In re Richards
| Decision Date | 03 December 2012 |
| Docket Number | No. S189275.,S189275. |
| Citation | 55 Cal.4th 948,289 P.3d 860,150 Cal.Rptr.3d 84 |
| Court | California Supreme Court |
| Parties | In re William RICHARDS on Habeas Corpus. |
Jan Stiglitz, San Diego, for Petitioner William Richards.
Cooley, Lori R. Mason, Palo Alto, Kyle C. Wong and Kathlyn A. Querubin, San Francisco, for The Innocence Network as Amicus Curiae on behalf of Petitioner William Richards.
Michael A. Ramos, District Attorney, Grover D. Merritt and Stephanie H. Zeitlin, Deputy District Attorneys, for Respondent The People.
At petitioner's 1997 trial for the murder of his wife, the evidence against him was circumstantial. One of many pieces of evidence linking petitioner to the crime was a postmortem photograph of the victim's hand, depicting an indistinct, crescent-shaped lesion. The prosecution's dental expert stated his opinion that the lesion was a human bite mark. And after comparing the bite mark to the distinctive arrangement of petitioner's lower teeth, the dental expert stated that petitioner's unusual dentition was consistent with the shape of the mark depicted in the photograph, and that he could not exclude petitioner's teeth as a possible source of the mark. According to the expert, petitioner's unusual dentition occurred in only 2 percent or less of the general population. The jury found petitioner guilty as charged. The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction.
In 2007, petitioner sought habeas corpus relief in the San Bernardino County Superior Court, claiming that new evidence established his innocence, and that his murder conviction was based on false evidence given at trial by the prosecution's dental expert. In a declaration supporting the petition, that expert stated that his trial testimony regarding the statistical frequency of petitioner's dentition was not based on scientific data. Moreover, after examining photographs depicting other lesions on the victim's body, the dental expert said he was no longer certain that the lesion on the victim's hand was a bite mark.
Supporting declarations by other dental experts agreed, based on newly available computer technology, that the prosecution's expert had testified inaccurately at trial.
The superior court issued an order to show cause. After an evidentiary hearing, the court granted habeas corpus relief; in the court's view, petitioner had presented new evidence pointing unerringly to his innocence. The Court of Appeal disagreed. We granted petitioner's request for review.
The most significant issue here is whether a conviction is based on "false evidence" ( Pen.Code, § 1473, subd. (b) ) when it depends in part on the opinion of an expert witness, and posttrial advances in technology have raised doubts about the expert's trial testimony without conclusively proving that testimony to be untrue. We conclude that in such circumstances the expert's trial testimony has not been shown to be "false evidence," but that the information garnered from the technological advances may be presented as newly discovered evidence in support of habeas corpus relief. Habeas corpus relief should be granted only if the new evidence " ‘point[s] unerringly to innocence or reduced culpability’ " ( In re Clark (1993) 5 Cal.4th 750, 766, 21 Cal.Rptr.2d 509, 855 P.2d 729), a showing that petitioner here has not made.
Petitioner and his wife, Pamela, lived in a camper parked on their property in a remote area of San Bernardino County. They used a generator, kept in a small shed, for electricity. To access their home, one had to ascend a steep sand and gravel driveway. The couple kept several dogs on the property to ward off uninvited intruders; they also had several guns, which Pamela knew how to use.
At approximately 11:55 p.m. on August 10, 1993, Eugene Price telephoned the couple's camper in response to a message Pamela had left on his answering machine around 7:00 or 7:30 that evening. Price had a sexual relationship with Pamela, who was planning to move with Price to an apartment in Ventura County. Petitioner answered the telephone call. He sounded stressed and agitated. When Price asked for Pamela, petitioner said she was dead. Price told petitioner to call 911. At 11:58 p.m., petitioner did so.
Because of the remote location of the property, San Bernardino Sheriff's Deputy Mark Nourse did not arrive until shortly after 12:30 a.m. He testified that the property was "pitch black," there were no lights, and there was no moonlight. Petitioner, who was dressed in blue jeans and a blue work shirt, gave this story: He had left work at 11:00 p.m. and arrived at the camper just before midnight. The generator was off when he arrived. The property was dark. The battery in the camper had lost its charge. He did not turn on the generator, and he had no light. He found his wife lying on the ground outside the camper. It was hard for him to see her body in the dark, but he realized she was dead when he rolled her over. He immediately called 911 and then cradled her head in his arms.
