‘Inflammatory and Prejudicial’

An Alderpoint man found guilty of first-degree murder in 2023 appears headed for a new trial after a state appellate court recently overturned his conviction, finding a local judge erred in allowing the jury to be presented with “inflammatory and prejudicial” evidence that may have changed the outcome of the case.

Jake Henry Combs, who claimed self-defense, was sentenced to 50 years to life for fatally shooting an acquaintance, Trevor John Earley, 25. Earley had reportedly become upset and threatened to kill Combs’ dog after the animal bit him in the face following an evening of drinking in January of 2022.

Earlier this month, the First District Court of Appeal denied the California Attorney General’s Office request for a rehearing on the decision, meaning absent a successful appeal to the California Supreme Court, which only hears a small percentage of petitions each year, Combs will likely be returned to Humboldt County in July.

Combs, now 33, was convicted following an eight-day trial presided over by Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Kaleb Cockrum. He is currently being held at Calipatria State Prison, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

In an email to the Journal before the rehearing request was denied, Humboldt County District Attorney Stacey Eads says she believes “due to the overwhelming evidence supporting the jury’s verdict, convicting Combs for the murder of Trevor Earley, coupled with the applicable law, the decision to overturn the conviction should be rectified.”

She also says the ruling was “devastating, absolutely traumatizing” for Earley’s family, and her office is in communication with them as the case proceeds through the judicial process.

In February, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors approved renaming the Alderpoint Bridge as the Trevor John Earley Memorial Bridge, with the resolution by Second District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell describing him as “a beloved son, brother, grandson, devoted friend and cherished member of a fourth-generation native Alderpoint family.”

Heavily steeped in minutiae of evidence code and legal precedence, the appellate decision centers on Cockrum’s ruling to allow the prosecution to present video and testimony about a violent assault Combs committed in jail while awaiting trial. Cockrum made the ruling after finding in favor of the prosecution’s assertion that the defense had opened that door during a line of questioning about the character of the victim and the defendant, which the panel described as “an abuse of discretion.”

Over 25 pages with extensive use of case law citations, the opinion meticulously walks through the narrow legal exemptions for when evidence of a never-charged and unrelated act might be admissible at trial, the need to carefully scrutinize the probative value of such evidence and the reasons those thresholds were not met in this case.

“Moreover, we struggle to imagine any evidence more inflammatory and prejudicial than video of Combs attacking a defenseless man in a wheelchair, refusing to stop when ordered to do so until a taser was deployed, and testimony regarding the same, together with the prosecution’s unsubstantiated allegation that the attack was racially motivated,” the appellate panel wrote.

“The prosecutor evidently agreed,” the decision continues, “making the jail attack the coda to her closing argument, and directly linking the jail attack to the charged murder by telling the jury that ‘Mr. Combs is a violent person, and we now have two instances for you to consider where he has attacked people unprovoked. You saw that in the jail attack video. What Mr. Combs did to Mr. Earley was murder and it was murder in the first degree.'”

In addition, the appellate court decision states that because “Combs admitted he shot Earley … the only question for the jury was Combs’ state of mind at the time he did so,” noting, “the jury deliberated for over a day on this single issue, deliberations that included sending six notes to the court, including two requests for readbacks of testimony and two notes indicating that they wanted ‘clarification of the element[s]’ of premeditation and deliberation,” an indication there was some division on the 12-person panel.

“We conclude that had evidence of the jail attack not been erroneously admitted into evidence, there was ‘a reasonable chance, more than an abstract possibility’ (quoting from a 2002 state Supreme Court decision) that a result more favorable to Combs would have been obtained,” the opinion states in closing.

David Levine, a professor at University of California College of Law, San Francisco, describes the opinion as “very detailed,” noting he was surprised the appellate court chose not to publish the decision, which would have made it citable in future cases.

Reversals are “unusual rather than rare, but it happens,” he says. “That’s why we have appeals. If anything, you want to be especially careful with a murder conviction because the stakes are so high.”

According to the Judicial Council of California, which releases yearly reports on filings and dispositions of cases across the state’s three-tiered court system, about 13 to 19 percent of felony convictions are overturned on appeal each year. However, it does not break down those statistics by crime.

“The basic standard is you don’t get a perfect trial, you get a fair trial,” Levine says. “Mistakes can happen, but there are things that are structural errors, things that are not harmless errors that require reversal, and this is one of those instances.”

But he says he can also see how Cockrum came to the ruling he did with the subject coming up “in the heat of the moment” during a sidebar discussion in the middle of the trial and without strenuous objection from the defense, noting if the matter had been raised during pre-trial motions, “maybe the judge would have had time to think it through and consult sources that are relative to the statutory issues.”

One of the aspects Levine says he found interesting about the decision was how the appellate court justices were “able to point to the jury deliberations, the notes sent in suggesting things were close and so, therefore, we can’t assume that this big mistake had no effect in this specific case.”

“When you’re getting a lot of notes, that means there is some division in the jury, and they are trying to reach some consensus,” Levine says. “It might be one or two people who are holding out .. but certainly that they are doing a careful job and that it’s a close vote.”

Levine says the appellate court’s reversal of the conviction in this instance was “a perfectly defensible result,” and he could “certainly understand how this panel of experienced people got here.”

“It is a combination of: We worry about this kind of evidence, so it only comes in in exceptional cases, and it was an extraordinary prejudicial piece of evidence, and the jury evidently had kind of a hard time in reaching a decision because of the number of times they asked for clarification, and therefore any mistake of this size may well have led to a decision that was made,” Levine says. “It could’ve come out the other way, and therefore, we can’t conclude it was a harmless error.”

The state AG’s Office did not immediately respond to an email inquiry about whether an appeal would be filed, but Eads said in her May 14 email to the Journal that her office was “advised the AG’s Office is engaged in a thorough review of the case,” which was to be “presented to the Solicitor General for their determination regarding whether to ask the California Supreme Court to review the appellate court’s decision.”

“My request for review, as well as that of the family and community, has been strongly communicated to the AG’s Office,” she wrote, adding that if the rehearing, which has since been denied, and an appeal to the Supreme Court, whether because it is not sought or grant, “do not result in the conviction being affirmed, we anticipate a remittitur will be filed, which essentially returns the case back to our local trial court for a new jury trial.”

In that latter scenario, Eads wrote, her office “will retry the case.”

“Our position is that Combs committed the murder of Trevor Earley, for which he was tried and convicted,” she says, adding that “we could see the case back in our local courts as early as July.”

This article appears in The Man Who Unsolved a Murder.