Opinion
NOT TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE OFFICIAL REPORTS
APPEAL from an order of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County No. GJ18352, Shep A. Zebberman, Referee Presiding.
Patricia Winters, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Appellant.
Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Attorney General, Dane R. Gillette, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Pamela C. Hamanaka, Assistant Attorney General, Scott A. Taryle and Colleen M. Tiedemann, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
RUBIN, J.
Raheem M. appeals from the order determining he was a ward of the juvenile court (Welf. & Inst. Code, § 602) after the juvenile court found he had committed first degree burglary. (Pen. Code, § 459.) For the reasons set forth below, we affirm the order.
FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY
On December 27, 2005, Jerry Hodges returned home to find that someone had broken into his locked bedroom closet and stolen several guns he kept there. A police fingerprint specialist lifted several prints from the closet door. One matched Hodge’s great-grandson, Raheem M. (appellant). The others could not be identified. Appellant had once lived with Hodges and had been in Hodges’s bedroom before. Appellant no longer had permission to be at the house, but Hodges believed other family members would sometimes allow appellant to enter. The police questioned appellant in September 2006. According to Los Angeles Police Detective William Dunn, appellant said that on the night of December 27, 2005, he climbed onto the second story balcony outside Hodges’s bedroom window and entered the room through that window. He also said he might have touched the closet, but denied breaking into it. Instead, according to appellant, he was interrupted by his uncle, Barakus, who told him to leave. Appellant told Dunn he then left the room and denied taking his great-grandfather’s guns. Appellant said he believed his uncle took the guns.
The district attorney filed a petition asking the juvenile court to determine that appellant was a ward of the court (Welf. & Inst. Code, § 602) because he had committed a burglary at Hodges’s house. (Pen. Code, § 459.) Based on the evidence described above, the court found the allegations true, sustained the petition, and committed appellant to a long term camp-community placement program for a time period no greater than five years and 10 months. Appellant contends that the trial court violated his constitutional right to present a defense by cutting off his lawyer’s questioning of Police Detective Dunn concerning any investigation into whether appellant’s uncle Barakus might have been the thief.
DISCUSSION
On cross-examination by defense counsel, Dunn testified that he followed up on appellant’s accusation against Barakus. Asked what he learned about Barakus, Dunn said Barakus was currently in the county jail, but had not been in jail when the burglary occurred. He also knew that Barakus was related to Hodges. When Dunn admitted that he had learned Barakus was a crack cocaine addict, the court sustained a prosecution objection on the ground that the question about Barakus’s drug use called for speculation. In response to further questioning, Dunn said he had not spoken to other police officers about Barakus, but had used “department resources” to investigate him. When defense counsel returned to the issue of Barakus’s drug use, the court sustained the prosecutor’s hearsay objection to the question whether Dunn’s investigation had turned up such evidence. Dunn was next asked whether he had ever spoken with Barakus, answering that he had not.
Defense counsel then asked whether it was true that drug addicts “sell stuff and they steal to get their drugs . . . ?” When the prosecutor made a relevancy objection, the court asked defense counsel for an offer of proof. Defense counsel said, “. . . I believe that if a thorough investigation had been made, there would have been another suspect that would have come into this officer’s purview, someone who had connection to the house, who had been at the house, who was told by my client in the interview that he had a drug habit and that he may well have been the person that broke into the room.” The court sustained the objection. Defense counsel then questioned Dunn further about appellant’s statement, getting Dunn to acknowledge that appellant had told him that Barakus had been at the house and had told him to come down from the bedroom balcony. On recross-examination, defense counsel had Dunn repeat appellant’s statements that appellant denied taking the guns and believed Barakus had taken them instead.
Appellant contends this record shows that the trial court violated his constitutional right to present a complete defense by preventing any inquiry into the police investigation of Barakus in order to show that Barakus had taken Hodges’s guns. We disagree. Instead, the trial court did no more than sustain garden variety evidentiary objections to two questions concerning whether or not Dunn knew Barakus was a drug addict and one question concerning whether or not drug addicts in general had a propensity to steal in order to support their habits. Defense counsel freely asked other questions about Dunn’s investigation both before and after the objections were sustained, including questions about whether Dunn had followed up on appellant’s accusation, had spoken with Barakus, or had spoken with other police officers about Barakus. Defense counsel also got Dunn to state that he had used department resources to investigate Barakus. For reasons that are not clear from the record, defense counsel never followed up with questions about the details of Dunn’s investigation or what it showed. What is clear, however, is that nothing in the record shows that the court prevented him from doing so. As a result, we hold that no constitutional violation occurred. (People v. Fudge (1994) 7 Cal.4th 1075, 1102-1103.)
Furthermore, defense counsel never objected on this ground below, leading us to hold in the alternative that the issue was waived. (People v. Alvarez (1996) 14 Cal.4th 155, 186.)
Because appellant has misconstrued the nature and effect of the trial court’s rulings, his appellate brief does not challenge the trial court’s three evidentiary rulings on the specific grounds that led the court to sustain the prosecutor’s objections. Instead, appellant makes the general observation that questions to Dunn about the investigation of Barakus could not have called for hearsay because the answers called for Dunn’s own knowledge and actions and were based on Dunn’s own investigative report. As respondent points out, defense counsel did not lay a sufficient foundation for the three questions and did not establish the extent to which Dunn relied on any report he might have prepared. Regardless, assuming for discussion’s sake only that error occurred, we conclude the error was harmless. Evidence that Barakus was a drug addict who might have had a motive to steal is useless without some other evidence suggesting he was actually present and committed the thefts. Apart from Dunn’s testimony that appellant believed Barakus had taken the guns – which the trial court clearly rejected – there was no such evidence. We therefore hold that a different result would not have been reasonably probable even if Dunn had testified that Barakus was a drug addict. (People v. Fudge, supra, 7 Cal.4th at pp. 1103-1104.)
DISPOSITION
For the reasons set forth above, the order declaring appellant a ward of the juvenile court is affirmed.
WE CONCUR: COOPER, P. J., FLIER, J.