Anderson v. State
| Decision Date | 22 February 2006 |
| Docket Number | No. F-2004-882.,F-2004-882. |
| Citation | 2006 OK CR 6,130 P.3d 273 |
| Parties | Richard Lloyd ANDERSON, Appellant v. STATE of Oklahoma, Appellee. |
| Court | United States State Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma. Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma |
Richard Couch, Travis Grafe, Assistant Public Defenders, Tulsa, OK, attorneys for defendant at trial.
Todd Chesbro, Tara Perkinson, Assistant District Attorneys, Tulsa, OK, attorneys for State at trial.
Paula J. Alfred, Assistant Public Defenders, Tulsa, OK, attorney for appellant on appeal.
W.A. Drew Edmondson, Attorney General of Oklahoma, Donald D. Self, Assistant Attorney General, Oklahoma City, OK, attorneys for appellee on appeal.
¶ 1 Richard Lloyd Anderson was tried by jury and convicted of Murder in the First Degree, in violation of 21 O.S.2001, § 701.7(A), in the District Court of Tulsa County, Case No. CF-2003-3372. In accordance with the jury's recommendation the Honorable Rebecca Brett Nightingale sentenced Anderson to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Anderson appeals from this judgment and sentence, raising five propositions of error.
¶ 2 Forty-one year-old Mark Wilkins lived with his parents, Reuben and Patricia, in their Tulsa home. Wilkins was a methamphetamine user and dealer. He also repaired pool tables and did other odd jobs. He did not drive. Wilkins called Melissa Travis on Sunday, February 23, 2003, asking for a ride so he could repair a pool table. Travis, Wilkins's friend and fellow drug dealer, lived with Anderson at Tammy Rhodes's apartment along with Ralph Colson. Rhodes's boyfriend. Travis agreed to give Wilkins a ride after Wilkins promised to give her some methamphetamine. She arrived at the house that afternoon, accompanied by the defendant, Anderson, her six-year-old daughter, and Tammy Rhodes's 11-year-old stepsister, Nancy Duff. Before Travis got there, Wilkins called his parents at the lake at approximately 11:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. He warned them that because it was snowing hard, the roads were bad and they should come home, and said he was waiting on a friend to give him a ride.
¶ 3 Shortly before 5:00 p.m. Reuben and Patricia returned to Tulsa. The snow at the house was several inches deep, and they could see a car had been parked in their driveway. As Reuben approached the house he saw bloody footprints on the walkway from the door to the car tracks in the driveway. Reuben unlocked the door and entered, walking through the kitchen to the den. A drawer was open in the kitchen, and a recliner was overturned in the den. Beyond the recliner Reuben could see Wilkins's feet. Wilkins was lying facedown in a pool of blood. He wore only a bloody shirt, which was open in the front. Most of the shirt buttons were torn off and scattered on the floor. There was a great deal of blood on and around Wilkins's head, face, chest and forearms, but very little blood on his legs and none on the soles of his feet. Wilkins's blood-soaked hands were bound behind him with an electrical cord. Another electrical cord was wrapped tightly around his neck. That cord was connected to the electrical cord from a battery charger lying near Wilkins's left hip. The charger electrical cord was pulled taut down Wilkins's back, between his buttocks, and the cables from the battery charger were wrapped around his right thigh. The clamps lay near Wilkins's testicles. A large commemorative glass beer bottle rested on Wilkins's back, underneath the charger electrical cord. Smears and pools of blood were in front of the fireplace in the center of the room. Large blood pools, clots, smears, and spatter were near the French doors and on the carpet and objects not far from the body. Wilkins's cell phone, wallet and dark-colored duster coat were missing, along with a trash can liner and a heavy glass paperweight. In addition to sustaining severe head wounds, Wilkins's neck had abrasions, lacerations and bruising unconnected with the ligature, and his hyoid bone was fractured. The medical examiner concluded Wilkins died from blunt force trauma and strangulation.
¶ 4 Melissa Travis testified that, when they reached the house, she left Rick and the girls in the car and went to get Wilkins. Travis expected Wilkins to be ready to leave, but he was unsuccessfully trying to shoot up a dose of methamphetamine. After several minutes, he told her to bring the girls in. Wilkins was unhappy that Travis had brought Anderson, but invited him in as well. Eventually Wilkins finished injecting the drug and joined the adults in the living room. They began to argue. Suddenly, Travis testified, Anderson picked up a glass paperweight, rushed over to the recliner, and hit Wilkins in the head. Travis said she tried to separate the two, then took the girls out to the car. Travis returned to the house and began carrying her personal belongings from the front room to her car. She eventually looked in the den. Wilkins, prone and fully clothed, lay near the French doors while Anderson sat on him, repeatedly hitting his head with the paperweight. Anderson told Travis he would kill Wilkins. Travis testified she joined the girls in the car and waited until Anderson left the house, wearing a dark-colored duster coat and carrying a trash bag with a heavy object inside. Travis took Anderson to his sister's apartment, dropped off the girls, then picked Anderson up and brought him to their apartment, where he showered and changed clothes. Travis was initially questioned by police several weeks after the murder, and suggested that Rhodes was involved in it. She later told officers that Anderson had killed Wilkins.
