Schmaus

Defendants and appellants Michael Beattie (Beattie), Danny Wayne Black (Black), and Jason Schmaus (Schmaus) were convicted of first degree murder, and the jury found true the special circumstance that the murder was committed while lying in wait. At defendants’ joint trial, Robert Glenn (Glenn) testified that lie and defendants shared the beliefs of the Aryan Brotherhood and Nazi Low Riders, White prison gangs, and that because the victim violated those beliefs by committing a sex offense, Glenn and defendants killed him while they were all incarcerated.

In the published portion of this opinion, we discuss Beattie’s argument that his Sixth Amendment right to confrontation was violated by the admission of a statement his nontestifying codefendant Schmaus made that implicated Beattie in the murder. We conclude that the trial court erred in admitting the statement, but hold that the error was harmless.

In the unpublished portion of this opinion, we deal with Schmaus’s contentions that the jury was improperly instructed on the lying-in-wait special circumstance and that it was error to admit evidence concerning White prison gangs; we discuss Beattie’s additional arguments…