State v. Davis

381 P.3d 888, 279 Or. App. 223, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 855
CourtClackamas County Circuit Court, Oregon
DecidedJune 29, 2016
DocketCR1200881; A154743
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 381 P.3d 888 (State v. Davis) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Clackamas 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. Davis, 381 P.3d 888, 279 Or. App. 223, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 855 (Or. Super. Ct. 2016).

Opinion

DUNCAN, R J.

In this criminal case, defendant appeals a judgment convicting him of two counts of first-degree theft, ORS 164.055, and two counts of second-degree theft, ORS 164.045, for checking out 50 books from libraries in Clackamas County and failing to return them. Defendant raises two assignments of error. In his first assignment of error, defendant contends that the trial court erred by admitting evidence regarding a previous conviction for theft for taking books from a book sale run by the Friends of the Tigard Library. We agree that the trial court erred in admitting the evidence regarding defendant’s book-sale theft, but we conclude that the error was harmless. In his second assignment of error, defendant contends that the trial court plainly erred in imposing $510 in court-appointed attorney fees in the absence of evidence that defendant was or might be able to pay them. We agree that the trial court plainly erred, and we exercise our discretion to correct the error. Accordingly, we reverse the portion of the judgment requiring defendant to pay attorney fees and otherwise affirm.

Defendant was charged with four counts of theft for checking out a total of 50 books — the maximum number that one patron may check out from the Clackamas County library system — from four Clackamas County libraries and failing to return them.1 Police recovered one of the books from Powell’s Books; Powell’s records showed that defendant had sold that book to Powell’s three days after he checked it out from the library. The book had been altered to remove its bar code and to obscure markings that identified it as a library book. Defendant admitted that he had sold perhaps nine more of the library books as part of a group of 500 books that he had arranged to sell through Craigslist. In his statements to the police, defendant contended that he had sold those books — the one sold to Powell’s and the others sold through Craigslist — accidentally, when they became intermingled with other books that he intended to sell. Two of the 50 books were eventually found with their bar codes removed, on the shelf in one of the libraries. The police [225]*225searched defendant’s house approximately three months after the books became overdue, but they did not find any of the missing library books there.

Before trial, the state moved to admit evidence of two prior thefts by defendant, including the fact that defendant had been convicted of those thefts after pleading guilty. First, the state sought to introduce evidence regarding defendant’s theft of 13 books from the Multnomah County Library, a theft accomplished by checking out the books from various library branches and failing to return them. Defendant sold three of those books to McKenzie Books on the same day that he checked them out from the library. Those books were altered similarly to the book recovered from Powell’s.

When questioned by the police about the Multnomah County Library books, defendant asserted that, after he checked the books out, he had loaned them to another person who was staying in the same house as he was, and when the books were returned to defendant, they had been altered. Defendant said that the person who had borrowed the books offered to sell them for defendant and then did so. Defendant pleaded guilty to the theft from the Multnomah County Library and was convicted.

Second, the state sought to introduce evidence regarding defendant’s theft of books from the Friends of the Tigard Library book sale. In that case, defendant did not check out books from the library. Instead, he went to the book sale, took books, and left without paying for them. When questioned by the police, defendant said that he had taken some books to the book sale and decided not to leave all of them there. In the process of taking some of the books back out, he may have accidentally taken a book that did not belong to him. Defendant also told police that he buys and sells books and that he uses an application on his smart phone to scan the ISBN on books to determine their value and learn which stores will buy the books. Defendant pleaded guilty to the Friends of the Tigard Library theft and was convicted.

After the state presented its evidence about the charged Clackamas County thefts to the jury, the court held [226]*226a hearing outside the presence of the jury to decide whether to admit evidence of the prior thefts. The state reasserted the arguments raised in its pretrial memorandum, namely, that “[s]o called prior bad act evidence is admissible in any case when it is offered to prove anything other than criminal propensity,” and that, in this case, evidence of the Multnomah County Library and Tigard book-sale thefts was “relevant to preparation, knowledge, lack of mistake, and intent,” all of which are nonpropensity purposes listed in OEC 404(3), which is set out below. 279 Or App at 227. As to both prior thefts, the state asserted that the evidence “would explain to the trier of fact how [defendant’s] actions were not a mistake or accident and his reason for doing this.” The state also argued that the probative value of the evidence outweighed any unfairly prejudicial effect.

In response, defendant distinguished the Tigard book-sale theft from the Multnomah County theft. He argued, inter alia, that the act of theft involved in the Tigard book-sale case was dissimilar from the charged acts because defendant stole the Tigard books by taking them from the book sale without buying them, whereas in the present case — as in the Multnomah County case — he checked out the books in accordance with the terms of his agreement with the libraries and committed a crime only if he intended to deprive the libraries of them. (It was undisputed that he did, in fact, deprive the libraries of them by failing to return them.) As a result, defendant contended, the evidence of the Tigard book-sale theft was “not particularly probative” of any fact at issue in this case. The state replied that, because defendant admitted that he checked out the library books at issue in this case, the real question for the jury was whether defendant intended to deprive the library of the books and that the evidence of both prior thefts would help the jury answer that question.

The court admitted the evidence of both prior thefts. It reasoned that the evidence went to “mistake or accident,” which it characterized as “really the only [way for defendant] to avoid culpability” in the case. The court also stated that the evidence was admissible to show defendant’s plan. Then it noted that

[227]*227“there is a lot of similarity [between the two prior thefts and the present charges], and the only dissimilarity * * * is that the incident in Tigard was an incident where the books * * * were taken out of the library without permission.
“In the case before the Court, the books were taken out of the library with permission, as they were in Multnomah County. But there are things that I think are sufficiently similar about the instances that make this evidence very probative as to whether there was a scheme or plan to accomplish this result. As with the case that’s before the Court, in the prior instances, there was an identification of the higher value of the books — an effort to identify the books with a higher value, at least arguably.

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Related

State v. Nguyen
429 P.3d 410 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2018)
State v. Wright
387 P.3d 405 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2016)
State v. Johnson
380 P.3d 1023 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2016)
State v. Hudman
379 P.3d 659 (Josephine County Circuit Court, Oregon, 2016)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
381 P.3d 888, 279 Or. App. 223, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 855, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-davis-orccclackamas-2016.