Butler v. State

• Decision Date: 16 March 1995
• Docket Number: No. 10S00-9307-CR-830,10S00-9307-CR-830
• Citation: 647 N.E.2d 631
• Parties: Vincent H. BUTLER, Sr., Appellant, v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee.
• Court: Indiana Supreme Court

Page 631

647 N.E.2d 631

Vincent H. BUTLER, Sr., Appellant, v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee.

No. 10S00-9307-CR-830.

Supreme Court of Indiana.

March 16, 1995.

Vicki L. Carmichael, Chief Public Defender, Jeffersonville, for appellant.

Pamela Carter, Atty. Gen., Suzann Weber Lupton, Deputy Atty. Gen., Office of the Atty. Gen., Indianapolis, for appellee.

ON DIRECT APPEAL

DeBRULER, Justice.

Appellant was found guilty in the Clark County Circuit Court of Voluntary Manslaughter ¹ and Murder ² in a jury trial. The trial court sentenced appellant to thirty years on the Voluntary Manslaughter conviction and sixty years on the Murder conviction. The sentences are to be served consecutively for a total of ninety years. This is a direct appeal. Ind. Appellate Rule 4(A)(7).

A jury found appellant guilty of murder for killing Pam Agee and guilty of voluntary manslaughter for killing Leta Dains. Appellant claims that his convictions should be reversed and a new trial granted because the trial court erred in:

(1) failing to sustain defense counsel's objections to the introduction of photographs of the slain victims and a videotape of the crime scene;

(2) allowing a testifying detective to characterize Dains' wounds as "defensive wounds"; and

(3) accepting the jury's verdicts of Murder for killing Agee and Voluntary Manslaughter for killing Dains.

Facts

Appellant and Leta Dains had been involved for about eight years. In the course of breaking up with Dains, appellant suspected that Dains was seeing one Pamela Agee. On the evening of November 7, 1992, Dains and Agee were at a bar in Louisville together. Appellant was alone at the same bar and spoke with Dains. In the early morning hours of November 8, 1992, he arrived at Dains' house. He noticed Pamela Agee's car parked in front of the house. Appellant looked inside the car, spied a letter addressed to Dains, and entered the car. There he discovered other romantic notes addressed to Dains, at least one of which was signed by Agee. Carrying a box containing two pastry knives, he then entered Dains' home. After hearing noises from Dains' bedroom, he entered it, turned the light on, and found Agee lying with Dains. Agee sat up in bed and began to argue with appellant. He stabbed both of them with one of his knives. Meanwhile, Dains' daughter overheard the struggle and vainly tried to open the bedroom door. When the door finally opened, Agee slumped into the hallway, bleeding from her wounds. The daughter ran to her room where, in a short while, appellant appeared and told her that he would not hurt her and that she should go to her mother who was lying in the yard across the street.

Allen Fowler, Dains' neighbor, found Dains collapsed and bleeding at his doorstep. As Mr. Fowler attempted to resuscitate her, appellant stood only a few feet away. Appellant then picked up the knife and walked to his car. By the time the police arrived, Dains had died of her wounds. Agee died on the way to the hospital. The autopsy reports showed that Agee had been stabbed fifteen times and Dains had been stabbed eleven times.

Appellant was arrested on the day of the deaths, and at the time said to police: "Wouldn't you do what I did if you found your girlfriend ... with another woman in bed?" At his home, the police found a number of blood soaked garments and a large kitchen knife.

Admissibility of Photographs and Videotape

Appellant claims that the trial court's admission of photographs of the cadavers of Dains and Agee and a videotape of the crime scene where the two were found was error. During the case in chief, the court admitted four photographs of the body of Dains as found in the Fowler yard. The court also admitted seven photographs of the body of Dains lying face up and face down on a stainless steel table at the morgue before autopsy. The photos showed separate stab wounds to the upper torso in the front and the back as well as wounds to the arm and hand and one in the pubic area. The court admitted four photographs of the body of Agee lying face up and face down on a stainless steel table at the morgue before autopsy. The photos showed separate stab wounds to the upper torso in the front and back. The trial court also admitted a videotape of the crime scene, which was played for the jury. The trial court admitted the photographs and the videotape over defense counsel's objections. On appeal, appellant argues that because the cause of death of neither victim was at issue, the only other possible purpose in introducing the photographs was to inflame the emotions of the jurors; thus, the photographs should not have been admitted. Restated in terms of the Indiana Rules of Evidence which became effective after the trial of this case, the arguments are that (1) the exhibits were irrelevant, hence inadmissible under Ind. Evidence Rules 401 and 402, and (2) the exhibits' relevance was substantially outweighed by the danger of prejudice, hence inadmissible under Ind. Evidence Rule 403.

