U.S. v. Purkey
| Decision Date | 07 November 2005 |
| Docket Number | No. 04-1337.,04-1337. |
| Citation | 428 F.3d 738 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Wesley Ira PURKEY, Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit |
Frederick A. Duchardt, Jr., argued, Kearney, MO (Laura O'Sullivan, Kansas City, MO, on the brief), for appellant.
Matt J. Whitworth, argued, Deputy U.S. Atty., Kansas City, MO (Philip M. Koppe, Asst. U.S. Atty., Todd P. Graves, U.S. Atty., on the brief), for appellee.
Before MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, McMILLIAN, and COLLOTON, Circuit Judges.
A jury convicted Wesley Purkey of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Jennifer Long, and sentenced him to death. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1201(a), (g), 3559(d), 3591-3598. On appeal, Mr. Purkey raises myriad challenges to his conviction and sentence. After careful review, we conclude that his arguments lack merit and therefore affirm the judgment of the district court.1
Jennifer Long, a sixteen year-old high school sophomore, disappeared in January of 1998. On December 15, 1998, while in the Wyandotte County Jail awaiting a Kansas state prosecution for the murder of eighty-year-old Mary Ruth Bales, Mr. Purkey contacted Detective Bill Howard of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department and offered to speak with him about a kidnapping and homicide that had occurred earlier that year. Mr. Purkey told Detective Howard that he also wanted to speak with an FBI agent about this crime because he wanted to spend his time in a federal, rather than a state, institution. Detective Howard asked FBI Special Agent Dirk Tarpley to go with him to meet with Mr. Purkey.
The next day, Mr. Purkey met with Detective Howard and Agent Tarpley. At the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Purkey executed a form indicating that he understood and voluntarily waived his constitutional rights. He then told the officers that he was going to plead guilty in the Kansas case and was therefore willing to confess to the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Missouri woman, provided that he could serve his state time in a federal penitentiary. Detective Howard and Agent Tarpley informed Mr. Purkey that they could not make any promises but would take whatever he had to say to the United States Attorney. After giving an account of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of the victim (who was later identified as Ms. Long), Mr. Purkey refused to cooperate further unless he received assurances from the United States Attorney that his case would be federally prosecuted.
That afternoon, Detective Howard and Agent Tarpley met with Kurt Shernuk, an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Kansas. Although he was skeptical of Mr. Purkey, Mr. Shernuk indicated that his office might be willing to prosecute the case if Mr. Purkey fully cooperated with the investigators and provided the location of the victim's remains and other evidence to corroborate his confession.
After meeting with Mr. Shernuk, Detective Howard and Agent Tarpley returned to the Wyandotte County Jail to speak with Mr. Purkey. They told him that Mr. Shernuk wanted a body and would require full cooperation, but they did not make Mr. Purkey any promises as to the sentence that he might receive. Mr. Purkey then led Messrs. Tarpley and Howard to the crime scene and to the place where he claimed to have discarded the victim's undergarments and jaw bone. He told the officers that because he had taken extraordinary measures to dispose of the body, including dismembering it with a chain saw and burning the remains, the victim's remains were not recoverable.
More meetings occurred over the next several days. On December 17, Detective Howard and Agent Tarpley again met with Mr. Purkey and, after being reminded verbally of his constitutional rights, Mr. Purkey gave a detailed handwritten confession. The next day, Detective Howard met with Mr. Purkey and, after reminding him of his rights, conducted a photo lineup to see if he could identify the victim. Without hesitation, Mr. Purkey identified Ms. Long. Agent Tarpley met with Mr. Purkey three days later, and after being advised of his rights, Mr. Purkey confessed again.
During the guilt phase of his federal trial, Mr. Purkey affirmed his statements about the killing and dismemberment of Ms. Long, but he disavowed his previous statements that he forced Ms. Long to travel with him from Missouri to his home in Kansas. Instead, he stated that Ms. Long, who he said he thought was a prostitute, voluntarily entered his truck and accompanied him to his home. He indicated that he fabricated the kidnapping aspect of the confession to ensure that his actions would be considered, and therefore prosecuted as, a federal crime. After deliberating briefly, the jury returned a verdict of guilty.
During the penalty phase of the trial, the defense submitted and the court instructed on twenty-seven mitigating factors. Mr. Purkey's primary mitigation defense consisted of expert testimony indicating that he suffered brain damage that resulted in diminished mental capacity. The government presented expert testimony to rebut this assertion and also produced evidence in support of six statutory and four non-statutory aggravating factors.
After deliberating for eleven hours and ten minutes, the jury found the existence of all six of the statutory aggravating factors: (1) that the death of Ms. Long occurred during the commission and attempted commission of her kidnapping; (2) that Mr. Purkey killed Ms. Long in an especially heinous, cruel, and depraved manner in that the killing involved torture and serious physical abuse; (3) that the victim was particularly vulnerable due to her youthful age of sixteen years; (4) that Mr. Purkey had previously been convicted of an offense punishable by a term of imprisonment of more than one year, involving the use, attempted use, and threatened use of a firearm against another person; (5) that Mr. Purkey had previously been convicted of an offense resulting in the death of a person for which a sentence of life imprisonment was authorized by statute; and (6) that Mr. Purkey had previously been convicted of two or more offenses punishable by a term of imprisonment of more than one year, committed on different occasions and involving the infliction and attempted infliction of serious bodily injury and death upon another person. The jury also found the existence of three of the four non-statutory aggravating factors: (1) that the government established loss and harm because of the victim's personal characteristics as an individual human being and the impact of the death upon the victim's family; (2) that the defendant had previously killed Mary Ruth Bales in a vicious manner in that he repeatedly struck her in the head with a hammer until she died; and (3) that Mr. Purkey had a substantial criminal history. The jury did not record any evidence of its findings with regard to the mitigating factors. It then determined that Mr. Purkey should be sentenced to death.
We begin with Mr. Purkey's arguments pertaining to the district court's denials of his pretrial motions.
Mr. Purkey's primary argument on appeal is that the district court erred in denying his motion to suppress his multiple confessions to the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Ms. Long. He argues that the district court should have suppressed his statements to Messrs. Tarpley and Howard because the statements were involuntary and therefore obtained in violation of the fifth amendment to the Constitution. He bases this argument on his assertion that the officers obtained the confessions through a false promise, cf. United States v. Pierce, 152 F.3d 808, 812-13 (8th Cir.1998), namely, that if he cooperated with the government he would receive a life sentence in a federal institution. As an alternative to suppression, Mr. Purkey moved to prohibit the government from pursuing the death penalty. The district court also denied that motion.
The core of Mr. Purkey's argument is that Detective Howard and Agent Tarpley procured his confession by indicating that the Assistant United States Attorney had accepted Mr. Purkey's alleged quid pro quo offer, that is, that Mr. Purkey would confess to the crime and provide full cooperation in return for a life sentence in a federal institution. Detective Howard and Agent Tarpley testified at the suppression hearing that they never made this representation to Mr. Purkey. The district court, adopting the discussion and conclusions in the report and recommendation of a magistrate judge,2 squarely rejected Mr. Purkey's version of the events. It found that, The court inserted a footnote within this language to make explicit that it found "the testimony of Special Agent Tarpley and Detective Howard more credible than that of defendant Purkey" on the issue of whether Messrs. Tarpley and Howard told Mr. Purkey that the Assistant United States Attorney had agreed to give Mr. Purkey a life sentence in the federal system in exchange for a full confession. Finally, the court concluded that during the course of the investigation,
Because Mr. Purkey's challenges are to the district court's conclusions regarding the facts underlying its decisions to deny his motions, we review the matter for clear...
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