## Facts

- Carlos Sanders, an inmate at Lorton Reformatory, was charged in federal court with assault arising from the stabbing of another inmate, Bobby Jenkins, and with possessing a homemade knife (“shank”) as prison contraband.
- Sanders and another inmate, Ricky Alston, were tried together in the Eastern District of Virginia.
- Before trial, Sanders moved in limine to bar the government from using several prior incidents. The district court excluded impeachment based on (a) an incident for which Sanders had been acquitted and (b) an armed-robbery conviction that had been reversed, but allowed the government to question Sanders about prior convictions for assault and for possession of a contraband shank.
- The district court permitted that questioning both:
  - as impeachment under Federal Rule of Evidence 609(a), and
  - as substantive evidence under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), reasoning the convictions showed Sanders’s intent.
- At the first trial, the jury acquitted Alston of assault, convicted Sanders of shank possession, and could not reach a verdict on Sanders’s assault charge; the court declared a mistrial on assault.
- At Sanders’s retrial on assault, he testified, admitted stabbing Jenkins, and claimed he acted in self-defense. The government again cross-examined him about the prior assault and prior contraband-shank convictions.
- The jury convicted Sanders of the lesser-included offense of assault with a dangerous weapon with intent to do bodily harm (18 U.S.C. § 113(c)).
- Sanders appealed, challenging the admission of the prior convictions and arguing the error required reversal of both the assault and contraband convictions.

## Issues

1. Did the district court abuse its discretion under Federal Rule of Evidence 609(a) by permitting impeachment with Sanders’s prior convictions for assault and possession of a contraband shank, given their similarity to the charged offenses?
2. Were those same prior convictions admissible under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) as proof of intent in the assault case when Sanders admitted the stabbing but claimed self-defense?
3. If admitting the prior convictions was error, was the error harmless as to (a) the assault conviction and (b) the shank-possession conviction?

## Decision

- The Fourth Circuit held the district court erred in allowing the government to use Sanders’s prior assault and contraband-shank convictions in the assault trial because the danger of unfair prejudice outweighed the limited value of the evidence for credibility or intent.
- The error was not harmless as to the assault conviction, which turned on a close credibility contest; the court reversed the assault conviction and remanded for a new trial.
- The error was harmless as to the shank-possession conviction; that conviction was affirmed.

## Legal Principles

- Under Rule 609(a)(1), impeachment with a prior felony conviction requires a balancing that admits the conviction only when its probative value on credibility outweighs the risk of unfair prejudice to the accused.
- When the prior conviction closely resembles the charged offense, the likelihood that jurors will use it as character or propensity evidence increases, so the Rule 609(a) balance generally favors exclusion absent a strong showing of genuine impeachment value.
- Rule 404(b) permits other-acts evidence only for a non-character purpose (such as intent, knowledge, or absence of mistake) and only when the non-character purpose is actually in dispute and supported by a logical connection to the contested issue.
- Where a defendant admits the act (here, the stabbing) and argues justification (self-defense), prior convictions for similar violence and similar contraband possession have limited value on “intent” and create a substantial risk of the forbidden inference that the defendant is the sort of person who commits the charged crime.
- An evidentiary error is not harmless when it likely affected the verdict in a close case turning on credibility; the same error may be harmless on a separate count supported by strong independent proof.

## Conclusion

United States v. Sanders held that the district court improperly admitted Sanders’s prior assault and contraband-shank convictions under Rules 609(a) and 404(b) in a retrial where Sanders admitted the stabbing but claimed self-defense, and because the case was close and depended heavily on credibility the Fourth Circuit reversed and remanded the assault conviction, while affirming the shank-possession conviction as unaffected by the error.


United States v. Sanders, 964 F.2d 295 (1992)