U.S. v. Webster

• Citation: 162 F.3d 308
• Decision Date: 03 December 1998
• Docket Number: B-L,No. 96-11224,96-11224
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Bruce Carneil WEBSTER, a/k/aove, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (5th Circuit)

Page 308

162 F.3d 308

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Bruce Carneil WEBSTER, a/k/a B-Love, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 96-11224.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

Dec. 3, 1998.

Rehearing Denied Jan. 29, 1999.

Christopher Allen Curtis, Asst. U.S. Atty., Fort Worth, TX, Delonia Anita Watson, Dallas, TX, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Allan K. Butcher, Larry M. Moore, Fort Worth, TX, for Defendant-Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Before SMITH, DUHE and WIENER, Circuit Judges.

JERRY E. SMITH, Circuit Judge:

Bruce Webster challenges his conviction of, and sentence for, kidnaping resulting in death, conspiring to kidnap, and using and carrying a firearm during a crime of violence. We affirm.

I.

The facts are the same as in the case of Webster's co-conspirator, Orlando Hall. See United States v. Hall, 152 F.3d 381 (5th Cir.1998). Webster, Hall, and Marvin Holloway ran a marihuana trafficking enterprise in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. They purchased marihuana in varying amounts in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with the assistance of Steven Beckley, who lived in Irving, Texas. The marihuana was transported, typically by Beckley, to Arkansas and stored in Holloway's house.

On September 21, 1994, Holloway drove Hall from Pine Bluff to the airport in Little Rock, and Hall took a flight to Dallas to engage in a drug transaction. Beckley and Hall's brother, Demetrius Hall (D. Hall), picked up Hall at the airport. Later that day, Hall and Beckley met two local drug dealers, Stanfield Vitalis and Neil Rene (N. Rene), at a car wash and gave them $4700 for the purchase of marihuana. Later that day, Beckley and D. Hall returned to the car wash to pick up the marihuana, but Vitalis and N. Rene never appeared.

When Hall got in touch with Vitalis and N. Rene by telephone, they claimed they had been robbed of the $4700. Using the telephone number that Beckley had dialed to contact Vitalis and N. Rene, Hall procured an address at the Polo Run Apartments in Arlington, Texas, from a friend who worked for the telephone company. Hall, D. Hall, and Beckley began conducting surveillance at the address and saw Vitalis and N. Rene exit an apartment and approach the same car they had driven to the car wash, which they claimed was stolen from them along with the $4700. Hall therefore deduced that Vitalis and N. Rene had lied to him about having been robbed.

On September 24, Hall contacted Holloway and had him drive Webster to the Little Rock airport. From there, Webster flew to Dallas. That evening, Hall, D. Hall, Beckley, and Webster returned to the Polo Run Apartments in a Cadillac owned by Cassandra Ross, Hall's sister. Hall and Webster were armed with handguns, D. Hall carried a small souvenir baseball bat, and Beckley had duct tape and a jug of gasoline. They approached the apartment from which they had previously seen Vitalis and N. Rene leave.

Webster and D. Hall went to the front door and knocked. The occupant, Lisa Rene, N. Rene's sixteen-year-old sister, refused to let them in and called her sister and the police emergency phone number. After Webster unsuccessfully attempted to kick in the door, he and D. Hall looked through a sliding glass door on the patio and saw that Lisa Rene was on the telephone. D. Hall shattered the door with the bat; Webster entered the apartment, tackled Lisa Rene, and dragged her to the car.

Hall and Beckley had returned to the car when they heard the sound of breaking glass. Webster forced Lisa Rene onto the floorboard of the car, and the group drove to Ross's apartment in Irving. Once there, they exited the Cadillac and forced Lisa Rene into the back seat of Beckley's car; Hall climbed into the back seat as well. With Beckley at the wheel and Webster in the front passenger seat, they drove around looking for a secluded spot. During the drive, Hall raped Lisa Rene and forced her to perform fellatio on him.

Unable to find a spot to their liking, they eventually returned to Ross's apartment. From there, Beckley, D. Hall, and Webster drove Lisa Rene to Pine Bluff. Hall remained in Irving and flew back to Arkansas the next day. En route to Pine Bluff, Webster and D. Hall took turns raping Lisa Rene. Once Beckley, D. Hall and Webster reached Pine Bluff, they obtained money from Holloway to get a motel room. In the room, they tied Lisa Rene to a chair and raped her repeatedly.

