Thursday, September 24, 2026
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No Error in Playing Video During Murder Trial of Defendant Desecrating Grave—C.A.
Opinion Says Admission of Footage Showing Defilement of Rival Gang Member’s Burial Site Was Proper Where Relevant to Increasing Tensions Before Shooting
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Div. Four of the First District Court of Appeal held yesterday that a trial judge did not abuse his discretion in allowing the prosecutor in a murder case to show jurors videos posts on the defendant’s Instagram account depicting him urinating on the grave of a deceased 17-year-old who was purportedly associated with a rival gang a few weeks before the fatal shooting.
At issue is whether the video was so “unduly prejudicial” as to warrant its exclusion under Evidence Code §352, which specifies:
“The court in its discretion may exclude evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the probability that its admission will (a) necessitate undue consumption of time or (b) create substantial danger of undue prejudice, of confusing the issues, or of misleading the jury.”
Justice Jeremy M. Goldman wrote yesterday’s unpublished opinion, acknowledging that “the question in this case may be somewhat close” but saying that “we cannot conclude that the trial court abused its discretion in weighing the admissibility of the cemetery videos under Evidence Code section 352” where the footage was highly probative of alleged increasing gang tensions leading up to the fatal shooting.
2020 Murder
Seeking to overturn his conviction based on the admission of the videos was Jacobi Gaines, who was accused of murdering Hassan Humphries on an Oakland street on Jan 13, 2020, among a host of other crimes. He was arrested at his mother’s home within the week, and officers recovered a semiautomatic pistol that was identified as matching casings found at the scene of the shooting.
Police officers also found items with writings affiliated with Oakland’s ENT gang in the home. A search of Gaines’ social media records revealed four Christmas Eve posts showing videos of him walking through a cemetery before urinating on a grave and kicking over flowers as well as other memorial items left at the site.
The engraving on the headstone is visible in the footage, and police officers later identified the decedent as a former member of a gang known as “Case.” On Dec. 29, he messaged someone that other parties were posting “old” videos of him “getting jumped for clout.”
Tensions Rising
Detectives testified at trial that Humpries was also a member of Case and that tensions between the two gangs were heating up around the time of the shooting. After a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, various firearm offenses, and other crimes, Alameda Superior Court Judge Jason Chin sentenced him to an aggregate term of 64-years-to-life in prison in March 2025.
On appeal, Gaines conceded that the videos have some relevance to motive but argued that they were cumulative to other evidence showing gang hostilities and created undue prejudice given the “universally-held cultural and religious taboos that reflect our society’s veneration of memorials, respect for the dead, empathy for survivors mourning the loss of a loved one, and the sacrosanct status ascribed to human remains.”
Unpersuaded, Goldman opined:
“The cemetery video helps explain how Gaines engaged in the ‘ongoing feud’ and why the Case gang members would repost the old video of him being jumped. Without the cemetery video, the back and forth between Gaines and the Case gang is less persuasive as a motive for the shooting.”
Undue Prejudice
Citing Supreme Court jurisprudence defining “undue prejudice” as that which tends to evoke an emotional bias against the defendant as an individual while having only minimal probative value to the case, he remarked that “we accept Gaines’s premise that desecration of a grave violates cultural norms and may have evoked an emotional bias against Gaines in some jurors” but commented:
“The videos’ probative value was more than minimal here. They may have been prejudicial insofar as they showed Gaines engaged in morally reprehensible and inflammatory acts, but that was the apparent reason he posted them—as a deliberate insult to members of a rival gang. The videos had probative value because they evidenced and explained Gaines’s involvement in the trajectory of that rivalry, which culminated in the homicide of Humphries. In that respect, they were not merely cumulative of other evidence, and we cannot find that the trial court abused its discretion in concluding that their prejudicial impact did not substantially outweigh their probative value.”
He added that “[e]ven if we assume the evidence was erroneously admitted, we conclude it was not reversible prejudicial error” in light of other “overwhelming evidence” of guilt.
Goldman declared that “[t]he judgment is affirmed and the matter remanded” to correct certain sentencing errors.
The case is People v. Gaines, A173003.
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