Hopkins v. State

• Decision Date: 21 October 1991
• Docket Number: No. 02S00-8905-CR-426,02S00-8905-CR-426
• Citation: 579 N.E.2d 1297
• Parties: Frank HOPKINS, a/k/a Frank Ali Abdul-Rahman, Appellant, v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee.
• Court: Indiana Supreme Court

Page 1297

579 N.E.2d 1297

60 USLW 2332

Frank HOPKINS, a/k/a Frank Ali Abdul-Rahman, Appellant, v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee.

No. 02S00-8905-CR-426.

Supreme Court of Indiana.

Oct. 21, 1991.

As Corrected Nov. 1, 1991.

Charles F. Leonard, Deputy Public Defender, Fort Wayne, for appellant.

Linley E. Pearson, Atty. Gen., Gary Damon Secrest, Deputy Atty. Gen., Indianapolis, Stephen Sims, Pros. Atty. of Allen County, Fort Wayne, for appellee.

GIVAN, Justice.

A jury trial resulted in appellant's conviction of murder and felony murder. The trial court correctly determined that the two convictions merged and sentenced appellant upon the felony-murder count to sixty (60) years in prison and imposed a $10,000 fine.

The facts are: The victim, Sharon Lapp, was acquainted with appellant, an aerobics instructor at the Old Fort Y.M.C.A. He had visited in the Lapp home. When Tom Lapp, the victim's husband, returned home from work at approximately 5:15 p.m. on May 1, 1985, he found the garage gate and the back door to the house both unlocked, which was unusual. Receiving no response upon entering the house, he proceeded upstairs, finding the den in disarray and the contents of his wife's purse dumped on the floor. He then went into their bedroom and found her nude body in a kneeling position over their bed, her throat cut nearly to the point of decapitation. An autopsy revealed Mrs. Lapp had suffered six additional stab wounds to her back and one to her left side, all delivered with "severe force" subsequent to the throat-slashing, which had been fatal.

A couple of weeks prior to the homicide, appellant and a friend had worked a tree-trimming job a block and a half from the victim's home. Appellant was identified as having solicited a drink of water from a neighbor of the Lapps on the day before the murder. Around 1:15 on the afternoon of the crime, appellant approached a man outside the home of a neighbor of the Lapps and offered to do some yardwork; the man soon thereafter jotted down a detailed description of appellant, which was introduced at trial along with that witness's testimony. Another witness placed appellant at an intersection near the Lapp home at 4:07 p.m. Bernard Williams, appellant's acquaintance since 1979, testified appellant arrived at his home around 4 p.m. that day looking scratched, nervous and disheveled, and remarked, "Goddamn, nothing went right. I f---ed up. That bitch. I think they saw me. I got to get out of town. Do you have a gun? Can you take me out of town?" Williams declined to assist appellant.

With the aid of other friends, appellant made his way first to Goshen, Indiana, then to East Chicago, where he wrote a letter to his wife stating, inter alia, "I'm sorry the marriage had to end this way ... I'll die first before I let a white man chain me up, and I'm headed for California." Appellant left behind a sheath knife capable of inflicting the victim's stab wounds when he moved from East Chicago, ultimately to the State of Oregon. Subsequent DNA analysis found a genetic match between semen collected from the victim's genitalia and whole blood samples taken from appellant, thereby establishing him as the source of that semen.

Appellant contends the trial court erred in denying his motion to dismiss and/or suppress based on the State's alleged intentional or negligent destruction of potentially exculpatory evidence. Mrs. Lapp was a prominent civic activist who had gathered information concerning activities of local authorities. On the day following the murder, Fort Wayne Deputy Chief of Police Ronald Hathaway was sent by his superiors to the victim's home where, contrary to established department protocol, he entered the victim's study, an area theretofore unprocessed by evidence technicians, and removed potentially sensitive files. These files dealt with the victim's research into, inter alia, cocaine use within the upper echelons of the local administration. Deputy Chief Hathaway delivered them to the Chief of Police and the Public Safety Director for their inspection. The files eventually were turned over to Indiana State Police investigators, but the victim's "cocaine file," known to have been kept on her person at all times, and the one on the Chief of Police himself were never recovered. In addition, the other items of physical evidence found in the home were negligently maintained and/or left unanalyzed such that appellant maintains he was materially prejudiced by the State's failure to properly process the potentially exculpatory evidence.