This trial proceeded upon a plea of not guilty to the several charges. At trial, defense counsel made an offer to stipulate that appellant had killed the two victims with a knife and said in opening statement that the two women had died as a result of appellant's using a knife on them. At trial, there is no rule limiting the facts in issue when one party unilaterally concedes or offers to stipulate that a fact be taken as proved. Stipulations by the both parties may have that effect when approved by the court conducting the trial. Absent such stipulations, evidence of facts in issue by reason of the charge and the plea of not guilty remains admissible. Hawkins v. State (1941), 219 Ind. 116, 37 N.E.2d 79; Brown v. State (1983), Ind., 448 N.E.2d 10; Perigo v. State (1989), Ind., 541 N.E.2d 936. Therefore, defense counsel's concessions in his opening statement and in his objections to these exhibits do not support appellant's claim of error.

The exhibits themselves have considerable relevance and probative value. Evidence is relevant if it has a tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of guilt more probable or less probable. Evid.R. 401. In a homicide case, the identity of the alleged victim and the assailant, the injury to the alleged victim and its source, the death of the alleged victim and its cause, and the physical surroundings in which the injury and death occurred, would all be facts of consequence in the determination of guilt of the accused. The photographs and videotape challenged by appellant were relevant circumstantial evidence of such facts as these.

Standing alone, however, relevance does not dictate admissibility. When relevant evidence carries with it an unwarranted prejudicial effect, and its probative value is substantially outweighed by such prejudicial effect, the evidence is inadmissible, despite its relevance. Bruce v. State (1978), 268 Ind. 180, 375 N.E.2d 1042, reh'g denied, cert. denied, 439 U.S. 988, 99 S.Ct. 586, 58 L.Ed.2d 662 (1978); Evid.R. 403.

To support this claim of error, appellant cites various Indiana cases in which gruesome photographic evidence was admitted to prove the victim's cause of death. See, e.g., Wagner v. State (1985), Ind., 474 N.E.2d 476; Kiefer v. State (1958), 239 Ind. 103, 153 N.E.2d 899, reh'g denied. The Kiefer case is particularly central to appellant's claim. In Kiefer, the State offered several autopsy photographs into evidence. Among the photographs offered were two taken after the doctor began the autopsy. On appeal they were deemed so "gruesome and shocking" as to be inadmissible. One picture depicted "the hands of a doctor and nurse with instruments, inside the deceased's chest." Kiefer, 239 Ind. at 111, 153 N.E.2d at 902. The other depicted the deceased's "nude body, lying face up on a slab and showing all of the knife wounds, plus additional incisions made in the body by the doctor in performing the autopsy." Kiefer, 239 Ind. at 111-12, 153 N.E.2d at 902. The court held that these photographs were inadmissible because the photographs

were not in any way necessary to establish the corpus delicti. They did not show the position of the parties to the crime nor correctly show the wounds of the victim or the cause of her death. They did not "shed light on any issue" or enlighten the jury on any fact in issue, but served only to arouse passion and prejudice.

Id. at 117, 153 N.E.2d. at 905. Thus, as the court in Loy v. State (1982), Ind., 436 N.E.2d 1125, would later note, whether a post-autopsy photograph will be admitted is contingent upon its

potential for displaying more than the state of the victim's body at the time it was discovered. Such a display may impute the handiwork of the physician to the accused assailant and thereby render the defendant responsible in the minds of the jurors for the cuts, incisions, and indignity of an autopsy.

Loy, 436 N.E.2d at 1128. Unlike the photographs found inadmissible in Kiefer, however, the photographs in the present case did correctly show the victims' wounds, did establish the corpus delicti, and probably did aid the jury in determining appellant's state of mind when he killed each of the two victims. Most important, the photographs in the present case did not show the bodies altered in any way by the doctor who performed the autopsy. ³ The photographs admitted into evidence in the present case were taken at the crime scene or before the autopsy itself was performed. The videotape showed the crime scene not long after the police first found Dains and Agee and there is no claim that it did not provide the jury with an accurate image of that place at that...