In years past courts have often used ("abused"?) words such as "plan," "scheme," and "pattern" to sanction the admissibility of evidence of a great many other crimes or bad acts committed by a criminal defendant. While courts were particularly likely to make use of these labels only when the other crimes bore at least some resemblance to the crime for which the defendant was on trial, in many such instances it is difficult for any fair-minded observer to say that the prior crimes and acts thus admitted were in any meaningful sense parts or constituents of a "plan" resident in the mind of the defendant.
Academic commentators have been critical of the talismanic use of the plan, scheme, and pattern labels to justify the admission of other crimes and bad act evidence. Taken to an extreme, the plan, scheme, and pattern exceptions to the prohibition against circumstantial use of other crimes evidence threaten to eviscerate putative limitations on the use of other crime evidence against criminal defendants. Here and there the academic criticism appears to have had some effect. For example, the California Supreme Court recently said, People v. Catlin, 26 P.3d 357 (July 16, 2001):
In order to be relevant as a common design or plan, "evidence of uncharged misconduct must demonstrate 'not merely a similarity in the results, but such a concurrence of common features that the various acts are naturally to be explained as caused by a general plan of which they are the individual manifestations.' " (People v. Ewoldt (1994) 7 Cal. 4th 380, 402, 867 P.2d 757 We have explained that "the common features must indicate the existence of a plan rather than a series of similar spontaneous acts," and that "evidence that the defendant has committed uncharged criminal acts that are similar to the charged offense may be relevant if these acts demonstrate circumstantially that the defendant committed the charged offense pursuant to the same design or plan he or she used in committing the uncharged acts." ( Id. at p. 403, italics added.)
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