State v. Carrasco-Montiel

379 P.3d 529, 279 Or. App. 64, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 792
CourtWashington County Circuit Court, Oregon
DecidedJune 22, 2016
DocketC121983CR; A154291
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 379 P.3d 529 (State v. Carrasco-Montiel) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Washington County Circuit Court, Oregon primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Carrasco-Montiel, 379 P.3d 529, 279 Or. App. 64, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 792 (Or. Super. Ct. 2016).

Opinion

DUNCAN, P. J.

After a jury trial, defendant was convicted of first-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon, and he was sentenced to 90 months’ imprisonment. On appeal, he argues that the trial court erred in failing to grant a mistrial sua sponte, after it became apparent that one of the jurors had injected information from outside the record into the jury’s deliberations. He further argues that the trial court should have sustained his objection to the prosecutor’s closing argument, which, according to defendant, undermined the presumption of innocence. And, he argues that the trial court should have granted his motion for a new trial, because, among other things, the testimony of his key alibi witness was inaudible and an unidentified juror had engaged in threatening conduct toward the jury foreperson; at the very least, defendant argues, the trial court should have allowed him to subpoena the foreperson to discern exactly what happened in the jury room. For the reasons that follow, we conclude that the trial court did not plainly err in failing to grant a mistrial in the absence of a motion by either party; that the prosecutor’s closing argument, viewed in context, did not undermine the presumption of innocence; that defendant cannot assign error to the denial of a motion for a new trial based on irregularities or juror misconduct that had come to defendant’s attention before the verdict; and that the trial court acted within its discretion in declining to subpoena the jury foreperson.

I. BACKGROUND

A. The State’s Case

Defendant was charged with first-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon on the theory that defendant hit the victim in the face with a bottle outside of a nightclub. The charges were tried to a jury, and the state presented the following evidence at trial.

The victim and defendant first met in May 2012, in the Portland area. Although they had both moved to the United States from the same city in Oaxaca, Mexico, they were not personally acquainted in Mexico; however, the victim knew of defendant because their respective families [67]*67had some unresolved dispute there. After meeting in the Portland area, the victim and defendant socialized on a few occasions, and the victim was aware that defendant had dated a woman, Cornejo, who was a friend of the victim’s family and had been one of the victim’s high school classmates.

The victim and Cornejo sometimes socialized without defendant present, and the victim came to believe that defendant and Cornejo had broken up. While Cornejo and the victim were out at the same club one night, she told the victim that she did not have a boyfriend. The victim then asked Cornejo if she would date him, but she declined, saying that she “wasn’t with anyone.”

Subsequently, the victim saw defendant and Cornejo out at a different club, and they, along with mutual acquaintances, ended up drinking at a motel later that night. At the motel, Cornejo and defendant confronted the victim about his interactions with Cornejo. The victim tried to explain that Cornejo had told him that she did not have a boyfriend, and he showed defendant text messages from Cornejo to that effect, which caused an altercation between defendant and Cornejo, and made Cornejo angry at the victim. The situation eventually calmed down, and the victim went to bed.

The following day, the victim called defendant to “patch things up.” Defendant responded that, “if he found [the victim] somewhere, then it wasn’t going to be over and he was going to beat [the victim].”

Then, in the early morning hours of June 17, 2012, defendant, Cornejo, and another man stopped the victim outside a dance club in Beaverton. Defendant and the victim argued, and bystanders intervened to stop the fight. The victim then walked by himself to his truck, talking on his phone. The victim heard someone approaching and thought it was his friends. As the victim turned, he saw defendant with a bottle in his hand. The victim felt the bottle hit his face, and he then ran away and hid.

As a result of the bottle striking his face, the blood vessels in the victim’s eye ruptured, scar tissue formed on [68]*68his retina, and he permanently lost some of his vision. Cuts from the bottle also scarred the victim’s face.

B. The Defense Case

Defendant’s theory was that someone else had caused the victim’s injuries, and that the victim had identified defendant as the assailant as part of an effort to trigger a criminal prosecution, which would allow the victim, who was not a legal resident of the United States, to obtain a U visa. In support of that theory, defendant presented an alibi defense though Cornejo, testimony from a lawyer, James, who specialized in the intersection between immigration and criminal law, and testimony from the victim about his understanding of the U visa process.

Cornejo testified that, during the night at the motel room, she had woken up next to the victim, whose hand was in her lap, and defendant and his brother were yelling about whether the victim had touched Cornejo while she was sleeping. The victim ran out of the motel, and she did not see him again until the night at the club when the victim was injured. However, in her version of the events, defendant approached the victim outside the club and demanded an apology for what happened at the motel. After the victim apologized, defendant and the victim got into an argument that was broken up by security. At that point, according to Cornejo, she and defendant left in their car and drove toward Troutdale; she did not learn that the victim had been injured until a month and a half later, when she was interviewed by a detective.

The transcript reflects that Cornejo was difficult to hear at points in her testimony. The court, on 13 different occasions, asked her to speak up. The prosecutor, in cross-examination, told her to speak louder. And, at another point during cross-examination, one of the jurors interjected, “We can’t hear.”

Defendant’s second witness, James, explained that the U visa program “gives victims, undocumented victims of crime a pathway to legal status by virtue of the fact that they cooperate with law enforcement and are the victim of a qualified crime.” Among other things, James explained that [69]*69an investigation need not result in charges or a conviction to obtain a U visa, but that law enforcement must substantiate that the applicant was the victim of a qualifying crime. Assault, he testified, is among the qualifying crimes.

On cross-examination, the victim acknowledged that he was an unlawful resident in the United States and was aware of the U visa, and he acknowledged that he had asked someone from the district attorney’s office about the U visa. On redirect examination, the victim stated that he had learned of the existence of the U visa about three months after the assault but had not yet applied for it.

C. Closing Arguments

During closing arguments, the prosecutor told the jury that the only disputed issue in the case was the identity of the perpetrator, which essentially reduced to a credibility contest between the victim and Cornejo about whether it was defendant who committed the assault. Defense counsel agreed that the case turned on that credibility question, and he argued that the jury should not believe the victim because he was drunk and likely did not know who assaulted him.

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Related

State v. Ramoz
451 P.3d 1032 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2019)
State v. Davis
415 P.3d 1129 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2018)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
379 P.3d 529, 279 Or. App. 64, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 792, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-carrasco-montiel-orccwashington-2016.