Baird v. Davis

• Citation: 388 F.3d 1110
• Decision Date: 12 November 2004
• Docket Number: No. 03-3170.,03-3170.
• Parties: Arthur P. BAIRD, II, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Cecil DAVIS, Superintendent, Respondent-Appellee.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (7th Circuit)

388 F.3d 1110

Arthur P. BAIRD, II, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Cecil DAVIS, Superintendent, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 03-3170.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued June 16, 2004.

Decided November 12, 2004.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Larry J. McKinney, Chief Judge.

Jessie A. Cook, Terre Haute, IN, for Petitioner-Appellant.

Steve Carter, Office Attorney General, Indianapolis, IN, for Respondent-Appellee.

Before POSNER, RIPPLE, and Diane P. WOOD, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

Arthur Baird was convicted by a jury in an Indiana state court of murder and was sentenced to death by the judge on the jury's recommendation. After exhausting his state judicial remedies in Baird v. State, 604 N.E.2d 1170 (Ind.1992); id., 688 N.E.2d 911 (Ind.1997), Baird sought federal habeas corpus. The district court denied him relief, and he appeals. His only challenge is to the sentence, and specifically to what he contends was the failure of the Indiana Supreme Court, in affirming the sentence, to give proper consideration to his mental state as a mitigating factor. He does devote a portion of his brief to contending that his confession should not have been admitted into evidence. But at argument his lawyer conceded that, since there is no challenge to the conviction and no suggestion that the confession played a role in the sentence, the objection to the admission of the confession is academic. Baird also does not challenge the Indiana courts' decision to deny him postconviction relief.

When he committed the murders in 1985, Baird was a man in his late 30s with an exemplary record as a law-abiding citizen, church deacon, and Navy veteran. He lived with his wife Nadine, who was six months pregnant, on a farm that he owned jointly with his parents. At about 5 o'clock one afternoon, he strangled her. Later, in a phone conversation with Nadine's mother, Baird told her that he and Nadine wouldn't be visiting her parents that evening because she was sick. Baird spent the night watching television, writing notes, and periodically lying down next to Nadine's body and holding it. The next morning he went to his parents' house on the farm at about 7 a.m. He fed the chickens, brought the newspaper to his father, and received a haircut from his mother. When his mother had finished cutting his hair and returned to the kitchen sink to continue making pickles, Baird picked up a butcher knife and stabbed her to death. He then went to the back door, where his father was just entering the house, told his father that there had been a disturbance, and then stabbed him to death with the butcher knife.

Baird returned to his own house and wrote another series of notes, some expressing remorse (e.g., "I am sick at heart for having done such a terrible act.... The police do not have to come after me. I will turn myself in") and others containing instructions for feeding the chickens— and burying them after the food ran out if no one wanted to butcher them for his or her own use—and for completing the pickling that his mother had left unfinished when he killed her. He loaded up his parents' car with food, newspapers, paper towels, and other items. At some point his mother-in-law called to inquire how her daughter was and he told her that Nadine was still in bed but that the two of them were going to leave soon for their real estate agent's office to close a deal on a 253-acre farm that he had an option to buy. He had thought that the government was going to give him a million dollars in exchange for his ideas about how to solve the nation's economic problems. This was a complete delusion, in conformity with which he had announced, in the bulletin of his church and elsewhere, that he was going to buy the farm for $575,000. He had boxed most of his possessions in preparation for the move and had scheduled the closing in the real estate agent's office, at which he was to make a down payment on the farm with a $50,000 certified check. In fact he had many debts and no money, having been recently laid off from his modest-paying factory job. As the date of the closing drew near, Baird was observed by neighbors to have become nervous and with-drawn.

Having loaded the car he drove to a different town, where the next day the police (who had found the bodies and the notes) arrested him as he was watching a softball game. The previous evening (the evening of the day on which he had murdered his parents) he had been observed sitting in the car in the parking lot of a bar, reading a book by the dome light. The owner had been concerned about this odd behavior and called the police, who questioned Baird but didn't arrest him.

