Key legal question
Whether the appellate court violated the right to be heard by refusing to hear the defendant's brother and the landlords as witnesses.
Extracted holding
No. The refusal was permissible anticipatory assessment of evidence because the brother was expected to give biased favorable testimony and the landlords could not change the outcome.
Extracted reasoning
A court may refuse evidence it may, without arbitrariness, consider incapable of changing its conviction. The defendant did not show that the proposed testimony would have altered the evidentiary result.