Griggs v. Com.
| Citation | 220 Va. 46,255 S.E.2d 475 |
| Decision Date | 08 June 1979 |
| Docket Number | No. 781195,781195 |
| Parties | Gary Lynn GRIGGS v. COMMONWEALTH of Virginia. Record |
| Court | Supreme Court of Virginia |
Fergus B. Norton, Roanoke (Norton & Raney, Roanoke, on brief), for appellant.
Vera S. Warthen, Asst. Atty. Gen. (Marshall Coleman, Atty. Gen., on brief), for appellee.
Before I'ANSON, C. J., and CARRICO, HARRISON, COCHRAN, HARMAN, POFF and COMPTON, JJ.
Indicted for burglary and robbery, the defendant, Gary Lynn Griggs, was tried by a jury, found guilty as charged, and sentenced to the penitentiary. He seeks reversal, contending that the trial court erred (1) in failing to suppress his confession, (2) in refusing to strike the evidence, and (3) in granting an instruction on voluntary intoxication.
The record shows that after midnight on January 30, 1977, Betty Jean McKay closed her restaurant and, accompanied by two friends, departed for her home with business receipts totaling approximately $3,000. When Ms. McKay and her companions entered her home about 4:00 a. m., they were accosted by two waiting burglars, one of whom was armed. All three victims were forced to lie on the floor; the hands and feet of all three were bound, and Ms. McKay's friends were gagged. Upon fleeing, the assailants took Ms. McKay's business receipts, several hundred dollars of other funds, and various items of personal property. The victims freed themselves from their bonds and called the police.
Investigation revealed that the burglars had entered the home by breaking "the basement door out." It was also ascertained that, while awaiting the arrival of their victims, the intruders "raided the refrigerator and ate the food."
None of the victims could furnish identification of the assailants. On March 4, 1977, however, the defendant was arrested on warrants charging him with burglary and robbery in the McKay incident. The next day, he confessed to his participation in the crimes.
In a pretrial hearing, the defendant sought unsuccessfully to have his confession suppressed on the ground that "his own peculiar suggestible nature" caused him to confess involuntarily. At this hearing, it was shown that, on the day of his arrest, the defendant was given his Miranda * warnings and was questioned by Detective McKeever of the City of Roanoke Police Department. In a two-hour session, during which the detective recited some of the details of the crimes, the defendant made no response other than to answer inquiries eliciting "personal information."
Later the same day, the defendant's father sought out and talked to Detective McKeever concerning the defendant's predicament. McKeever told the father that the police had "evidence and witnesses who could place (the defendant) at the scene of the offense." The father then visited the defendant in jail and urged him to "tell the truth" because "they had the evidence on him."
The next day, after repeating the Miranda warnings, Detective McKeever again questioned the defendant. In a session lasting two and one-half hours, the defendant recited his father's admonition to him to "tell the truth" and then confessed in a detailed statement that supplied particulars of the crimes not previously known to the police.
During the suppression hearing, the defendant called as a witness Dr. Robert Showalter, a psychiatrist and assistant director of the Forensic Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Virginia Hospital. Dr. Showalter examined the defendant in mid-September, 1977, some 71/2 months after the offenses occurred and approximately 6 months after the defendant gave his confession.
Dr. Showalter testified that the defendant told him "very little" concerning the crimes because the defendant "persisted in claiming amnesia." The doctor stated that he felt the amnesia was not "of a particular self-serving nature," but was the result of a "toxically based organic brain syndrome," caused by the defendant's prolonged and excessive use of drugs. The doctor testified further that the defendant also suffered from severe dyslexia, an "organically based reading deficit," which, from the defendant's early years, had prevented "meaningful relationships with peers" and had caused the defendant to become "a very compliant and very dependent young man." These difficulties, the doctor said, operated to cause the defendant, in a stressful situation such as police interrogation, to "return to a very childlike state," in which he was highly susceptible to suggestion.
Dr. Showalter admitted that the defendant's confession sounded "intelligible" and was "cognitively intact." The doctor opined, however, that the two-hour police interview on the day of the defendant's arrest, during which Detective McKeever "recycled" before the defendant information concerning the crimes, prompted the defendant's memory of the events and, in the coercively stressful and suggestive situation in which he found himself the next day, caused him to recite in the confession the specific details of the offenses.
As the Commonwealth concedes, the prosecution had the burden of showing that the defendant's confession was voluntary. McCoy v. Commonwealth, 206 Va. 470, 474, 144 S.E.2d 303, 307 (1965). Voluntariness is a factual question, and the prosecution's burden may be satisfied by proof by a preponderance of evidence. Voluntariness determines admissibility, and the question, therefore, is one for decision by the court and not the jury. Witt v. Commonwealth, 215 Va. 670, 674, 212 S.E.2d 293, 296-97 (1975).
Here, the Commonwealth's evidence clearly was sufficient to establish at least a prima facie case of voluntariness. Against this prima facie showing, the defendant did not offer the challenges usually made to the admissibility of confessions. No claim was asserted that the Miranda warnings were inadequate or were not understood; indeed, the record shows that, at the beginning of each of his two periods of interrogation, the defendant was fully advised of his Miranda rights, and he signed a printed form waiving those rights. Neither was any allegation made of police misconduct in obtaining the confession; to the contrary, during the suppression hearing,...
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...has the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that a defendant's statements are voluntary. Griggs v. Commonwealth, 220 Va. 46, 49, 255 S.E.2d 475, 477 (1979). Admissibility is an issue for the court and not the jury, and the trial court must determine from the evidence whethe......
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