Court of Appeals allows jury to hear threats against postal employees

The Court of Appeals has issued an good old-fashioned evidentiary ruling that applies the settled rules guiding relevance and admissibility. It arises in a criminal case where the defendant was accused of making threats relating to his employment with the Post Office.

The case is United States v. Garnes, issued on May 28. After the defendant was fired, he spoke to the Department of Labor about his unemployment benefits. Those conversations led to an indictment alleging defendant had threatened to injure another person. During the call, the Government alleged, defendant threatened to assault and murder two Post Office employees after he was told he did not qualify for unemployment benefits. 

What did defendant say: the Government claims he said, "If I go back to the post office, I'm gonna shoot somebody," and other similar comments. Prior to trial, defendant's attorney successfully moved to exclude certain other statements that mentioned his prior time in prison and that it would not bother him to be in jail. Defendant argued these were not threatening statements but, instead, "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." The trial court excluded these statements as more prejudicial than probative.

The Court of Appeals (Lynch, Nardini and Kahn) reverses the trial court and says the jury can hear the jail comments, which are relevant to the charge that he threatened to assault or murder postal employees. Here is the reasoning:

the five statements made by Garnes that repeatedly refer to, and indeed overstate, his criminal history, at a minimum have a “tendency” to make it more probable that the threatening language would convey to listeners that they had something to fear, and that Garnes made those statements with an awareness, and even with the intention, that he would create such fear. See Fed. R. Evid. 401. A jury could find that Garnes’s statements about his history of criminal acts, his past experiences in jail and prison, and his comfort with returning to jail would convey to a reasonable listener a sense that Garnes was willing and able to act on his violent words, and that he made those statements in a conscious attempt to make his threats to shoot and kill employees of  the DOL and USPS more credible.

While the defendant claims the statement create the potential for unfair prejudice, the Court of Appeals disagrees. The Court notes that the statements "may create some potential for unfair prejudice," but "the five statements are part of the 'res gestae,' the narrative the government rightly seeks to tell at the guilt phase of the trial." Defendant's exaggerated statements about his criminal record are a part of that: the jury may find the stretched the truth about his jail time in order to make his threats more credible.