State v. Johnson

Court of Appeals of Kansas·Decided May 1, 2020·No. 113228·Unpublished

Opinion

NOT DESIGNATED FOR PUBLICATION

No. 113,228

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE STATE OF KANSAS

STATE OF KANSAS,

Appellee,

v.

DAQUANTRIUS S. JOHNSON,

Appellant.

MEMORANDUM OPINION

Appeal from Sedgwick District Court; BENJAMIN L. BURGESS, judge. Opinion on remand filed May 1, 2020. Affirmed in part, reversed in part, vacated in part, and remanded with directions.

Samuel Schirer, of Kansas Appellate Defender Office, for appellant.

Matt J. Maloney, assistant district attorney, Marc Bennett, district attorney, and Derek Schmidt, attorney general, for appellee.

Before HILL, P.J., BUSER and LEBEN, JJ.

PER CURIAM: This case returns to us on remand from our Supreme Court. The court has directed us to consider all the issues raised by Johnson in his appeal, in the light of its ruling that the trial judge napping during the trial, as pointed out by the jury, was not structural error. State v. Johnson, 310 Kan. 909, 453 P.3d 281(2019). We are directed to determine the question of reversing Johnson's conviction under a judicial misconduct analysis. The Supreme Court held that "Johnson must demonstrate that the misconduct prejudiced his substantial rights." 310 Kan. at 918. We have also been directed that our analysis "must include a consideration of the overall strength of the evidence against

Johnson and the impact of any curative steps taken by the trial judge to purge the taint of the misconduct." 310 Kan. at 918.

Our review of the record and the arguments of the parties leads us to hold that Johnson invited this error through declining a mistrial and has failed to show the judicial misconduct of napping during the trial has prejudiced his substantial rights.

The Supreme Court also ruled that a trial court must obtain a limited jury trial waiver from the accused before accepting a stipulation to an element of the crime charged from the accused. This ruling pertains to Johnson's charge of criminal possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. In accordance with the Supreme Court's holding on this point, we reverse that conviction and remand for a new trial.

Our analysis begins with an examination of two aspects of the claimed judicial misconduct—invited error and prejudice. Did Johnson invite the error? And even if he did not invite the error, were his substantial rights affected by the misconduct? We will then move on to address several other issues raised by Johnson.

We look first at invited error.

After his napping came to light, the trial judge asked Johnson whether he wanted to ask for a mistrial. Johnson's attorney declined. In his brief, Johnson argued the invited error rule did not preclude review of this issue for two reasons:

• The error was structural; and • his attorney's decision to decline a mistrial was an ineffectual waiver of his constitutional right to a jury trial.

We all know now that what happened is not structural error from our Supreme Court's opinion. So, we look to Johnson's second argument about an ineffectual waiver.

Johnson argued his constitutional right to a presiding judge was incorporated into his right to a jury trial, and his attorney could not waive his jury trial right according to State v. Frye, 294 Kan. 364, Syl. ¶ 3, 372, 277 P.3d 1091 (2012). In Frye, the court held that a jury trial waiver is not valid unless the defendant personally waives his or her right to a jury trial. Johnson then fleshes out his argument with a quotation from an old case, Capital Traction Co. v. Hof, 174 U.S. 1, 13-14, 19 S. Ct. 580, 43 L. Ed. 873 (1899), when the court held that a "trial by jury" is not merely a trial by 12 jurors, but is a trial in "the presence and under the superintendence of a judge empowered to instruct them on the law and to advise them on the facts, and . . . to set aside their verdict, if, in his opinion, it is against the law or the evidence."

But this argument against applying the invited error doctrine does not hold up considering our Supreme Court's decision. When the court ruled there was no structural error, it also ruled that the trial court judge did not "so abdicate[] and abandon[] his judicial responsibilities that he was effectively absent from the courtroom." 310 Kan. at 917. Thus, Johnson's argument that his defense attorney's waiver of a mistrial amounted to a waiver of his jury trial right cannot be upheld considering these Supreme Court holdings. Since the court ruled that the judge was not absent from the courtroom, we cannot avoid applying the invited error doctrine.

A litigant may not invite error and then complain of the error on appeal. State v.

Verser, 299 Kan. 776, 784, 326 P.3d 1046 (2014). The long-standing rule supports the common-sense notion that parties cannot complain about their own conduct at trial or about rulings they asked a trial judge to make. See State v. Hargrove, 48 Kan. App. 2d 522, 531, 293 P.3d 787 (2013). The invited error doctrine binds trial counsel to strategic decisions and deters parties from asking a judge to act in a certain way to litter the record with error to provide grounds for appeal of an adverse judgment. 48 Kan. App. 2d at 532. The Hargrove court held that an invited jury instruction error cannot be asserted as error on appeal when the instruction was proposed for tactical advantage. 48 Kan. App. 2d at

547. In Verser, our Supreme Court applied the invited error doctrine when a trial judge gave the defendant the option of having a mistrial declared, and the defendant chose to continue the trial. 299 Kan. at 784. A defendant's actions in causing the alleged error and the context in which those actions occurred must be scrutinized in deciding whether to apply the invited-error doctrine. There is no bright-line rule for its application. State v. Fleming, 308 Kan. 689, Syl. ¶ 4, 423 P.3d 506 (2018).

It is unclear why Johnson's counsel declined to ask for a mistrial. Because Johnson chose to proceed to trial rather than pursue a mistrial and the judicial misconduct was not structural error, the invited error doctrine precludes our review. But we will go on to examine prejudice as directed by the Supreme Court.

Prejudice

In this analysis, we will follow the directions of our Supreme Court. We will consider the overall strength of the evidence against Johnson and then decide whether the curative steps taken by the trial judge were effective in purging the taint of his misconduct. We give a brief review of the evidence.

In October 2013, Randall Gifford was in his living room in Wichita when he saw two boys walking down the street in front of his house. One of the boys threw a pop bottle into Gifford's yard. Gifford went outside and asked the boys to pick up the pop bottle. The boys responded, "fuck you." Gifford got into his car and followed the boys as they ran away. Gifford called 911. Gifford took pictures of the boys with his cell phone camera.

The boys went up to a house on Roseberry Street and knocked on the door. A man answered the door wearing a white tank top and blue or black shorts with a white stripe down the side. Gifford was parked near the intersection of Roseberry and Cessna. He

took a cell phone picture of the man speaking with the boys. The picture was blurry. The man went inside the house for a short time and came back out and started walking toward Gifford's car on Roseberry. Gifford started backing up on Cessna. The man walked out into Cessna Street near the intersection, pulled out a gun, and fired a shot. Gifford accelerated in reverse to get out of there.

Gifford told the 911 dispatcher:

"He fired it towards me, but I think he was pointing more up in the air . . . but it was still towards me . . . he wasn't pointing directly up . . . But I was also backing up pretty fast though . . . and I was quite a ways away from him, I was 4 or 5 houses away from him . . . when he fired."

Gifford told one police officer that the shooter "intentionally fired over his head." At trial, Gifford testified that the man pointed the gun at his car. Gifford's car was not hit by a bullet.

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