Rainey v. State
| Decision Date | 28 September 2021 |
| Docket Number | No. 3094, Sept. Term, 2018,3094, Sept. Term, 2018 |
| Citation | 260 A.3d 711,252 Md.App. 578 |
| Parties | Robert RAINEY v. STATE of Maryland |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
Argued by: Katherine P. Rasin (Paul B. DeWolfe, Public Defender on the brief), Baltimore, MD, for Appellant.
Argued by: Menelik Coates (Brian E. Frosh, Atty. Gen. on the brief), Baltimore, MD, for Appellee.
Panel: Fader, C.J., Arthur, Gould,** JJ.
On the afternoon of May 2, 2017, Dartania Tibbs was fatally shot in the 800 block of North Glover Street in Baltimore. After hearing testimony from an eyewitness and viewing surveillance video of the scene, a jury in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City convicted appellant Robert Rainey of first-degree murder, using a handgun in a crime of violence, and possessing a firearm after a disqualifying conviction.
The court sentenced Rainey to life in prison for the murder, plus concurrent terms of twenty years on the handgun offense and five years without parole on the firearm offense. He presents the following questions for review:
After the parties had filed their briefs, this Court requested supplemental briefing on three additional questions:
Because we conclude that the court did not commit reversible error, we shall affirm the judgments.
Responding to North Glover Street at 5:28 p.m. on May 2, 2017, a police officer found Dartania Tibbs lying dead in an alley, face up with a bullet wound in his neck. Tibbs had $63.90 in cash and thirteen gel caps of heroin on his person.
Citiwatch camera footage and surveillance video footage from a nearby store showed a woman and child within view of the murder. The woman in the video was Daphne Creighton.
At trial, Ms. Creighton testified that she was sitting on her front steps with her four-year-old grandson and her dog. She described her neighborhood as heavily infested with drugs.
Ms. Creighton observed two men who were arguing about money. One of the men was wearing his hair in dreadlocks, which were "hanging loose" and "going back and forth." He had on "a white t-shirt, shorts, and a pair of gray New Balance" shoes, matching the appearance of a person shown on the video.
When the other man replied that he was not going to give him any money, the man with dreadlocks walked away. The other man sat down on some steps. The block "was clear for a minute," meaning that "there was nobody purchasing anything."1
A short time later, Ms. Creighton heard a series of four booms. She saw the man with dreadlocks with his arm raised and the other man lying in the alley. The man with dreadlocks looked up and down the street and then ran off. Ms. Creighton walked over and saw that the other man was dead in the alley.
When the police arrived, Ms. Creighton did not tell them that she had witnessed the shooting, because, she testified, she "thought the drug dealers would retaliate" against her. Later that evening, however, she went to the police station and told the officers what she had seen.
In an excerpt from a recorded interview that was played for the jury, Ms. Creighton described the shooter, whose name she did not know, as "tall" and "slim." She said that "usually he's around here all the time." She added: "He is usually doing him on the corner —Well, he usually has these two outfits he wears all the time." (Emphasis added.)
On May 8, 2017, Ms. Creighton selected a photograph of a man wearing shoulder-length dreadlocks from a photo array. She said that she was 70 percent sure that the photo showed the man who shot Tibbs. She was instructed to call the police and the detective who had interviewed her if she saw the man again.
On June 6, 2017, Ms. Creighton saw the shooter on the street, now with a short haircut. She called 911, and the police arrested Rainey.
In a still image from a body-worn camera, Rainey's hair is cropped closely to the skull at the time of the arrest. The mug shots, taken after Rainey's arrest, also depict him with his hair closely cropped to the skull.
At trial, Ms. Creighton identified herself, her grandson, her dog, the victim, and Rainey on the video. She identified Rainey as the person whose dreadlocks were "going back and forth" in the video. She was "100 percent sure" that Rainey was the person she saw with Tibbs.
We shall add material from the record in our discussion of the issues raised by Rainey.
Rainey contends that the trial court erred in refusing to redact the portion of Daphne Creighton's recorded statement in which she stated that Rainey was "usually doing him on the corner." Rainey argues that this statement should not have been admitted because, he says, the "jurors would recognize" that "doing him" meant selling heroin. In his view, the court should have excluded this evidence under Rule 5-403 because it was more unfairly prejudicial than probative and under Rule 5-404(b) as inadmissible evidence of other wrongs.
We address Rainey's evidentiary challenges in turn, explaining why neither is supported by the record or the law.
On the first day of trial, Daphne Creighton testified that she had seen Rainey at the murder scene. The State presented a recording of her statement to the police on the day of the shooting as a prior consistent statement of identification. See Md. Rule 5-802.1(c) ().
Before the State played Ms. Creighton's statement, defense counsel objected, asserting that Ms. Creighton said "certain things" that were "prejudicial[.]" The prosecutor countered that he had edited out a portion of the original video, in which Ms. Creighton said that Rainey would be "out there on the corner selling drugs." Defense counsel persisted in the objection, arguing that the phrase "he is out doing him on the corner" was prejudicial. The prosecutor responded that there was "no prejudice" because the State had removed the explicit references to drugs, and the statement established how Ms. Creighton was able to identify Rainey: "he's a person on the corner that she sees."
After listening to the recording outside the presence of the jury, the trial court concluded that the phrase "doing him on the corner" was not unfairly prejudicial in light of other evidence that linked Rainey to drug activity. The court cited Ms. Creighton's testimony that just before the shooting the block "was clear," which the court understood to mean "no drug deals" were happening. In addition, the court cited Ms. Creighton's testimony that because of her fear of being shot by a drug dealer, she had waited to inform the police that she had witnessed the shooting. In the court's view, Ms. Creighton had already associated Rainey with drug dealing "any number of times."
Although Ms. Creighton's statement was admissible as a statement of identification under Rule 5-802.1(c), evidence "may be excluded," under Rule 5-403, "if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice[.]" According to Rainey, the evidence that he was a drug dealer was unfairly prejudicial, and "[t]he probative value with respect to [his] guilt of the crimes for which he was on trial ... is scant."
We review the decision to overrule Rainey's Rule 5-403 objection for abuse of discretion. See State v. Simms , 420 Md. 705, 725, 25 A.3d 144 (2011). When weighing the probative value of proffered evidence against its unfairly prejudicial impact, a trial court abuses its discretion only when no reasonable person would take the view that the court took, or when the court acts without reference to any guiding rules or principles. See , e.g ., Williams v. State , 232 Md. App. 342, 355-56, 157 A.3d 398 (2017), aff'd , 457 Md. 551, 179 A.3d 1006 (2018). The decision "will not be reversed simply because the appellate court would not have made the same ruling." King v. State , 407 Md. 682, 697, 967 A.2d 790 (2009).
Here, the challenged evidence supplied the jury with information about the factual basis for Ms. Creighton's identification of Rainey, which was among the most important pieces of evidence in the State's case. For the reasons articulated by the trial court, the prejudicial impact of the challenged statement, if any,2 was mitigated by Ms. Creighton's testimony about Rainey's regular presence amidst the drug dealing on her street.
Based on this record, we conclude that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in overruling Rainey's Rule 5-403 objection.
Md. Rule 5-404(b) provides in...
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