Harris v. State
| Decision Date | 27 December 2018 |
| Docket Number | No. 69509,69509 |
| Citation | 432 P.3d 207 |
| Parties | Ammar Asimfaruq HARRIS, Appellant, v. The STATE of Nevada, Respondent. |
| Court | Nevada Supreme Court |
Appellant Ammar Harris shot and killed a fellow motorist driving on the Las Vegas Strip. The motorist’s car then careened down the Strip and struck a taxicab, killing both the driver and a passenger in a fiery explosion. At trial, the district court admitted photographs of the taxicab victims, including images of their bodies disfigured by the fire and subsequent autopsies. The main issue in this appeal is whether admission of the photographs amounted to an abuse of the district court’s discretion. We conclude that it did. Photographs, even gruesome ones, may be properly admitted in a criminal case to show the cause of a victim’s death, the nature of his injuries, and the like. But such photographs are still subject to the balancing test outlined in NRS 48.035(1), which requires a district court to exclude evidence when its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice. Because the challenged photographs added little to the State’s case, but created a significant risk of inflaming the jury, the district court should have excluded them. However, as the admission of the photographs was harmless, and none of Harris’ other claims warrant relief, we affirm.
Harris spent the early morning hours of February 21, 2013, partying at a Las Vegas nightclub with his girlfriend, Yeni, and two other women. At roughly 3:30 a.m., Kenneth Cherry and Freddy Walters pulled up to the club in a Maserati. They left soon after, getting back in the Maserati only to loop around the valet and park again. Around the same time, Harris and the women left the club and headed to the valet to pick up his car. When they got there, Harris realized he had left his jacket back at the club and went to retrieve it. An argument broke out while he was gone, and Yeni saw a man waving around a gun. She went inside and told Harris about the incident. When he returned, he retrieved a gun from his glove compartment and told Yeni to use it if necessary. He then walked over to Cherry’s Maserati, which drove away.
Harris and the women left shortly thereafter. As they were driving onto the Strip, Harris pulled up to Cherry’s Maserati and cut it off. Harris told Yeni, who was in the passenger seat, to roll down her window and lean back. Yeni noticed the gun in his lap. Apparently foreseeing trouble, she told Harris that Cherry was not the right person. Harris ignored her. Through the window, he said something to Cherry like "What’s up?" and Cherry responded with either "Do I know you?" or "I don’t know you." Harris then shot Cherry, killing him almost instantly. Cherry died pressing on the gas pedal and the Maserati took off. Harris pulled ahead and kept shooting, striking Walters, Cherry’s passenger. The Maserati collided with several vehicles before slamming into a taxicab at a speed of roughly 88 miles per hour. The taxicab burst into flames which engulfed the entire vehicle. The driver of the taxicab, Michael Bolden, and his passenger, Sandra Sutton, died from injuries they sustained in the crash and the fire.
The State charged Harris with the murders of Cherry, Bolden, and Sutton, and the attempted murder of Walters. The State sought the death penalty for each murder. At trial, the defense conceded that Harris shot Cherry, but argued he was not guilty of first-degree murder for two main reasons. First, Harris claimed he acted in self-defense. Pointing to surveillance videos which showed Cherry and Walters driving in and out of the valet several times and interacting with the man Yeni saw with the gun, he claimed that Cherry and Walters had been "hunting" him and he had to shoot first to protect himself. He argued that his drug and alcohol intoxication, and his prior experience of being shot, played into his belief that he had to shoot first. He also claimed that he could not commit a premeditated murder due to his intoxication.
The State responded to Harris’ self-defense claim by arguing that neither the video, nor any testimony, indicated that Cherry or Walters acted in a threatening manner. The State also pointed out that they left the club before Harris, which undermined his claim that they were hunting him. Finally, the State argued that even if Harris consumed alcohol or drugs before the shooting, he was not so intoxicated that he was unable to form the intent necessary to be guilty of first-degree murder. The jury found Harris guilty of three counts of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, one count of attempted murder with the use of a deadly weapon, and other felonies. After a penalty hearing, the jury found beyond a reasonable doubt that ten aggravating circumstances applied to each murder, and no juror found any mitigating circumstances. The jury imposed a sentence of death for each murder. This appeal followed.
Admission of gruesome photographs
The main issue presented in this appeal is whether the district court abused its discretion when it admitted photographs of the victims who died in the cab. Before addressing this issue in more detail, we must first address Harris’ assertion that we should not give deference to the district court’s decision because it did not identify specific reasons for admitting the photographs and therefore we can only speculate as to the basis for its decision. Given the state of the record, we do not agree. Harris sought to exclude the photographs before trial. The district court agreed that the photographs were "quite disturbing" and asked the State why they were necessary. The State then went through each photograph, one by one, and explained why each was necessary; broadly, the State argued that the photographs showed the manner in which the victims were found, the extent of their injuries, and the cause of their deaths. Harris responded that none of these issues were in dispute, and he affirmatively stated that he would not endeavor to put them in dispute. The district court later admitted the photographs. Under these circumstances, we can fairly infer that the district court credited the State’s arguments for admitting the photographs over Harris’ arguments to the contrary. We therefore review for an abuse of discretion. See, e.g., West v. State, 119 Nev. 410, 420, 75 P.3d 808, 815 (2003) ().
The district court abused its discretion
Citing NRS 48.035(1), Harris argues that the photographs were so unnecessarily graphic that they risked outraging the jury, and that potential for unfair prejudice substantially outweighed any probative value the photographs otherwise had. The State responds that this court has routinely upheld the admission of such photographs when used to show the nature of a victim’s injuries and the manner of their infliction, or when they otherwise assist the jury in ascertaining the truth of a matter at issue. And, the State argues, the photographs were particularly necessary here because not only did it have to prove that Harris killed Cherry, it had to prove that he was responsible for the more attenuated deaths of the victims in the taxicab. See Doyle v. State , 116 Nev. 148, 161, 995 P.2d 465, 473 (2000) ().
The State is correct that photographs of a victim’s injuries tend to be highly probative and thus are frequently deemed admissible in criminal cases despite their graphic content. See, e.g., Browne v. State, 113 Nev. 305, 314, 933 P.2d 187, 192 (1997) ; see also 1 Christopher B. Mueller & Laird C. Kirkpatrick, Federal Evidence § 4:18 (4th ed. 2018) (). But while that is generally true, it does not mean such photographs are always admissible, regardless of the facts and circumstances of a given case. Nevada law does not categorically admit or exclude such photographs; rather, like all evidence a party seeks to introduce, they are subject to the balancing test set out in NRS 48.035(1), which precludes the admission of evidence when its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice. NRS 48.035 requires the district court to act as a gatekeeper by assessing the need for the evidence on a case-by-case basis and excluding it when the benefit it adds is substantially outweighed by the unfair harm it might cause.
While the record suggests that the district court adopted the State’s reasoning for the admission of each photograph, the record does not evidence a meaningful weighing of the potential for unfair prejudice against each photograph’s probative value, which leads us to conclude that the district court did not properly fulfill its role as gatekeeper in this case. See Hall v. Commonwealth, 468 S.W.3d 814, 827 (Ky. 2015) (). The photographs at issue are shocking. In full color and high-resolution, they show the terrible aftermath of the taxicab’s explosion and the further mutilation caused by the victims’ autopsies. They include images of charred limbs and burned flesh, dissected tracheas and chest cavities ripped open, and the desecrated bodies of human beings who clearly died a...
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