Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know
Decided 1998-05-04
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently July 2014
19 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
¶2As correctly stated by the majority, our case law has consistently held that testimony that merely refers to a defendant by his or her street name or nickname does not automatically suggest bad character.2 However, I believe it is possible for a street name to be so closely linked with the circumstances of a crime that it may, when recited in the jury’s presence, tend to suggest the defendant’s bad reputation or propensity to commit specific criminal acts. In those situations, I believe that trial courts should consider whether the probative value associated with recitation of the street name in the jury’s presence is outweighed by the prejudicial impact of the jury’s hearing the defendant referred to by a nickname that explicitly suggests guilt.
¶3I draw no conclusions, however, regarding whether the trial court in this case erred by not making this determination, because I believe that even if such error did occur, it was outweighed by the overwhelming evidence of appellant’s guilt.