There is no indication that Baird had any financial motive in committing the murders, or that he had hostile or even strained relations with either his wife or his parents. Despite the bizarre circumstances of the murders, two psychiatrists testified that he was sane, at least when he murdered his parents. Two other psychiatrists, plus a clinical psychologist, while agreeing that Baird knew the difference between right and wrong when he committed the murders, thought that he suffered from an obsessive-compulsive disorder that had prevented him from conforming his behavior to his moral perception. Baird himself described the murders to the psychiatrists as motiveless and ascribed them to the pressure of the impending purchase of the farm; he thought the pressure had caused him to crack. He told them that he had resisted the compulsion to kill but had been unable to overcome it. The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder (and feticide) without qualification, refusing to find him either not responsible by reason of insanity or guilty but mentally ill. The correctness of this judgment is not in issue.

During the penalty phase of the case, the jury recommended that Baird be sentenced to death for the murder of his parents but not for the murder of his wife (and fetus). As required by Indiana law, the trial judge made an independent determination of whether to impose the death sentence, but came to the same conclusion as the jury. (Indiana's death-penalty statute has since been amended, in light of Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584, 122 S.Ct. 2428, 153 L.Ed.2d 556 (2002), to make the jury's decision definitive. Ind.Code § 35-50-2-9(e) (1998), amended by 2002 Ind. Acts 117, § 2; Ritchie v. State, 809 N.E.2d 258, 263-64 and n. 1 (Ind.2004). But this change has no bearing on the present case, given the concordance of judge and jury.) The judge didn't think Baird's mental condition should be given any weight in mitigation of the heinousness of the murder of his parents. The Indiana Supreme Court disagreed and conducted its own, independent analysis of the mitigating and aggravating circumstances and concluded that the death sentence was proper. The court did not doubt that Baird had known the difference between right and wrong and had known when he committed the murders that he was doing wrong, but the court acknowledged that he had been acting under the influence of a serious mental disorder (604 N.E.2d at 1182):

The [sentencing] judge also declared in his findings that the several mitigating circumstances he found to exist were outweighed by the single aggravating circumstance. The court considered all categories of mitigating factors, finding that appellant had no history of prior criminal conduct, was of a law abiding nature, was an active participant in his church, held employment and provided for his family as best he could, served his country in military service and was honorably discharged, and was generally held to be a person of good character in his community. With respect to the murder of Nadine Baird, the court also found that appellant may have been under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance at the time of the murder, and that this same mental condition may have substantially impaired appellant's capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.

The court specifically found that there were no mitigating circumstances springing from appellant's mental condition at the time of the murder of his parents. After review of the record including the psychiatric testimony, however, we are inclined to find that appellant's mental condition at the time of the murders of his parents is entitled to some mitigating value. The psychiatric evidence supports a determination that appellant has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The testimony was uncontradicted that appellant sincerely believed that the federal government was going to give him one million dollars for his ideas on how to solve the country's economic problems, and that he and Nadine would use the money to purchase and equip a 253 acre farm. There was no basis in experience for this belief. At this time appellant had no income, was in debt, and Nadine was pregnant. Appellant was so obsessed with the idea of buying this farm that he set a closing date at which time he was to tender a $50,000 certified check, and as he finally realized that his grandiose plans would be exposed as a mere fantasy to the persons whose derision would be most destructive to him he was compelled to protect himself from them. We find that appellant was under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance when the murders were committed, but find this mitigating factor to be in the low range. We also find that the mitigating circumstances of appellant's regular employment, church participation, military service, law abiding nature, and good character in the community each to be in the low range. Appellant's lack of prior criminal history is a mitigating factor in the medium range. Upon review, we find that these mitigating circumstances as we have determined and evaluated them are outweighed by the sole aggravating circumstance, namely, the murders of Kathryn and Arthur Paul Baird, I,...