Com. v. Vick

• Citation: 381 Mass. 43,406 N.E.2d 1295
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. James L. VICK.
• Decision Date: 01 July 1980
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

Page 1295

406 N.E.2d 1295

381 Mass. 43

COMMONWEALTH v. James L. VICK.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Suffolk.

Argued March 5, 1980.

Decided July 1, 1980.

Sherrill P. Cline, Somerville, for defendant.

Michael J. Traft, Asst. Dist. Atty. (Matthew L. McGrath, Legal Asst. to the Dist. Atty., West Roxbury, with him), for the Commonwealth.

Before HENNESSEY, C. J., and QUIRICO, BRAUCHER, KAPLAN and WILKINS, JJ.

BRAUCHER, Justice.

Pursuant to G.L. c. 278, §§ 33A-33G, the defendant appeals from convictions of murder in the first degree of Johnnie Vick, his brother, of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon on Robert Vick, his uncle, and of unlawful possession of a handgun. There was substantially no dispute that he shot and killed his brother and shot his uncle, and the principal issue at his trial was his criminal responsibility. But inculpatory statements made by him while in custody, bearing on deliberate premeditation as well as on sanity, were admitted in evidence. We hold that the judge's failure, on his own motion, to submit to the jury the issue whether those statements were the product of a rational intellect requires reversal of the convictions.

There was evidence tending to prove the following facts. The defendant lived in a third floor apartment in a building in Dorchester owned by his uncle. The uncle lived in a first floor apartment and the defendant's brother lived in a second floor apartment. On the morning of Tuesday, December 26, 1977, the defendant entered the building, greeted his uncle and brother, and went up to his apartment. Some time later, in his brother's apartment, the defendant shot his brother three times, killing him. The uncle then got into a car in the driveway, and the defendant went out on the porch and shot his uncle through the windshield, hitting him in the hand.

The prospect of a defense of insanity was fully disclosed in the opening statement to the jury on behalf of the defendant, and the defendant's uncle testified at length to irrational behavior of the defendant during several months preceding the shooting. Thereafter the prosecutor called the defendant's parole officer as a witness, and the parole officer testified to the following. The day after the shooting the defendant called the witness, and the witness and three others went to an apartment where the defendant was staying and took him to the police station. The defendant was booked, given Miranda warnings, and asked if he wished to say anything. He said he would rather talk to his attorney, and the police waited for the attorney to appear. The witness sat next to him and "chatted" with him throughout. At some point the defendant said, "You can only take so much. It was bound to happen." The defendant also said he and his uncle did not get along too well; there was continuous harassment about his not paying his rent. There was no objection or exception to this testimony.

Subsequently, the prosecutor called as a witness another parole officer who had conducted a preliminary parole revocation hearing on January 3, 1978, about a week after the shooting. After a voir dire hearing, the judge found that the defendant "knowingly and intelligently waived his Miranda rights and decided on his own and with advice of counsel to go ahead with the hearing," and permitted the hearing officer to testify before the jury. At the hearing, according to the testimony, the defendant said that his uncle was bothering him because he hadn't paid rent, that he was having serious difficulties with his relatives and had to sleep in a motel in Saugus, and that on December 26, 1977, he got in his car at the motel, saw a gun on the seat, pushed it over and drove to the Dorchester apartment. At that point the defendant's lawyer told him not to say more, and the hearing ended. The witness testified that the defendant appeared "to be kind of spaced out" at the hearing.

There was other testimony that the defendant had not had any difficulties with his uncle or brother, that there was no rent problem, and that he had spent the night of December 25, 1977, in an apartment in Mattapan. Thus the defendant's statements could be thought to be consistent with his detachment from reality. On the other hand, those statements could be understood to provide significant evidence of motive and deliberate premeditation.

Where a conviction rests significantly on a full-fledged confession by the defendant and there is testimony making out a substantial claim of involuntariness, we have held that the judge on his own motion should order a hearing on the issue of voluntariness, rule that the confession is voluntary before allowing its consideration by the jury, and submit the issue of voluntariness to the jury for reconsideration. Commonwealth v. Harris, 371 Mass. 462, 469-474, 358 N.E.2d 982 (1976). We have in recent years questioned whether the same safeguards might not be required for inculpatory statements which fall short of a confession. See Commonwealth v. Garcia, --- Mass. ---, --- - --- ^a, 399...