People v. Hardiman, Docket No. 118670, Calendar No. 2.

Citation466 Mich. 417,646 N.W.2d 158
Decision Date25 June 2002
Docket NumberDocket No. 118670, Calendar No. 2.
PartiesPEOPLE of the State of Michigan, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Carman A. HARDIMAN, Defendant-Appellee.
CourtSupreme Court of Michigan

Jennifer M. Granholm, Attorney General, Thomas L. Casey, Solicitor General, David G. Gorcyca, Prosecuting Attorney, Joyce F. Todd, Chief, Appellate Division, and Janice A. Kabodian, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, Pontiac, MI, for the people.

State Appellate Defender (by Gail Rodwan), Detroit, MI, for defendant-appellee.

Joseph Sheeran, President, Michael E. Duggan, Prosecuting Attorney, Janice M. Joyce Bartee, Principal Appellate Attorney, Detroit, MI, for Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, Amicus Curiae.

OPINION

TAYLOR, J.

At the conclusion of a jury trial in the circuit court, the defendant was convicted of possessing less than fifty grams of heroin with intent to deliver, and possession of marijuana. The Court of Appeals reversed on the ground that the prosecution introduced insufficient evidence of guilt. We reverse because, in our judgment, the evidence was sufficient.

I

The Court of Appeals has stated the facts:

On October 22, 1996, police officers executed a search warrant at an apartment in Pontiac. Although several people were in the hallway outside the apartment, no one was in the apartment when the police entered. Police stopped defendant in the apartment's parking lot sometime during the raid. During the search, officers found in the dining room wastebasket eight plastic sandwich bags, each with one corner cut away.1 Police also searched the apartment's northwest bedroom and found in a nightstand a letter addressed to defendant at that address, six $10 bags of heroin, a $10 bag of marijuana, $130 in cash, an ID card, and a loan payment book belonging to Rodney Crump. Both male and female clothing were found in the bedroom closet, including a blue denim dress that contained forty $10 packs of heroin in the pocket. Four hundred dollars was found in a sock in a dresser drawer. Written correspondence and a telephone calling card belonging to Crump were found in a television stand. Police also found an unpostmarked letter addressed to defendant in the mailbox of the apartment. [Unpublished opinion per curiam, issued February 6, 2001 (Docket No. 213402).]

On the basis of these proofs, a circuit court jury found the defendant guilty of possession of less than fifty grams of heroin with intent to deliver, and possession of marijuana. M.C.L. §§ 333.7401(2)(a)(iv), 333.7403(2)(d).2

The Court of Appeals reversed, finding the proofs to be insufficient. From that judgment, the prosecuting attorney timely applied to this Court for leave to appeal.

II

The standard for reviewing an issue concerning sufficiency of the evidence has been explained on several prior occasions. People v. Johnson, 460 Mich. 720, 722-723, 597 N.W.2d 73 (1999); People v. Wolfe, 440 Mich. 508, 513-514, 489 N.W.2d 748 (1992) 3; People v. Hampton 407 Mich. 354, 366, 285 N.W.2d 284 (1979). Taking the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, the question on appeal is whether a rational trier of fact could find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

III

As the Court of Appeals correctly observed, Wolfe provides the governing principles for our inquiry:

A person need not have actual physical possession of a controlled substance to be guilty of possessing it. Possession may be either actual or constructive. Likewise, possession may be found even when the defendant is not the owner of recovered narcotics. Moreover, possession may be joint, with more than one person actually or constructively possessing a controlled substance.[4]
The courts have frequently addressed the concept of constructive possession and the link between a defendant and narcotics that must be shown to establish constructive possession. It is well established that a person's presence, by itself, at a location where drugs are found is insufficient to prove constructive possession. Instead, some additional connection between the defendant and the contraband must be shown. [440 Mich. at 519-520, 489 N.W.2d 748 (citations omitted).]

In the present case, the Court of Appeals said that the evidence did not link the defendant to the drugs. It found no "direct evidence" that the defendant resided at the apartment or knew about the contraband. It noted that no fingerprint evidence placed the defendant near the drugs; also, no evidence established that the defendant owned the dress in which the drugs were found.

