United States v. Garnes

102 F.4th 628

UNITED STATES of America, Appellant, v. Quadri GARNES, Defendant-Appellee.

Docket No. 23-6790

August Term, 2023

United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit

Argued: January 9, 2024

Decided: May 28, 2024

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Morrison, J.)

Antoinette N. Rangel (David C. James, Alexander Mindlin, on the brief), Assistant United States Attorneys, for Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn, NY, for Appellant.

Colleen P. Cassidy, Federal Defenders of New York, Inc., Appeals Bureau, New York, NY, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before: Lynch, Nardini, and Kahn, Circuit Judges.

Gerard E. Lynch, Circuit Judge:

On September 29, 2022, Defendant-Appellee Quadri Garnes called the New York State Department of Labor ("DOL") to inquire about his eligibility for unemployment benefits based on his brief employment with the United States Postal Service ("USPS"). After being informed that he was ineligible for benefits, Garnes made statements over the phone to two DOL employees that the government alleges constituted true threats to harm USPS officials and others. The alleged threats incorporated five statements that referenced (and indeed overstated) Garnes's prior criminal record.

A grand jury in the Eastern District of New York indicted Garnes on two counts in connection with the September 29, 2022 phone call: threatening to assault and murder employees of the USPS, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 115(a)(1)(B) and (b)(4) (Count One), and transmitting in interstate commerce communications containing one or more threats to injure the person of another, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) (Count Two).

Prior to trial, Garnes moved to require the government to redact the threatening conversation to exclude the five references that Garnes himself made to his criminal history and prior incarceration, citing Rules 401, 402, and 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence. The government opposed the motion. On July 7, 2023, the district court (Nina R. Morrison, J.) granted Garnes's motion and excluded the five statements, concluding that the probative value of that evidence is substantially outweighed by a danger of unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, and misleading the jury.

On appeal from that order, the government argues that the district court exceeded its discretion in excluding the five statements, because (1) it underestimated their probative value and misapplied Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence and Second Circuit case law to its analysis of unfair prejudice; (2) it did not properly consider the utility of a limiting instruction; and (3) it wrongly relied on the existence of what it considered to be "strong" alternative evidence.

For the reasons set forth below, we hold that, in a prosecution for making threats, the district court exceeded its discretion in excluding portions of the threats themselves under Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, where those statements, made by the defendant himself, are highly probative, and any unfair prejudice can be substantially reduced by a limiting instruction. Accordingly, we REVERSE the district court's order of exclusion, and REMAND the case for further proceedings.

BACKGROUND

I. Factual Background¹

Garnes worked as a mail carrier for the USPS from late March or early April 2022 to late May 2022. Following his termination from that position, he applied for unemployment benefits. His claim was denied because he had not worked for the USPS long enough to be eligible for the benefits.

On September 29, 2022, Garnes telephoned the DOL to inquire about his unemployment benefit claim. Over the course of a 45-minute phone conversation, Garnes spoke with two DOL employees, who each advised him that he did not qualify for unemployment benefits. In response, Garnes made a series of statements expressing his frustration with that outcome.

Some of the statements indicated that Garnes would shoot individuals at the USPS and DOL: "If I go back to the post office, I'm gonna shoot somebody." Gov't App'x 81. "Oh, so I gotta go to the post office and shoot the post office up, right?" Id. at 89. "Somebody might get shot today coming out of Department of Labor." Id. at 90. Other statements conveyed that Garnes's reaction to the denial of benefits would land him in jail or prison ("Y'all gonna make me go to jail," id. at 82) and that he was comfortable with that possibility ("I'm made, as long as I'm in the New York City jail, I'm good," id. at 88). Garnes also acknowledged that he knew the conversation was being recorded: "And I'm putting it out there on, cause I know this is recorded, because if I was to do something like that, at least when they start going through the records, they know why it was done." Id. at 88. Of particular relevance to this appeal, some of the statements indicated that Garnes had a criminal history, for example: "Cause listen didn't I just tell you I got 18 and a half years in jail. It don't bother me to be in jail." Id.

