Unlawful Possession of a Weapon Part 5

Then, we get the last nail in the coffin; Huddleston! Now, if you’re litigating an issue, 404(B) issue in federal court, I have no doubt that the response that you’re going to get from the government is going to have Huddleston on the front page. Because Huddleston was really the one that gave us a really good screwing. Pardon my language! Because Huddleston went back to the legislative intent of 404(B) and it quotes the legislation intent saying that,” the rule was not intended to protect the defendant”. No, in fact, the rule places a ,”greater emphasis on admissibility” and the evidence, the congress was not nearly so concerned with the potential pre-judicial effect as it was with ensuring that restrictions would not be placed on the admission of such evidence. So this is where, they go back, Huddleston goes back to the legislative intend and says,” Look! Congress didn’t write this rule to protect the defendant from extraneous offenses. No, no! Congress wrote this rule to make sure that the prosecutors could get around all these little arguments about extraneous offenses and get the stuff in”

Now, every time you get a memorandum on 404B at least in federal court, this is the first thing they put on there. Now [I am going to go ahead and skip that] there’s some really interesting language in the descent…lets skip some of this! I mean you all want to go home, so let’s skip some of this. But this one I can’t skip, I’m sorry! This one is just great! the descent in Beechum, says, the advisory notes that’s what was being referred to in Huddleston or rather the advisory note in the rule 404b itself ; seem to advise use of a straight forward prejudice probativeness balancing test not the substantially outweighed test of rule 403. Basically what that saying is that; if you look at advisory notes for 4040B, it doesn’t say substantially outweighed. It just says outweighed! It does not say substantially outweighed. Then the descent says,” one might even say that the majority in Beechum did not overrule Broadway at all. It simply moved it from time square to the Bermuda triangle! I don’t know why, I love that quote but.