The Court of Appeals failed to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution. Circumstantial evidence suggested the defendant resided in the apartment; both the mailbox and nightstand contained mail addressed to her, and she was found in the rear parking lot. The contents of the nightstand and closet supported the prosecuting attorney's theory that the defendant and Mr. Crump shared the bedroom.

The dress containing packaged heroin in the closet permitted a reasonable inference that the defendant possessed the drugs. No evidence that another woman resided at the apartment is in the record. The packaging of the heroin in the dress suggested an intent to deliver.5

As detailed above, the evidence that supported the inference of defendant's residence at the apartment was strong: two letters addressed to defendant were found at the residence—one in the mailbox and one (correspondence from a local government agency) in a nightstand in the bedroom. Women's clothing was found in the bedroom closet. Additionally, defendant was found by the police in the parking lot behind the apartment. Viewed in a light most favorable to the prosecution, this evidence permitted as a reasonable inference that defendant resided in the apartment. Regarding the claim that the letter addressed to defendant might have been found in one nightstand, while the cocaine, marijuana, and items of identification pertaining to Rodney Crump might have been found in another nightstand, there is no evidence that there was more than one nightstand in the bedroom. The opinion of the Court of Appeals states that the police "found in a nightstand a letter addressed to defendant at that address, six $10 bags of heroin, a $10 bag of marijuana, $130 in cash, an ID card, and a loan payment book belonging to Rodney Crump." Slip op at 1. (Emphasis supplied.) Viewing the evidence in a light most favorable to the prosecution, Wolfe, supra at 515, 489 N.W.2d 748, and recognizing that "possession may be joint," id. at 520, 489 N.W.2d 748, we must conclude that a rational trier of fact could have decided that the presence of the letter in the nightstand supported the reasonable inference that defendant possessed—even if jointly—the drugs that were also located in that nightstand.

Next, the prosecution's decision not to directly demonstrate that the dress in the closet fit defendant did not invalidate the reasonable inference that it was her dress. "Even in a case relying on circumstantial evidence, the prosecution need not negate every reasonable theory consistent with the defendant's innocence, but need merely introduce evidence sufficient to convince a reasonable jury in the face of whatever contradictory evidence the defendant may provide." People v. Konrad, 449 Mich. 263, 273, n. 6, 536 N.W.2d 517 (1995). The prosecution was not required to prove a negative: that the dress could not have belonged to some other unknown female. In light of the clear evidence that defendant resided in the apartment, and specifically in the northwest bedroom of the apartment, the presence of women's clothing in the closet of that bedroom supported the reasonable inference that such clothing—including the dress—belonged to defendant.

All these attacks on the verdict essentially coalesce around the proposition that the jury violated the rule articulated in People v. Atley, 392 Mich. 298, 220 N.W.2d 465 (1974), that established that an inference can not be built upon an inference to establish an element of the offense. This is indeed the black letter holding of Atley standing alone. However, virtually from the time of its publication, Atley was apparently felt to be unworkable and has been the subject of judicial redefinition by a series of decisions.

Before discussing those cases, however, it is useful to understand the conceptual problems with forbidding the building of an inference upon an inference. It appears that the doctrine forbidding the piling of an inference upon an inference arose from the intuitive view that circumstantial evidence was less probative or reliable than direct evidence. Despite its initial appeal, this view is hard to justify as a logical proposition and has accordingly been assailed by legal scholars. One is the distinguished commentator in the field of evidence, Professor John Henry Wigmore, who dismissed the doctrine as follows:

It was once suggested that an inference upon an inference will not be permitted, i.e., that a fact desired to be used circumstantially must itself be established by testimonial evidence, and this suggestion has been repeated by several courts and sometimes actually has been enforced.

* * *

There is no such orthodox rule; nor can there be. If there were, hardly a single trial could be adequately prosecuted.... In these and innumerable daily instances we build up inference upon inference, and yet no court (until in very modern times) ever thought of forbidding it. All departments of reasoning, all scientific work, every day's life and every day's trials proceed upon such data. The judicial utterances that sanction the fallacious and impracticable limitation, originally put forward without authority, must be taken as valid only for the particular evidentiary facts therein ruled upon. [1A Wigmore, Evidence (Tiller rev.), § 41, pp. 1106, 1111.]

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