Even if an Arapahoe County judge was wrong to combine a defendant’s drug and murder charges in one trial, the move did not likely affect the jury’s verdict, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Monday.

Joseph Wayne Washington argued there should have been separate trials for his murder charge and for the other counts largely related to drug possession. In Washington’s view, jurors were more likely to reject his self-defense argument and convict him of murder once the prosecution painted him as a “large-scale drug dealer,” when, in reality, the shooting had no connection to the drugs.

The Supreme Court clarified that the incorrect joining together of charges does not result in automatic reversal of a defendant’s convictions unless the result is an unfair trial. In all other instances, wrote Justice Melissa Hart, courts look at whether the error affected the outcome.

The “evidence against Washington’s self-defense claim was more than sufficient to support his second degree murder conviction,” she wrote in the May 6 opinion. “Moreover, the trial court properly instructed the jury to consider each charge separately.”

In August 2017, Washington attended a barbecue at Cherry Creek State Park. Allegedly, another attendee, Jackson Chavez, got into an altercation with his girlfriend. When asked to leave, Chavez knocked a man to the ground and then came after Washington. Washington walked to his bag, got a gun and shot Chavez. 

Washington then fled to a hotel with his girlfriend. When police arrested him, they found several types of illegal narcotics, including some that Washington left behind in his home and car. Prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder, numerous counts of drug possession, plus additional charges related to Washington’s post-arrest conduct.

He asserted he was acting in self-defense and that the drugs were not his.

The defense argued the drug charges should be tried separately, but then-District Court Judge Patricia Herron disagreed. She concluded they were “part and parcel” of the same incident. Herron specifically noted Washington gifted the person who booked his hotel room with cocaine as part of his escape after the murder.

Jurors acquitted Washington of certain charges and convicted him of the lesser offense of second-degree murder, along with the remaining drug counts. He received a 57-year sentence.

On appeal, Washington only challenged Herron’s decision not to sever the murder case. Under the rules of procedure, two or more offenses can be joined for trial when they are “of the same or similar character” or are based on “acts or transactions connected together.”

A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals concluded that even if joining the charges was a mistake, it did not require automatic reversal of Washington’s convictions. There was “overwhelming evidence” Washington did not kill Chavez in self-defense, and the fact jurors acquitted him of some offenses, while convicting him of others, showed their ability to consider the offenses separately, the panel reasoned.

During oral arguments last year, some members of the Supreme Court appeared sympathetic to the idea that the drug evidence could have been improperly used to illustrate Washington’s bad character, given the tenuous connection to the shooting.

“We’re, like, three steps removed from the murder,” said Justice Richard L. Gabriel.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court decided that incorrectly joining the charges was not the type of error that seriously affected the fairness of Washington’s trial, known as a structural error requiring automatic reversal.

“The short list of errors that have been recognized as structural includes the complete deprivation of counsel, a trial before a biased judge, and the unlawful exclusion of people of the defendant’s race from a grand jury,” wrote Hart.

Without answering whether it was proper to join the various charges in a single trial, the justices agreed with the Court of Appeals that the totality of the evidence supported the jury’s verdict. Although Washington urged the Supreme Court not to draw conclusions from the jury’s verdict acquitting him on some charges, Hart noted the split decision “lends additional support” to the idea that jurors did consider the evidence separately.

The case is Washington v. People.