Motion to admit other acts evidence; MCL 768.27b; MRE 403; People v Cameron; People v Watkins

In this interlocutory appeal, the court held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in ruling other acts evidence admissible under MCL 768.27b. Defendant is charged with, among other things, CSC I and III in this case. He argued that the evidence at issue should have been excluded under MRE 403. The court disagreed. While there were “some dissimilarities between the level of force used in the two cases, both cases involve domestic relationships in which defendant is alleged to have taken advantage of his close proximity to his victim in order to commit acts of sexual assault.” In this case, complainant claimed he “sexually assaulted her while she was living with him. At the time, she was staying with [him] because she had nowhere else to live. In the other case, defendant,” then 33 years old, was “alleged to have engaged in at least 10 instances of sexual penetration of” a teenage female relative. “Notably, [he] also lived in the same house as” the young girl involved in that case “when the assaults took place. Assuming the truth of these allegations, one could reasonably infer that” he used his proximity to his young relative “to sexually assault her.” Thus, the other acts evidence showed his “propensity to manipulate his domestic relationships in order to commit acts of sexual assault against vulnerable victims. The trial court also found that the temporal proximity between the other acts and the allegations in the present case, as well as the frequency with which the other acts occurred, weighed in favor of admitting the evidence. The acts alleged in the other case” took place less than a year before the actions alleged here. Defendant was charged with 10 CSC I counts “in the other case, suggesting that the frequency with which he allegedly assaulted” that girl “was not so limited as to favor exclusion.” While he asserted the evidence was “unreliable because he has not been convicted of” those offenses, this ignored “that MCL 768.27b does not indicate that a defendant has to be convicted of a particular offense in order for it to be admissible under the statute.” The trial court did not abuse its discretion in finding “that the Watkins factors weighed in favor of admitting this evidence because its probative value is not substantially outweighed by its potential prejudicial effect.” It also did not appear at this stage that admitting “this evidence will be overly confusing to the jury or waste time at trial.” Affirmed.