¶ 5 Several aspects of Travis's testimony were corroborated by other evidence. Tammy Rhodes saw Travis and Anderson leave with the girls on Sunday morning. Wilkins left phone messages for Rhodes twice that afternoon, and Travis's voice was in the background. Rhodes's mother, Robbin Duff, talked to Travis that afternoon on the telephone, and heard the girls and Anderson in the background. Robbin Duff also saw Anderson return to the apartment to take a shower. Nancy Duff testified that she, Anderson, and Travis's daughter went with Travis to see "that guy", briefly went in the house, then had to sit in the car. A teenager shoveling snow across the street saw a skinny blond woman, two children and a man at the Wilkins's house; the woman was carrying things from the house to a car resembling Travis's car. Reuben Wilkins testified that a trash can liner, glass paperweight, and dark-colored duster coat were missing from the house. Physical evidence at the scene and the autopsy results confirm Travis's description of the blows she saw and Wilkins's probable locations at some time during the assault. When police tested the electrical cord around Wilkins's wrists, they found a mixture of Wilkins's DNA and some other person's. Travis and several other suspects were excluded, but Anderson could not be excluded as a source of the DNA mixture.
¶ 6 Anderson claims in Proposition I that the State's DNA expert, Dr. Fuller, overstated her scientific findings with inaccurate and misleading testimony. Dr. Fuller analyzed the DNA mixture found on the electrical wire binding Wilkins's wrists.1 She first attributed all the DNA mixture she could to a known subject by subtracting from the mixture all the DNA components belonging to the victim. Several DNA components remained. She tested that DNA against four suspects, including Travis, Rhodes and Anderson. Only Anderson could not be excluded as a contributor to the remaining DNA. Dr. Fuller testified that, statistically, the odds of getting a match between Anderson and the remaining DNA in the mixture were one in 4,200 United States Caucasians, one in 17,000 African Americans, and one in 18,000 Hispanics.
¶ 7 Anderson does not complain about this basic scientific evidence. He claims that Dr. Fuller's attempts to explain her methodology and findings were inaccurate, misleading, unscientific, and prejudicial. The record does not support this claim. Dr. Fuller clearly testified regarding the DNA test procedures she used. She repeatedly stated that testing was a process of exclusion—that is, she could only exclude persons as DNA contributors, then calculate the probability that the DNA belonged to a person not excluded. Dr. Fuller characterized as "conservative" the procedure in which she subtracted the victim's known DNA from the mixture to be tested, since that subtraction necessarily restricted the remaining DNA available for comparison to suspects. Dr. Fuller described this as erring on behalf of the defense, since DNA likely to be shared by a suspect and victim was not included in the comparison test using only a suspect's DNA. This, in turn, led to a much larger statistical pool of persons whose DNA would be compatible with the remaining DNA in the mixture. For example, Wilkins's DNA could not be excluded from DNA on a piece of chewed gum at the scene, and statistically, there was a one in 7.4 million chance that any other person's DNA would match. In other words, one could double Oklahoma's population before finding another person likely to have deposited that DNA on that piece of gum. By contrast, 4200 people other than Anderson could, statistically, have matched the DNA mixture found on the wire—or about ten percent of the Tulsa population.2
¶ 8 Anderson claims that Dr. Fuller's testimony assumed his guilt, and implicitly told the jury he committed the crime. He argues that Dr. Fuller's methodology could not have erred "on behalf of the defense" unless you assume that the defendant was the person depositing the DNA. Thus, he claims, Dr. Fuller told jurors that her methodology favored Anderson because he was guilty. On the contrary, Dr. Fuller never implied that Anderson committed the crime or was guilty. In fact, on cross-examination she readily admitted that many other people in the Tulsa area could have deposited that DNA in the mixture...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Andrew v. Moham
...jury. Accordingly, Petitioner's fifteenth ground for relief is denied.Ground 16: Constitutionality of Sentence. In Anderson v. State, 130 P.3d 273 (Okla. Crim. App. 2006), the OCCA determined that juries should be instructed that a person convicted of certain crimes is subject to Oklahoma's......
-
Pavatt v. Trammell
...Petitioner asserts that these instructions were required under Supreme Court precedent and the OCCA's decision in Anderson v. State, 130 P.3d 273 (Okla. Crim. App. 2006). Respondent contends that Petitioner's Ground Eight is unexhausted. Respondent argues that while a state law version of P......
-
State v. Booker
...Code Ann. § 508.145(b) (West, Westlaw through end of 2021 Reg. & Called Sess.) (40 years for a life sentence); Anderson v. State , 130 P.3d 273, 282–83 (Okla. Crim. App. 2006) (85% of 45-year presumptive life sentence).16 See Alaska Stat. Ann. §§ 12.55.125(a) (West, Westlaw through Aug. 27,......
-
Marshall v. Jones, No. 05-CV-033-TCK-PJC.
...and sentenced, the OCCA held that trial courts should instruct jurors on the 85 percent rule prior to sentencing. Anderson v. State, 130 P.3d 273, 283 (Okla. Crim.App.2006). The Anderson court, however, specified that its holding was prospective and did not apply to "cases before this decis......