United States v. Armenta

Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit·Decided November 14, 2024·No. 23-7035·Unpublished

Opinion

FILED

United States Court of Appeals UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Tenth Circuit

FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT November 14, 2024

Christopher M. Wolpert

Clerk of Court

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff - Appellee,

v. No. 23-7035 (D.C. No. 6:21-CR-00208-PRW-2)

ANTHONY JUAN ARMENTA, (E.D. Okla.)

Defendant - Appellant.

ORDER AND JUDGMENT*

Before MATHESON, KELLY, and MORITZ, Circuit Judges.

A jury convicted Anthony Armenta of several crimes stemming from a shooting and physical altercation. He challenges his convictions on the basis that he did not receive a fair trial or due process because the district court refused to sever his trial from that of his codefendant. Although we agree with Armenta that he and his codefendant presented mutually antagonistic defenses at least in part, Armenta fails to demonstrate any prejudice flowing from that antagonism. And even if he could show prejudice, he cannot establish that the district court abused its discretion in issuing limiting instructions rather than severing his trial. So we conclude that the

*

This order and judgment is not binding precedent, except under the doctrines of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral estoppel. But it may be cited for its persuasive value. See Fed. R. App. P. 32.1(a); 10th Cir. R. 32.1(A).

district court did not abuse its discretion in denying the motion to sever and affirm.

Background

Armenta’s convictions stem from an incident that took place on the banks of the Mountain Fork River in May 2020 when a group of three friends returning from a fishing trip encountered two strangers on the shore. That encounter would end with shots fired and criminal charges filed against Armenta and his codefendant, Kevin Ward.

According to trial testimony from victims Braydon Rich, Trent Short, and Christopher Chappell, they had been fishing for a couple hours when they spotted a storm rolling in and decided to head back to shore. As their boat neared the bank, located on the Choctaw Nation Reservation, Rich exited the boat and walked up the bank, intending to drive a vehicle down to the bank to pull the boat out of the river. Armenta approached Rich and asked if he had jumper cables. When Rich replied in the negative, Armenta pulled out a gun, pointed it at him, and told him not to move. Rich ran to Chappell’s truck, jumped inside, and called 911. As Rich watched, a second man, Ward, hit the truck’s windshield with a gun and yelled at him to get out.

While Rich took refuge in the truck, Short and Chappell remained in the boat.

Chappell heard Armenta tell Ward to “just pop him,” referring to Rich, and Ward fired at the truck. R. vol. 4, 290. Armenta then started shooting at Chappell and Short. Two bullets struck Short, but he and Chappell were able to swim to safety. Armenta and Ward then pulled Rich out of the truck, and a fight ensued. Armenta and Ward hit Rich multiple times, including with a tire tool, a gun, and a pipe. Rich

was eventually able to break away and run to a friend’s house.

Based on these events, the government indicted Armenta and Ward on four counts: assault resulting in serious bodily injury in Indian Country (as to Short), two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon with intent to do bodily harm in Indian Country (as to Chappell and Rich), and one count of using, carrying, brandishing, and discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence. The indictment charged both men with each count both directly and on a theory of aiding and abetting.

Armenta sought to sever the case against him from the case against Ward at least six times. At the outset, in a pretrial motion, he cited statements Ward made to investigators that implicated and placed blame on Armenta for firing at the boat, asserting that those statements would be admissible against Ward in a joint trial but would not be admissible in a separate trial against only Armenta. The district court refused to sever, ruling that Armenta failed to show mutually antagonistic defenses or a prejudicial risk to a specific trial right. The court noted that the government intended to redact Armenta’s name from Ward’s confession and that the court would provide a limiting instruction advising the jury to consider the confession only as evidence of Ward’s guilt.

Armenta moved to sever a second time, after jury selection but before opening statements, when it became clear that Ward might introduce evidence of Armenta’s prior drug use as part of a duress defense. But the district court again denied the motion, stating that judicial economy favored joinder and reiterating that the defenses

were not mutually exclusive and that no specific trial right was jeopardized.

Ward’s duress defense crystallized during trial. Ward testified that he smoked marijuana and methamphetamine with Armenta on the day of the shooting and that Armenta was “real paranoid” and “crazy.” Id. at 684. He explained that Armenta believed a friend of his was in danger and that Armenta threatened to kill Ward and Ward’s girlfriend if Ward did not stay in the car while Armenta drove around looking for the friend. This threat seemed credible, Ward said, because Armenta’s girlfriend had burn marks on her body, and Armenta implied that he inflicted them. Ward testified that Armenta handed him a gun when they arrived at the river, then pointed his own weapon at him and told him to shoot at Rich in the truck. He also said that he received threatening letters from Armenta while in jail. To corroborate this testimony, Ward called the lead detective on the case, who testified that he learned Armenta had been awake for 20 days leading up to the shooting and had threatened to blow up a bridge and kill people.1 He also called the mother of Armenta’s girlfriend, who said she saw the burns on her daughter’s body.

Armenta not only objected to much of this testimony but also repeatedly renewed his motion to sever, arguing that the government would not have been able to bring in any of this evidence had he been tried alone. And because this evidence was introduced by a codefendant and not the government, Armenta pointed out, he

1 The district court admitted the detective’s testimony for the limited purpose of corroborating Ward’s state of mind, not for its truth, and instructed the jury to that effect.

had not received notice pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) that evidence of prior bad acts would be introduced. As a result, he contended, he was unable to investigate the veracity of the allegations. But the district court consistently denied Armenta’s motions, reiterating its view that the defenses were not mutually antagonistic, that Armenta failed to point to a specific compromised trial right, and that judicial economy favored proceeding jointly.2 Armenta’s defense theory, according to his opening statement, was that he merely fired his gun in the air after hearing other shots fired, that Ward alone shot at all three victims, and that although Armenta hit Rich with a gun during their physical altercation by the truck, he did so only in self-defense. But Armenta rested without calling any witnesses in support of this theory.3 And the government, for its part, argued in closing that Ward and Armenta were “equally responsible” for each other’s assaults on an aiding-and-abetting theory. Id. at 752.

The instructions to the jury included both an aiding-and-abetting instruction

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