Background
Sunkeun Kim was charged across three consolidated Waukesha County cases with an escalating pattern of domestic violence against his wife Madeline, culminating in her murder. The earliest charges arose from battering incidents in August and September 2018, during which Kim also took Madeline’s phone and keys and strangled her when she tried to seek help. Kim was released on a signature bond with a no-contact order and GPS monitoring, but violated both conditions—approaching Madeline at a University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee campus building and attempting to persuade her to recant her accusations. Madeline filed for divorce on October 29, 2018.
Madeline was found dead in her bedroom on November 18, 2018, having been killed by strangulation. Physical evidence tying Kim to the crime included DNA consistent with his found on her clothing and under her fingernails, a black Toyota RAV4 resembling his seen near her residence around the time of death, a tampered GPS ankle monitor, a deleted Google search on his phone for “shoehorn ankle bracelet trick,” and text messages to his cousin expressing fear of a felony conviction’s impact on his employment and immigration status and stating he had removed his monitor. The jury convicted Kim of all charges after a ten-day trial and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Prior to trial, the State moved to admit statements Madeline had made to eleven witnesses—law enforcement officers, friends, family members, and co-workers—describing the abuse she suffered and her fear of Kim. The circuit court admitted those statements under the forfeiture-by-wrongdoing doctrine, finding by a preponderance of the evidence that Kim killed Madeline to prevent her from testifying. Kim appealed, challenging both the legal basis for that finding and the volume of testimony admitted.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals affirmed all three judgments. On the Confrontation Clause challenge, the court applied the mixed standard of review established in State v. Baldwin—accepting the circuit court’s factual findings unless clearly erroneous and independently assessing the constitutional question. It held that the State proved by a preponderance of the evidence both that Kim caused Madeline’s death and that he did so with the specific intent to prevent her from testifying, satisfying the requirements of the forfeiture-by-wrongdoing doctrine as articulated in Giles v. California, 554 U.S. 353 (2008). The court found compelling the collective circumstantial evidence, including the DNA, GPS tampering, incriminating text messages, and Kim’s prior efforts to get Madeline to recant—all of which traced a clear path of motive and intent.
On the cumulative-evidence challenge, the court held that the circuit court had not abused its discretion under Wis. Stat. § 904.03. The trial court had carefully managed each witness’s testimony, directing the State to focus on new matters and limiting repetition to brief follow-up questions. The appellate court noted that many witnesses addressed distinct incidents—some the August abuse, others the September abuse—and that Madeline’s having confided in multiple people independently enhanced the credibility of her statements rather than merely repeating the same proof.
The court also held that even if any of the challenged testimony had been erroneously admitted, the error was harmless under Wis. Stat. §§ 805.18(1) and 972.11(1): given the totality of the evidence presented over ten days of trial, there was no reasonable probability that a handful of arguably cumulative statements affected the outcome.
Key Takeaways
- A defendant forfeits Sixth Amendment confrontation rights under the forfeiture-by-wrongdoing doctrine when the State proves by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant both caused the witness’s unavailability and acted with the specific intent to prevent that witness from testifying—including in divorce proceedings, not only criminal proceedings.
- Prior acts of domestic abuse combined with overt efforts to pressure a victim to recant, coupled with circumstantial evidence of the killing itself, can satisfy the preponderance standard for forfeiture by wrongdoing even without an eyewitness to the homicide.
- Trial courts retain broad discretion to admit multiple witnesses’ accounts of a victim’s out-of-court statements without running afoul of the cumulative-evidence bar, particularly where each witness addresses a distinct incident or adds a credibility dimension, and where the court actively constrains repetitive questioning.
- Any error in admitting marginally cumulative forfeiture-by-wrongdoing testimony is subject to harmless-error review; where the overall trial record is strong, the error will not warrant a new trial.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the breadth of the forfeiture-by-wrongdoing doctrine in Wisconsin domestic violence prosecutions. It confirms that prosecutors may rely on circumstantial evidence alone—without a confession or eyewitness—to establish both the killing and the intent element required by Giles, and that the doctrine extends to situations where a defendant’s motive was to neutralize a witness in civil proceedings such as divorce, not only pending criminal cases. Defense counsel handling cases with deceased domestic-violence complainants should expect broad admission of the victim’s prior statements once the State marshals sufficient circumstantial evidence of intent-to-silence.
The opinion also offers practical guidance on managing voluminous forfeiture-by-wrongdoing testimony at trial. The court endorsed the circuit court’s witness-by-witness, statement-by-statement approach to admissibility and its practice of granting latitude for genuinely new testimony while capping repetitive questioning to a question or two. That framework—and the court’s willingness to affirm on harmless-error grounds as a backstop—signals that convictions in complex domestic-violence homicide cases are unlikely to be undone by cumulative-evidence objections alone.