoke from his stupor, he had a bloody cut across his torso and a hole slashed through the chest of his sweatshirt. Moreover, although authorities found Shayne's knife near his mattress, forensic examination of the blade showed no signs of human blood. Taken together, the defense argued, the evidence showed that it was Eli, not Shayne, who escalated the fight by drawing a knife, and that Shayne had only stabbed Eli because he reasonably believed his life to be in danger.

The jurors were apparently not convinced, at least not fully. After deliberating for five hours, they returned a mixed verdict: guilty on a charge of assault resulting in serious bodily injury, not guilty on a charge of assault with a dangerous weapon with intent to do bodily harm.

II

"A person may resort to self-defense if he reasonably believes that he is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm, thus necessitating an in-kind response." United States v. Toledo, 739 F.3d 562, 567 (10th Cir. 2014). A defendant's "burden of production to warrant a self-defense instruction is not onerous." Id. at 568 (internal quotation marks omitted). It requires only that there be "evidence sufficient for a reasonable jury to find in his favor." Id. at 567.

United States v. Barrett , 797 F.3d 1207, 1218 (10th Cir. 2015). Because Shayne clearly met this burden, the crux of this appeal concerns evidence the jury never heard. To make its case, the government was required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the stabbing was not an act of self-defense, i.e., that Shayne lacked a genuine and reasonable belief that he was in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that his use of force was necessary. See id. (citing Toledo, 739 F.3d at 567 ).

Hoping to stymie the government on this point, Shayne filed notice before trial that he intended to present evidence not only of the beating he took from his uncle in 2018, but of an alleged assault by Eli on his disabled brother in 2014 and several alleged assaults on a girlfriend, including a physical assault in 2015 and a sexual assault in 2017. Shayne argued that this evidence was admissible under Rule 404(b) because evidence that Eli had attacked people in the past, together with evidence that Shayne had known of the attacks, would tend to show that Shayne had good reason to fear Eli and therefore to believe it necessary to meet force with force.

During a hearing on the matter, the district court ruled that Shayne would be allowed to present evidence of Eli's 2018 assault on him, but the court barred evidence of the other alleged assaults. The court agreed that the evidence served a valid purpose under Rule 404(b) because Shayne's state of mind was pivotal on the issue of self-defense. But the court also held that the evidence was still subject to Rule 403, which provides that a trial court may bar relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by certain prudential concerns, such as the risk of unfair prejudice. With that, the court turned to the balancing analysis mandated by Rule 403.

On the probative side of the scale, the court concluded that only Eli's 2018 assault on Shayne was highly probative to his state of mind at the time of the incident because it happened relatively recently and involved an attack on the defendant himself. By contrast, the other alleged assaults were more temporally remote and involved alleged assaults on others, a lack of similarity that "substantially reduced" their probative value. Rec., vol. III at 37. This was especially true of the alleged sexual assault, as it involved a categorically different kind of aggression.

Meanwhile, on the prejudicial side of the scale, the court believed presenting evidence of the other assaults risked wasting time and confusing the issues. Unlike the 2018 assault on Shayne, which was documented in a police report and ended in a conviction, the precise circumstances of the other alleged assaults were not well documented. Consequently, the court reasoned, proving exactly what happened would require "mini trials" and confuse the factual issues the jury had to consider. Most of all, the court said the evidence risked unfair prejudice. Presented with allegations that Eli had beaten a woman and a person with disabilities, the jury might be tempted to believe he was simply a bad person and therefore got what he had coming to him. Concluding that these risks substantially outweighed the proffered evidence's probative value, the court excluded it under Rule 403.

III

Shayne argues on appeal that the district court committed a legal error when it discounted the probative value of the other assaults due to their lack of similarity with the incident in question. He contends that, unlike in the typical case where a prosecutor offers the Rule 404(b) evidence to prove the defendant's knowledge or identity, similarity is simply not a relevant consideration in the self-defense context where the purpose is to show the defendant's own state of mind. As a result of the error, he claims, the court mistakenly skewed the balance in favor of exclusion when conducting Rule 403's balancing test.

In assessing the district court's decision, we review its legal interpretation of the Federal Rules of Evidence de novo and its application of the rules for abuse of discretion. United States v. Gutierrez de Lopez , 761 F.3d 1123, 1132 (10th Cir. 2014) (citing United States v. Griffin , 389 F.3d 1100, 1103 (10th Cir. 2004) ). A district court does not abuse its discretion if its ruling "falls within the bounds of permissible choice in the circumstances and is not arbitrary, capricious, or whimsical." Id. (citing United States v. Smith , 534 F.3d 1211, 1218 (10th Cir. 2008) ).

As an initial matter, the district court was correct in holding that specific instances of a victim's violent conduct may be admissible in a self-defense case to prove the defendant's state of mind. Although we have previously declined to decide whether Rule 404(b) permits the use of other-act evidence in this manner, see United States v. Talamante , 981 F.2d 1153, 1157 (10th Cir. 1992), we see no reason to avoid the question here.

Rule 404(b)(1) provides that "[e]vidence of any other crime, wrong, or act is not admissible to prove a person's character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character." But Rule 404(b)(2) provides that such evidence "may be admissible for another purpose, such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge,...