Flowers v. State
| Citation | 456 P.3d 1037 |
| Decision Date | 30 January 2020 |
| Docket Number | No. 55759,No. 53159,53159 |
| Parties | Norman Keith FLOWERS, a/k/a Norman Harold Flowers, III, Appellant, v. The STATE of Nevada, Respondent. Norman Harold Flowers, III, Appellant, v. The State of Nevada, Respondent. |
| Court | Supreme Court of Nevada |
JoNell Thomas, Special Public Defender, and Randall H. Pike and Clark W. Patrick, Chief Deputy Special Public Defenders, Clark County, for Appellant.
Aaron D. Ford, Attorney General, Carson City; Steven B. Wolfson, District Attorney, Pamela C. Weckerly and Charles W. Thoman, Chief Deputy District Attorneys, and Nancy A. Becker, Deputy District Attorney, Clark County, for Respondent.
BEFORE PICKERING, C.J., PARRAGUIRRE and CADISH, JJ.
A Clark County jury convicted appellant Norman Flowers of first-degree felony murder, sexual assault, and burglary in connection with the rape and murder of 18-year-old Sheila Quarles. Flowers timely appealed his original and amended judgments of conviction and the order denying the motion for a new trial that followed. The appeals were consolidated, briefed, and argued. Before a decision was reached, we granted Flowers’ motion to voluntarily dismiss these consolidated appeals due to a global plea agreement resolving the charges in this and a separate criminal case. Years later, Flowers succeeded in setting aside the plea agreement. This court subsequently granted Flowers’ motion to reinstate these consolidated appeals. After supplemental briefing and reargument, we affirm.
At the time of her death, Sheila Quarles shared an apartment with her mother, Debra, in Las Vegas. On March 24, 2005, Sheila stayed home from her job at Starbucks while her mother went to work. Sheila spoke to her mother by phone several times that day, the last time at 1 p.m. Around 3 p.m., Debra returned to the apartment and found Sheila, face-up and nonresponsive, in a bathtub full of hot water. By the time paramedics arrived, Sheila had died.
There were no signs of a forced entry into the apartment. Some items in the bathroom had been knocked over and several valuables were missing, including Sheila’s cell phone, her bankcard, and jewelry. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) detectives noted that Sheila had a bruised abdomen and scraped knee but saw no major external injuries.
The Clark County Coroner’s Office performed an autopsy. The autopsy report was not admitted into evidence, but some of the photographs documenting it were. The autopsy revealed the following: Sheila had hemorrhages under her scalp, consistent with blunt force trauma to the head
; she had suffered vaginal lacerations and tears, consistent with sexual assault; she exhibited petechiae, consistent with asphyxiation ; she had hemorrhages on her neck, consistent with manual strangulation; and her lungs contained froth, consistent with drowning. The lack of swelling in the vaginal lacerations and tears indicated that the sexual assault occurred less than an hour before Sheila died.
LVMPD collected a vaginal swab from Sheila’s body at the autopsy and her thong underwear from the crime scene. The crime lab found sperm in both. A forensic scientist in LVMPD’s biology/DNA unit. Kristina Paulette, generated DNA profiles from this evidence. The profiles revealed a mixture of Sheila’s DNA and that of two unknown males. LVMPD used the DNA profiles to eliminate several possible suspects. The profiles did not initially provide any new leads, though, and the case went cold.
Less than two months after Sheila’s death, on May 3, 2005, a second woman, Merilee Coote, was found dead in her Las Vegas apartment, the victim of sexual assault and manual strangulation. The crime scene yielded single-source DNA profiles from the carpet underneath Coote’s body and from her vaginal and anal swabs. Flowers and Coote knew one another through a woman Flowers had dated, and a witness placed Flowers in Coote’s apartment complex at the time Coote’s body was found. As part of the Coote investigation, LVMPD obtained a buccal swab from Flowers. Flowers’ DNA profile matched the DNA profile generated from the Coote crime scene, and Flowers was arrested for the Coote sexual assault and murder.
Paulette entered the DNA profiles generated from Sheila’s crime scene evidence into CODIS, a DNA database. After receiving Flowers’ DNA profile—generated in connection with the investigation into the Coote murder—CODIS alerted Paulette that it had identified Flowers as a potential contributor to the Sheila Quarles DNA profiles. Paulette reworked Flowers’ buccal swab and confirmed that, unlike 99.9% of the population, Flowers could not be excluded as one of the two males who contributed to the mixed DNA profiles from Sheila’s crime scene.
