U.S. v. Eggleston, 98-1996MN
| Decision Date | 13 January 1999 |
| Docket Number | No. 98-1996MN,98-1996MN |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Russell Edward EGGLESTON, Appellant, |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit |
Mark Nyvold, St. Paul, MN, argued, for Appellant.
Robin Jamal Zayed, Minneapolis, MN, argued, for Appellee.
Before BOWMAN, Chief Judge, BRIGHT and RICHARD S. ARNOLD, Circuit Judges.
Russell Eggleston was convicted after a jury trial of possession of crack cocaine with the intention of distributing it, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1). He was sentenced to thirty years in prison, to be followed by ten years on supervised release. A special assessment of $100.00 was also imposed. Although the sentence is very long (it was in fact at the bottom of the Guidelines range applicable in this case (360 months to life)), no question is raised on appeal with respect to the sentence. (Defendant was a career offender and therefore subject to enhanced punishment under U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1.) Instead, Mr. Eggleston makes three arguments for reversal, two having to do with the admission of evidence at the trial, and one claim of prosecutorial misconduct during the closing argument. We affirm the conviction.
A brief statement of important facts will suffice. The defendant was arrested on the morning of July 27, 1997, by two Minneapolis police officers. He was driving a Ford Taurus. He had one passenger, Zachary Robinson. The trunk of the car was locked, but, after a search warrant was obtained, the trunk was opened, and 185 grams, about seven ounces, of crack were found. The principal theory of defense was that the crack belonged to Robinson, not Eggleston, and that Eggleston did not know that the crack was in the trunk.
We shall first discuss defendant's argument that it was error to admit in evidence against him the fact that six years previously, in 1991, he had been arrested with 39 individually wrapped packages of cocaine and a scale in his car. He was convicted of possession with intent to distribute in connection with this arrest. The government asserts that the evidence was relevant to prove knowledge, which, under Fed.R.Evid. 404(b), is one of the reasons that can justify evidence of prior bad acts or offenses. If Eggleston's defense in the present case had been that he thought the cocaine was foot powder, or some other substance, the fact that he had previously possessed cocaine with the intention of distributing it would certainly be relevant, because it would tend to show that he knows what cocaine is and could not plausibly be thought to have mistaken it for some innocent substance. This, however, was not Eggleston's defense. His theory was simply that the cocaine belonged to Robinson, not to himself, and that, indeed, he did not even know that the cocaine was in the trunk. In this situation, we see no relevance whatever in the previous incident, and we think it was error to allow the jury to hear about it. The case against Mr. Eggleston, however, was very strong, including damaging admissions out of his own mouth, which we shall shortly describe, and therefore the error was, in our judgment, harmless.
After his arrest, Mr. Eggleston was placed in the Anoka County jail, where he was detained without bail. He was given, and signed, a writing containing an "inmate telephone system notice." This writing warned him that "[p]hone calls made on these telephones [the ones in the jail] are subject to monitoring and recording," except for calls made to an inmate's attorney. The phones were for collect calls only. The form continued, "when you choose to make a collect call using one of these telephones, you are consenting to the monitoring or recording of the telephone conversation." Mr. Eggleston's signature appears immediately below the following line: "I have reviewed and understand the above information."
A number of calls made by Eggleston from the jail were monitored, recorded, and introduced in evidence against him at the trial. During these calls, the defendant admitted, among other things, the following: he was afraid that Robinson would speak to the police; he, Eggleston, had taken seven ounces of crack cocaine from a man named Eaton; at the time the police stopped the Taurus, Eggleston had reached down to make sure that the trunk-lock button was depressed, so the police could not get access to the trunk (no key being available); and, again, Eggleston had...
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