Anonymous jury; Reference to jurors by number; People v Hanks; People v Williams; Ineffective assistance of counsel; Denial of request to introduce evidence of Facebook screenshots; Right to present a defense; Sentencing; Mitigating factors of youth; People v Boykin; Miller v Alabama; Proportionality; Maximum term of years sentence under MCL 769.25

The court rejected defendant’s anonymous jury and related ineffective assistance of counsel claim. It also held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion or deny him his right to present a defense by denying his request to admit screenshots taken from another individual’s (M) Facebook page. Finally, it rejected his challenges to his sentence to the maximum term of years under MCL 769.25 for his first-degree premeditated murder conviction. He was also convicted of AWIM and intentional discharge of a firearm from a motor vehicle. He was sentenced to concurrent terms of 480 to 720 months for the murder conviction and 285 to 600 months for each of the others, with jail credit. The court first found that the record did not support “that the jury was ‘anonymous’ as” defined in Hanks. His ineffective assistance claim was based on defense counsel’s statement to the jurors that he would love to use their names but numbers were being used because “‘we all want you to feel safe[.]’” The court concluded the statement could “be reasonably interpreted as an attempt to build a rapport with the jury by informing the potential jurors that he did not think of them as simply a number.” As to the evidence from M’s Facebook page, while defendant theorized that M was the shooter, among other things he “did not produce any evidence to establish that it was [M’s] hand holding the gun in the first screenshot or that [M] possessed such a gun.” The court held that the trial court properly denied admission of the screenshots because they “did not tend to make it more probable that [M] was the shooter[.]” As to defendant’s murder sentence, the court disagreed with his claim that “the trial court failed to properly consider the mitigating factors of youth as set forth” in Boykin. It also concluded that defense counsel’s “sentencing memorandum was a concise and cogent argument highlighting what [he] believed were the strongest factors that weighed in favor of mitigation.” Finally, defendant did not rebut the presumption that the sentence was proportionate. He “fired a semi-automatic rifle out of a moving car filled with young people at another moving car filled with young people . . . in a populated area, killing a seventeen-year old female and injuring several others.” He also then tried “to dispose of the rifle and other evidence.” Affirmed.