State of New Hampshire v. Jaime B. Guay

THE STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

SUPREME COURT

In Case No. 2022-0313, State of New Hampshire v. Jaime B.
Guay, the court on February 12, 2024, issued the following
order:

The court has reviewed the written arguments and the record submitted
on appeal, and has determined to resolve the case by way of this order. See
Sup. Ct. R. 20(2). The defendant, Jaime Guay, appeals her conviction,
following a jury trial in Superior Court (Tucker, J.), on a charge of theft by
unauthorized taking, see RSA 637:3 (2016), for not scanning or paying for
some merchandise at a department store’s self-checkout register before leaving
the store with the merchandise in her possession. She argues that the trial
court erred by not allowing her to testify, under New Hampshire Rule of
Evidence 403, that she was in an abusive relationship, and that at the time she
failed to pay for the relevant merchandise, she was distracted by fear of what
her boyfriend might do when she later arrived home. We affirm.

Evidence is relevant if “it has any tendency to make a fact more or less
probable than it would be without the evidence,” and if “the fact is of
consequence in determining the action.” N.H. R. Ev. 401. Relevant evidence is
generally admissible. N.H. R. Ev. 402. The trial court may, nevertheless,
exclude evidence that is relevant “if its probative value is substantially
outweighed by a danger of . . . unfair prejudice.” N.H. R. Ev. 403.

“Evidence is unfairly prejudicial if its primary purpose or effect is to
appeal to a jury’s sympathies, arouse its sense of horror, provoke its instinct to
punish, or trigger other mainsprings of human action that may cause a jury to
base its decision on something other than the established propositions in the
case.” State v. Town, 163 N.H. 790, 796 (2012) (quotation omitted). Unfair
prejudice “is an undue tendency to induce a decision . . . on some improper
basis, commonly one that is emotionally charged.” Id. (quotation omitted).

Whether evidence is relevant, or whether its probative value is
substantially outweighed by a danger of unfair prejudice, are matters within
the trial court’s sound discretion. See id. at 795-96. To establish that the trial
court unsustainably exercised its discretion, the defendant must demonstrate
that its ruling was clearly untenable or unreasonable to the prejudice of her
case. See id. at 795.

In this case, the defendant sought to introduce evidence that when she
was at the store, she received a phone call from her abusive and controlling
boyfriend, that she had been at the store for longer than she had anticipated,
and that she was distracted by fear and anxiety “for her physical safety and her
general well-being” because of “what would happen when she got home.” She
argued that evidence of the abusive and controlling nature of her relationship
with her boyfriend was relevant to demonstrate that she did not act “with a
purpose to deprive” the store of its merchandise. RSA 637:3, I. The trial court
allowed the defendant to testify that she was rushing because she was running
late, and that she was concerned that her boyfriend would be angry. The trial
court would not allow the defendant, however, to testify that her boyfriend was
“abusive and controlling,” or what she thought her boyfriend “might do if she
was late.” The trial court observed that “the reason [the defendant] had to get
home [was not] especially relevant,” and that “if you get into the abusive
relationship, . . . you’re playing on sympathy which is going to distract the jury
from whether she had the required mental state.” Thus, the trial court
reasoned that any probative value of such evidence would be substantially
outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice.

On this record, we cannot conclude that the trial court’s ruling was
clearly untenable or unreasonable to the prejudice of the defendant’s case. See
Town, 163 N.H. at 795. The trial court reasonably could have determined that
the abusive nature of the defendant’s relationship with her then-boyfriend bore
little probative value as to whether she acted purposely. Moreover, the trial
court’s determination that any relevance of such evidence was substantially
outweighed by a danger that the jury might decide the case based upon its
sympathy for the defendant as a domestic violence victim, rather than upon the
evidence and the trial court’s instructions, was reasonable and well within the
trial court’s discretion. See State v. Jenot, 158 N.H. 181, 186-87 (2008)
(holding that, for purposes of Rule 403, jury “could have been distracted by the
[excluded] evidence [in an accomplice liability case that the defendant had
previously been sexually assaulted by the principal] and based [its] decision
upon the defendant’s status as a victim of the principal rather than the facts
adduced and instructions on the law”).

Affirmed.

MacDonald, C.J., and Bassett, Hantz Marconi, Donovan, and Countway,
JJ., concurred.

Timothy A. Gudas,
Clerk

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