Deputy Nourse also said that although it was an overcast night and very dark, and although only half an hour had transpired between petitioner's reported arrival at his property and Nourse's arrival there, petitioner was able to take the deputy on a detailed tour of the crime scene. Petitioner knew that Pamela's pants were lying next to the generator, and that they had not come off easily, telling the deputy, "trust me on this." He knew that her underwear was inside the camper. He knew that her blood was inside the camper on the pillow. He knew that there was "blood on rocks up against the hill" (referring to the rough, upward-sloping terrain to the southwest of the crime scene). He knew that a bloodstained paving stone had been thrown "over the side of the hill" (referring to the rough, downward-sloping terrain to the north of the crime scene). He theorized about what Pamela was doing when her murderer arrived, where the murderer confronted Pamela, and what she did in her defense. And he surmised that the murderer had used a cinder block to kill Pamela. He also told the deputy: "[A]ll the evidence that relates to this case I already touched and moved trying to figure out how this whole thing happened."
Deputy Nourse described petitioner's demeanor as "very calm, cool, [and] collected," but occasionally petitioner would fall to his knees crying, after which he would get back up and continue talking. To the deputy, it seemed as if petitioner was speaking "like he had rehearsed or was reading from a script." Petitioner's dogs barked, growled, and snarled at Deputy Nourse. Petitioner remarked that the dogs had failed to protect his wife from her murderer. He did not report anything missing from the premises.
Deputy Nourse checked Pamela's body. It was neither warm nor cold. Her arm was pliable. Her blood was still wet, bright red, and in a puddle; it had not coagulated or soaked into the sandy soil. She appeared to have just died.
Sheriff's investigators secured the crime scene. In the morning, they conducted a thorough investigation. Pamela was lying on her back on the ground outside the camper, covered with a sleeping bag. She was naked from the waist down, except for her socks. Her head was crushed, an eye hanging out. A bloody cinder block was lying near her head, and blood spatters were on the ground. Petitioner had scattered bloodstains on his pants and shoes. From a study of all the footprints and tire tracks that were discernible in the soft sand and gravel, it did not appear that anyone had been present except petitioner, Pamela, and the investigators.
Investigators found a note in Pamela's purse in which petitioner proposed a division of their assets and personal property. Petitioner and his wife had been having financial and marital difficulties, and both had sexual relationships outside the marriage.
DNA testing established that the bloodstains on petitioner's pants and shoes belonged to Pamela. A criminalist determined that the stains were from blood spatter, not from drips or contact, indicating that the blood hit petitioner's pants and shoes when Pamela's skull was smashed.
An autopsy determined that Pamela had been strangled. The strangling was sufficient by itself to cause her death. In addition, her skull was smashed. That injury was also sufficient to cause her death. There was no evidence of sexual assault.
The pathologist who performed the autopsy severed some of Pamela's fingertips from her body for testing. Daniel Gregonis, a criminalist, later examined the severed fingertips under a stereomicroscope and noticed blue cotton fibers wedged deep in a crack of a broken fingernail. A broken fragment apparently torn from the same fingernail was found on the ground at the crime scene, suggesting that the fingernail broke during Pamela's struggle with her assailant. The criminalist examined the blue cotton shirt petitioner wore on the night of the murder, and he concluded that the blue shirt fibers were indistinguishable from the fibers caught in the crack in Pamela's broken fingernail. The same fibers were not, however, mentioned in the report of Craig Ogino, another criminalist who testified for the prosecution at trial and who may have examined the same fingertips.
The timeclock at petitioner's work indicated that he had left there at 11:03 p.m. on the night of the murder. A few weeks after Pamela's murder, a sheriff's homicide investigator went to petitioner's place of employment. The investigator left petitioner's workplace at 11:03 p.m., walked to his car, and then drove at the speed of traffic (60–70 miles per hour). He arrived at petitioner's residence at 11:47 p.m. If on the night of the murder petitioner also arrived home at 11:47 p.m., then he had been at home for 11 minutes when he called 911.
A homicide detective interviewed petitioner on several occasions after Pamela's murder. Petitioner's statements were generally consistent with what...
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