Appellant argues the trial court's denial of his motions to suppress/dismiss based upon this allegedly negligent destruction of exculpatory evidence violated his Fourteenth Amendment rights to fundamental fairness and due process of law. He notes that at the hearing on his motion, the trial court found the deputy chief had collected the items "for three generalized purposes: a. Police command suspected involvement of a member of the Department; b. The items compromised the administration; and, c. Items were evidence of a crime." The court ruled the destruction of potentially exculpatory evidence by the police constituted "malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance" and had affected appellant's ability "to seize an unknown opportunity to use the lost evidence or to demonstrate prejudice for its non-production. The Defendant has met his burden of demonstrating materiality." The court then ruled in limine that items of physical evidence seized by police from the Lapp residence were inadmissible due to lack of continuity in the chain of custody and improper preservation. However, the court went on to find it would not grant the motion to dismiss the charges because a trial court should not dismiss the charges absent a showing that the lost evidence would have provided a viable defense, citing California v. Trombetta (1984), 467 U.S. 479, 104 S.Ct. 2528, 81 L.Ed.2d 413.

Appellant urges this Court to find the trial court applied an erroneous standard and otherwise to hold, despite the more recent decision in Arizona v. Youngblood (1988), 488 U.S. 51, 109 S.Ct. 333, 102 L.Ed.2d 281, that a dismissal of the charges was warranted even absent a showing of bad faith on the part of the police. In any event, however, more is required for reversal than a showing of the bad-faith loss of potentially material exculpatory evidence. As pointed out in Justice Stevens' concurring-in-result opinion in Youngblood, the potential of the evidence to exculpate the accused "must be evaluated in the context of the entire record," because the "proper standard of materiality must reflect our overriding concern with the justice of the finding of guilt," citing United States v. Agurs (1976), 427 U.S. 97, 112, 96 S.Ct. 2392, 2401-2, 49 L.Ed.2d 342, 354-5. He also notes that where the other evidence of guilt at trial is so overwhelming that the likelihood of exculpation becomes highly improbable, no due process violation results from the loss of the evidence, citing Trombetta, supra.

Here, where the DNA matching evidence identified appellant as the perpetrator, and the other circumstantial evidence outlined in the preceding paragraphs all pointed to appellant, the likelihood of his being exculpated by proper preservation of the evidence in question seems remote indeed. This situation is somewhat analogous to the one in Lee v. State (1989), Ind., 545 N.E.2d 1085, where this Court found no reversible error despite the purposeful destruction of audiotape of an interrogation of the accused due to its inclusion of unseemly remarks perceived as embarrassing to the police department. In that case, as in this one, a showing of arguably bad-faith destruction, absent some material likelihood of exculpation, did not result in a denial of due process.

We find no error in the trial court's denial of appellant's motion to dismiss.

Appellant contends the trial court erred in admitting evidence identifying him as the perpetrator by means of biologically matching his blood with semen found in the victim. Prior to trial, appellant was informed by the prosecution that tests run by Cellmark Laboratory indicated a match with the genetic coding material (deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA) derived from blood samples drawn from appellant in a comparison with DNA extracted from traces of semen found on vaginal swabbings taken from the victim. Appellant then filed a motion in limine to exclude the evidence of DNA identification.

Recognizing the issue to be one of first impression in Indiana involving the admissibility of novel scientific evidence, the trial court, observing our decision in Cornett v. State (1983), Ind., 450 N.E.2d 498, conducted a Frye hearing, so named after Frye v. United States (D.C.Cir.1923), 293 F. 1013, which decision set forth the inquiry still generally followed in assessing the reliability of novel scientific evidence, to determine whether such DNA evidence is generally accepted by the relevant scientific community. The hearing, conducted November 9 through December 20, 1988, generated nearly 2200 pages of transcript as well as several dozen videocassettes, played back at the trial in order to place that expert testimony before the jury. When the Frye hearing concluded, the trial court denied appellant's motion to exclude and at trial admitted, over appellant's objection, the State's expert evidence regarding its forensic DNA test results.

Appellant argues the State failed to lay a proper foundation under Frye, supra and Cornett, supra for the DNA evidence because it is not yet generally accepted in the relevant scientific communities, because the particular procedures used by Cellmark were not validated and did not meet applicable standards of reliability, and because in his particular instance Cellmark did not even follow their own protocol, leaving open an unacceptably high possibility of a "false positive" match. In Frye, supra, the District of Columbia Court of...