State, Appellant v. Hutnik, Respondent

Summary

The Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed the dismissal of Hutnik's criminal complaint, which the trial court had grounded on both constitutional vagueness and failure of proof. The court held the vagueness attack was foreclosed by its prior decision in State v. Alfonsi, and that the trial judge prejudicially erred in excluding Edward E. Hoebel's testimony that Hutnik had solicited money in connection with the same legislative bill on an occasion that could not be fixed as before or after the charged offense date. The court announced that the admissibility of other-occurrence evidence offered to prove intent turns on remoteness rather than chronology, and that a discretionary exclusion founded on an error of law exceeds the limits of judicial discretion under Rule 303 of the Model Code of Evidence. It declined to decide whether the judge erred in refusing to declare Anthony Wise a hostile witness and to permit use of his grand-jury testimony, because that testimony was not in the record and the reversal on the Hoebel issue made the question unnecessary.