James

Opinion by Judge KLEINFELD; Dissent by Judge NOONAN.

The only issue raised in this case is whether the district court erred by excluding some evidence regarding the victim’s violent past.

FACTS

Appellant’s daughter shot and killed appellant’s boyfriend. For furnishing her daughter with the gun, the mother, appellant, was indicted for aiding and abetting manslaughter within Indian country, under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2 , 1112, 1153. She was convicted in a jury trial, and sentenced to probation for five years. The daughter was prosecuted in a juvenile proceeding. The daughter’s ease is not at issue here.

The mother, Ernestine James, met her boyfriend, David Ogden (the victim), at a pow-wow in Seattle. He was nice sober, nasty drunk. Ogden had boasted to her about once killing a man and getting away with it. He told her he had sold another man a fake watch, and when the man complained, had stabbed him in the neck with a ball point pen. Ogden told appellant that “it was pretty funny watching a guy with a pen dangling out of his neck.” He also bragged that he had once “ripped a side view mirror off the car and beat a man unconscious with *749 it,” and that, in yet another incident, he had…

dissenting:

The opinion of the court very fairly sets out the facts and relevant testimony. Ernestine Audry James handed a gun to her 14-year-old daughter Jaylene with which Jay-lene killed Ernestine’s own boyfriend David Ogden. The most that Ernestine could be convicted of was gross negligence in giving the gun to her daughter. Her only defense was that she believed that her daughter and herself were in danger of grievous bodily harm or death from Ogden.

Essential to that defense was her belief in Ogden’s stories of previous acts of vicious violence committed by him. These stories were of such a remarkable character of atrocity that one might doubt that he had told them of himself or doubt that they had really occurred. Hence the question raised by the jurors as to Ogden’s stabbing of an old man; Ogden stabbing of another person with a pen; and Ogden murdering a man: “Axe there police or court documents to prove this or is it ‘brag’?”

For the defense the records, if admitted, would have had two legitimate functions: to corroborate Ernestine James’s own testimony that she, had heard Ogden tell her these things and to corroborate her statement that she had reason to be afraid of…