This new information led detectives to focus on Flowers as a person of interest in Sheila’s sexual assault and death. Their investigation revealed that Flowers had dated Sheila's mother, Debra, for several months in late 2004 and met Sheila then. Two weeks before Sheila died, Flowers approached Debra and Sheila, who were sitting outside their apartment. Asked why he was there, Flowers replied that he’d been hired to do maintenance work at the apartment complex. The three spoke for approximately 20 minutes. At trial, the property manager testified that Flowers never worked at the complex. After Sheila’s death but before Flowers’ arrest in the Coote case, Flowers expressed his sympathy to Debra for Sheila’s death, drove her to two grief counseling
sessions, and asked Debra for updates on the investigation into Sheila’s case.
Eventually, LVMPD identified George Brass as the second contributor to the DNA mix from Sheila’s crime scene. Sheila had a casual sexual relationship with Brass, who lived with his mother at the same apartment complex as Sheila and her mother. When interviewed, Brass stated that he had consensual sex with Sheila the morning of the day she died, then drove across town to the Wal-Mart where he worked. Wal-Mart records showed that Brass clocked in at noon, left for lunch at 4 p.m., returned to work at 5 p.m., and left for the day at 7:45 p.m.
In the Sheila Quarles matter, the State charged Flowers with one count each of first-degree murder, sexual assault, burglary, and robbery, and filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty. The State brought similar charges against Flowers in connection with Merilee Coote’s death and sexual assault and the death and sexual assault of a third woman, Rena Gonzalez. The district court denied the State’s motion to consolidate Sheila’s case with the Coote/Gonzalez case. After an evidentiary hearing, however, the district court granted in part and denied in part the State’s motion to introduce evidence relating to Coote’s death and sexual assault to establish that Flowers, not Brass or someone else, killed Sheila and to refute Flowers’ claim that he had consensual sex with Sheila.
Flowers proceeded to trial in the Sheila Quarles case in October 2008. The jury found Flowers guilty of first-degree murder on a felony-murder theory, sexual assault, and burglary. It found Flowers not guilty of robbery and declined to impose the death penalty, instead returning a verdict of life without the possibility of parole. The district court denied Flowers’ motions for a new trial.
Flowers raises eight issues respecting the trial in his case. He urges reversal because the district court (A) erred in admitting evidence related to the Coote sexual assault and murder; (B) accepted testimonial hearsay, violating the Confrontation Clause; (C) admitted the uncounseled statement Flowers gave police about Sheila after being charged and appointed counsel in the Coote case, violating his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights; (D) unconstitutionally allowed the admission of gruesome autopsy photographs; (E) denied Flowers’ constitutional rights by excluding as hearsay an exculpatory statement Sheila made to a third party about having a relationship with "Keith" (the name Flowers went by); and (F) tolerated prosecutorial misconduct; and because the conviction is (G) not supported by sufficient evidence and (H) tainted by cumulative error.
Flowers argues that the district court erred and violated his constitutional rights when it allowed the State to present evidence of the Coote sexual assault and murder to prove that Flowers, not Brass or someone else, sexually assaulted and killed Sheila. He sees the crimes as too dissimilar to give the Coote evidence enough nonpropensity probative value to outweigh its undeniably prejudicial effect.
NRS 48.045(2) prohibits the use of "[e]vidence of other crimes, wrongs or acts ... to prove the character of a person in order to show that the person acted in conformity therewith." Evidence of a defendant’s other bad acts "may, however, be admissible for other purposes, such as proof of motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, or absence of mistake or accident." Id. ; see Bigpond v. State , 128 Nev. 108, 116, 270 P.3d 1244, 1249 (2012) (). "A presumption of inadmissibility attaches to [other] bad act evidence." Ledbetter v. State, 122 Nev. 252, 259, 129 P.3d 671, 677 (2006) (quotation omitted). Before admitting other-bad-act evidence, the district court must determine, outside the presence of the jury, that (1) the other bad act is relevant to the crime charged, (2) the State can prove the other bad act by clear and convincing evidence, and (3) the nonpropensity probative value of the other-bad-act evidence "is not substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice.’’ Tinch v. State, 113 Nev. 1170, 1176, 946 P.2d 1061, 1064-65 (1997), modified by Bigpond, 128 Nev. 108, 270 P.3d 1244 ; see Petrocelli v. State, 101 Nev. 46, 692 P.2d 503 (1985), superseded in part by statute as stated in Thomas v. State, 120 Nev....
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