United States v. Queen
United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
132 F.3d 991 (1997)
- Written by Angela Patrick, JD
Facts
Roland Queen (defendant) threatened violence to intimidate two witnesses who were supposed to testify against him at an armed-robbery trial. Several years later, Queen was charged with unlawfully intimidating Feronica Isaacs, a different witness, to keep Isaacs from testifying against Stephen Hester at a trial about drug trafficking. One element of the charged crime was that Queen had intended to tamper with a witness when he spoke to Isaacs. To help the jury determine Queen’s intent when he spoke to Isaacs, the trial court admitted evidence that Queen had intimidated the two witnesses before the earlier armed-robbery trial. The trial court also instructed the jury that it could consider the prior witness-tampering evidence for the sole purpose of inferring Queen’s intent. The jury convicted Queen of witness tampering by threatening Isaacs. Queen appealed, arguing that the evidence of his prior witness tampering should have been excluded.
Rule of Law
Issue
Holding and Reasoning (Niemeyer, J.)
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