An new important decision by the Colorado Court of Appeals in the case of People v. Liebler, 2022COA21 (February 17, 2022), has established a key limitation to the general rule that an appellate court must defer to the conclusions of a trial court jury on issues of witness credibility. The official syllabus of the case explains:
In this direct criminal appeal, a division of the court of appeals considers whether witness testimony that is indisputably contradicted by video evidence can nonetheless be sufficient to support a conclusion by a reasonable jury that the prosecution proved an element of the charged offense — here, the use of force element of attempted aggravated robbery. As a matter of first impression, and under the circumstances presented, the division concludes that it cannot.
This is clearly the right decision, but one that contradicts the general rules that a jury verdict may be upheld if there is any competent evidence in the record (such as admissible testimony from a witness under oath) that supports its ruling, and that the credibility of witnesses is solely for the jury to determine.
2 comments:
Huh... So wouldn't the right thing to do be, send it back to lower court with instructions to instruct the jury correctly?
Cheers,
Guy
Nobody argues that the jury wasn't instructed correctly.
The question was whether the evidence admitted was sufficient to allow the jury to convict as it did.
A conviction entered by a jury will be affirmed if there is enough evidence in the record to support it. But, this time there wasn't for the robbery charges which supported a 10 year sentence which otherwise would have been 2-3 years.
The other charges were affirmed on appeal despite arguments that the prosecutor had made improper comments and that a witness had made improper testimony about another witness's credibility. If those allegations of error had been sustained, the case would be been remanded for a new trial on the non-robbery charges.
The fact that a jury can be upheld as reasonable with one set of charges, despite giving credit to testimony blatantly contradicted by video evidence with respect to other charges is a bit problematic. It doesn't really make sense in the circumstances to treat the jury as if it was reasonable across the board in these circumstances. But that argument apparently wasn't made on appeal, probably because it had almost no chance of success under existing precedents, and because the same video evidence that was used to reject the robbery charges, was so damning with respect to the theft charges and controlled substances charges, that any error on the other charges was considered to be harmless error.
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