People v. Lamar

In People v. Lamar (1906) 148 Cal. 564, the defendant asserted he had shot and killed the victim in self-defense. (Id. at pp. 565-566.) There was evidence that the victim was intoxicated at the time of the shooting. (Id. at p. 571.) After a witness testified that the victim had a "good" reputation "for peace and quiet" (id. at p. 569), the defense sought to establish that the victim had a different reputation when he was intoxicated, viz., a reputation for "being a quarrelsome, violent, and dangerous man" (id. at p. 571). The trial court precluded the defendant from introducing such evidence. (Id. at pp. 569-570.) The Supreme Court held it was error to exclude the evidence. (Id. at p. 572.) It explained that a "man may possess different characters or different reputations, adapted to different localities or different conditions of mind, and as applied to the inquiry at hand the deceased may have had one reputation for peace and quiet when sober, and quite another for these same traits when drunk. The existence of these different reputations under different conditions of mind was what the defendant sought to show,--the reputation of the deceased for violence when intoxicated, as contradistinguished from his reputation for peace when sober . . . ." (Ibid.) Lamar merely holds that evidence that a particular person has a character for being quarrelsome, violent, and dangerous when intoxicated is admissible to prove that the person acted in conformity with that character when, at the time of the incident, the person was intoxicated.