Hall and Holloway arrived at the motel room on the morning of September 25. They went into the bathroom with Lisa Rene for approximately fifteen to twenty minutes. When Hall and Holloway came out of the bathroom, Hall told Beckley, "She know too much." Hall, Holloway, and Webster then left the motel.

Later that afternoon, Webster and Hall went to Byrd Lake Park and dug a grave. That same evening, Webster, Hall, and Beckley took Lisa Rene to the park but could not find the grave site in the dark, so they returned to the motel room. In the early morning of September 26, Beckley and D. Hall moved Lisa Rene to another motel because they believed the security guard at the first motel was growing suspicious.

The same morning, Webster, Hall, and Beckley again drove Lisa Rene to Byrd Lake Park. They covered her eyes with a mask. Hall and Webster led the way to the grave site, with Beckley guiding Lisa Rene by the shoulders. At the grave site, Hall turned Lisa Rene's back toward the grave, placed a sheet over her head, and hit her in the head with a shovel. Lisa Rene screamed and started running. Beckley grabbed her, and they both fell down. Beckley hit her in the head twice with the shovel and handed it to Hall. Webster and Hall began taking turns hitting her with the shovel. Webster then gagged her and dragged her into the grave. He stripped her, covered her with gasoline, and shoveled dirt back into the grave. When buried, Lisa Rene, although unconscious, likely was still breathing. Hall, Beckley, and Webster then returned to the motel and picked up D. Hall.

Based on information from the victim's brothers, D. Hall was arrested; Hall and Beckley subsequently surrendered to the police. On September 29, just after turning himself in, Beckley gave a confession to a police detective and an FBI agent in which he admitted to the kidnaping of Lisa Rene and implicated himself, Hall, and an individual known as "B-Love." Beckley stated that he had last seen Lisa Rene at the Pine Bluff Motel with B-Love. A security guard at the motel informed the agents and officers that Webster went by the name B-Love, and provided a description of Webster and his vehicle. When Webster pulled into the motel parking lot during the early morning of September 30, he was detained and subsequently arrested.

II.

In November 1994, a six-count superseding indictment charged Webster, Hall, D. Hall, Beckley, and Holloway with various offenses related to the kidnaping and murder of Lisa Rene. Specifically, the indictment charged Webster with kidnaping in which a death occurred in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) (count 1), conspiracy to commit kidnaping in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1201(c) (count 2), traveling in interstate commerce with intent to promote extortion in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1952 (count 5), and using and carrying a firearm during a crime of violence in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) (count 6). In February 1995, the government filed its notice of intent to seek the death penalty against Webster pursuant to § 3593(a) of the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 ("FDPA"), 18 U.S.C. §§ 3591-3598.

Webster's trial was severed from that of his co-defendants. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on counts 1, 2 and 6, and count five was dismissed on the government's motion. The court conducted a separate sentencing hearing before the same jury. See § 3593. After the penalty phase, the jury returned special findings that Webster satisfied the requisite elements of intent, see § 3591(a), and that three statutory and two non-statutory aggravating factors existed. ¹ See § 3592. Varying numbers of jurors found nine mitigating factors. ² See § 3592. The court sentenced Webster to death on count one of the superseding indictment; life imprisonment on count two; and sixty months' imprisonment on count six to run consecutively to the sentence in count 2.

III.

Webster raises several grounds for reversing his conviction and/or sentence that we already have ruled on in Hall:

1. The district court violated Webster's Fifth and Eighth Amendment rights by conditioning the admission of psychiatric testimony in mitigation of punishment upon Webster's submission to a government psychiatric examination. ³

2. The district court abused its discretion by admitting certain unfairly prejudicial materials into evidence, namely photographs and a videotape. ⁴

3. The admission of evidence regarding unadjudicated offenses ⁵ during the penalty phase and a lack of a jury instruction requiring the jury to apply some burden of proof to this evidence rendered the death sentence unreliable.

4. The admission of nontestimonial victim impact statements violated due process and the Eighth Amendment, Webster's Sixth Amendment right of confrontation, and the FDPA's evidentiary standards.

We addressed and rejected each of these arguments in Hall, which controls the outcome here. ⁶

IV.

Webster appeals his judgment of conviction and death sentence on the following grounds that we must address, as we did not consider them in Hall:

1. The court erroneously instructed and materially misdirected the jury in numerous ways at the penalty phase.

2. The court failed to instruct the jury accurately regarding on which non-monetary benefit(s) of the kidnapping the government relied and regarding the need for the jury to agree on such a benefit unanimously in order to convict in the guilt-innocence phase.

3. The court admitted the fruits of a search pursuant to, and statements given after, an arrest contravening the Fourth...