The DOL reported the conversation to the New York State Police and the United States Postal Inspection Service. Law enforcement searched for Garnes and took steps to protect the employees of the DOL and USPS. The DOL also informed its employees of the threats and took additional safety measures. Garnes was arrested two weeks later.

II. Procedural History

In a superseding indictment dated June 16, 2023, Garnes was charged with threatening to assault and murder officials whose killing would be a crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1114, in this instance, employees of the USPS, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 115(a)(1)(B) and (b)(4) (Count One), and transmitting in interstate commerce communications containing one or more threats to injure the person of another, encompassing the DOL employees, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) (Count Two).

On June 23, 2023, Garnes moved in limine to exclude evidence relating to his prior criminal history, namely, the five statements that he made during the phone call with the DOL that referenced his time in jail, his prior felony convictions, and the places of his past incarceration. The five statements that Garnes sought to exclude are:

I got 18 and a half years in jail. I got 18 and a half years. No, listen, listen, I have eight.

[T]o make myself not stop from robbing a bank. They're 18 and a half years in jail.

[L]ook, look, I got mad felonies. I got like nine, 10 felonies, right?

Cause listen didn't I just tell you I got 18 and a half years in jail. It don't bother me to be in jail.

And I told you I got 18 and [a] half years all together in jail, all together in prison. [N]ot Rikers Island, state prison, state prison, Clinton, A[t]tica, Elm[i]ra state prison. [M]aybe where your, where, where, where, where your place is in Albany.

Gov't App'x 46-47, 81-89.²

Garnes contended that those statements did not constitute threats or statements of intent, but rather, were, "at worst, poorly phrased attempts . . . to characterize the absurdity of his predicament; one where it is preferable, from an economic standpoint, to be incarcerated than to live as a free man." Id. at 50. Accordingly, Garnes argued that the five statements should be excluded under Rule 402 of the Federal Rules of Evidence because they are "irrelevant to the charged offense" and, even if they are minimally relevant, under Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence because they are "highly prejudicial." Id. at 47.

Garnes further argued that the statements are misleading because he had "unintentionally misstate[d]" his criminal history "in a manner that suggests that it is worse than it actually is," and that this also increases the danger of unfair prejudice. Id. at 48-49. Although Garnes told the DOL that he had spent 18 and a half years incarcerated in various state facilities as a result of nine or ten felony convictions, in reality, Garnes had been incarcerated for a total of only seven years, in a single institution - Ulster Correctional Facility. The 18-and-a-half-year figure referred to the span of time that Garnes had spent in and out of the criminal justice system, and the reference to nine felonies reflected the number of felonies Garnes had been charged with, though he was convicted of only three.

The government opposed Garnes's motion to exclude, arguing that the five statements are more probative than prejudicial, and are directly probative of the charged offenses. In particular, the government argued that the statements are highly relevant evidence to its required showing of mens rea, because in a true threat prosecution, the government must prove that the defendant had some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements. See Counterman v. Colorado, 600 U.S. 66, 69, 143 S.Ct. 2106, 216 L.Ed.2d 775 (2023). Therefore, the government asserted that the statements should be admitted into evidence with the rest of the recorded phone call.

After the final pretrial conference, the district court issued an electronic docket order on July 7, 2023 that granted Garnes's motion in limine to exclude the five statements, concluding that their probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, and misleading the jury under Rule 403. The district court also stated that it would provide its reasons for the ruling on the record prior to the beginning of jury selection.

Two days later, the government submitted a letter to the district court arguing that, by excluding portions of the September 29, 2022 call, the July 7, 2023 order excluded portions of the charged conduct, which should be admitted because that evidence is highly probative of both the actus reus and the mens rea of the charged offenses. As theorized by the government, that evidence "would allow a jury to assess the criminal conduct in its entirety" and to "reasonably infer" that Garnes repeatedly referenced his criminal history to demonstrate to his...