Jury can hear ex-Brooklyn postal worker’s boasts about criminal past in shooting threat case

A federal jury will be allowed to hear a former mail carrier’s boasts about the “mad felonies” on his rap sheet when he goes on trial for threatening to shoot up a post office, an appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a jury could hear a series of recorded statements by Quadri Garnes telling the targets of his alleged threats how “it don’t bother me to be in jail” because of his past prison sentences.

Garnes, 47, is accused of threatening a mass shooting if he didn’t get unemployment benefits.

Their 32-page decision reverses a ruling last year by Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Nina Morrison, who said in July that admitting the statements would “risk unfair prejudice” to Garnes by introducing his criminal record and painting him as someone with “a propensity to commit crimes.”

Morrison, a 2022 appointee to the bench by President Biden, previously worked for two decades with the Innocence Project, an organization that works to overturn convictions of the wrongly accused. At the time of her ruling, Garnes would have been the first criminal trial the judge had presided over.

Garnes, a registered sex offender from Brooklyn, spent about seven years behind bars for a string of criminal convictions, including one for attempted rape in 1994.

He more recently got a job at the Homecrest Station post office in Brooklyn in March 2022, but lost that job just over two months later after crashing a   Postal Service truck into two other vehicles, according to court filings.

Because he hadn’t held that job for a total of 60 days, he wasn’t eligible for unemployment benefits — and when he called the state Department of Labor to demand his benefits, his rhetoric turned violent, the feds said.

“I can’t get what I worked for… so I have to go to the Post Office and shoot up the Post Office, right?” he said during the Sept. 29 phone call, according to a criminal compliant, later asking, “Does the city want me to kill five or six people because I can’t pay the rent?”

He also threatened to shoot people outside the downtown Brooklyn office of the Department of Labor, prosecutors allege.

“Somebody might get shot today coming out of the Department of Labor,” he said, according to prosecutors.

During the calls, he said that he’d spent “spent 18 and a half years in jail,” an exaggeration, it turned out, and repeatedly referred to his time behind bars.

The case was set to go to trial last July, with jury selection well underway, but on July 12 Morrison barred the parts of his threatening phone calls where he mentions a criminal record or having spent time in jail.

“I’m not persuaded by the government’s argument that Mr. Garnes’ criminal history is admissible to show the effect of the threats on a victim…. and the details of his actual criminal history were not part of the allegedly threatening statements Garnes made,” the judge said.

That led prosecutors to appeal her ruling, which delayed the case.

On Tuesday, the three-judge panel ruled that Morrison got it wrong, with Circuit Judge Gerald Lynch writing that the jury should be allowed to decide what the statements mean.

“The point of the evidence is not that Garnes had a criminal record; it is that a jury could find that he used, and indeed exaggerated, his criminal record to intimidate his listeners and enhance the efficacy of his threats to shoot USPS and DOL personnel,” Lynch wrote.

“The government could be instructed not to suggest to the jury that Garnes had a criminal record, and to confine its use of the evidence to arguing that, even if everything he said on the subject was false, the jury should consider his claims as evidence that he was trying to instill fear.”