King v. People, 88SC405

• Citation: 785 P.2d 596
• Decision Date: 16 January 1990
• Docket Number: No. 88SC405,88SC405
• Parties: Raymond KING, Petitioner, v. The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Respondent.
• Court: Supreme Court of Colorado

Page 596

785 P.2d 596

Raymond KING, Petitioner, v. The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Respondent.

No. 88SC405.

Supreme Court of Colorado,

En Banc.

Jan. 16, 1990.

David F. Vela, Colorado State Public Defender and Douglas D. Barnes, Deputy State Public Defender, Denver, for petitioner.

Robert M. Brown and Linda A. McMahan, Chief Deputy Dist. Attys., Colorado Springs, for respondent.

Chief Justice QUINN delivered the Opinion of the Court.

We granted certiorari to review the decision of the court of appeals in People v. King, 765 P.2d 608 (Colo.App.1988). In affirming the conviction of the defendant, Raymond King, on two counts of murder in the first degree after deliberation, the court of appeals held that the defendant's statements concerning his actions and thoughts during and shortly after the killings, made to a defense-retained psychiatrist during pretrial psychiatric examinations, were not admissible under Colorado Rule of Evidence 803(4) because "[t]he truthfulness and candor rationale for the hearsay exception is absent" when such statements are made to a nontreating psychiatrist for the purpose of enabling the psychiatrist to testify at trial on the defendant's state of mind at the time of the offenses. Id. at 609. Although we reject the analysis utilized by the court of appeals, we nonetheless affirm the judgment. In our view, the defendant's statements to the psychiatrist qualified for admission under CRE 803(4), but the exclusion of such testimony was harmless error under the circumstances of this case.

I.

The defendant was charged by indictment in the District Court of El Paso County with two counts of first degree murder after deliberation. ¹ The crimes were committed on March 24, 1985, and the victims of the offenses were the defendant's wife, Mona Rhea King, and the wife's sister, Carla Michelle Cannon.

The basic facts underlying the issue before us are not in dispute. The defendant and his wife Mona had been married for six years and lived with their five-year-old daughter, Tara, in Colorado Springs. In late 1984 or early 1985, Mona's sister, Carla Michelle Cannon, moved into the home. Shortly thereafter marital problems developed between the defendant and his wife, and in March 1985 the defendant moved to Pueblo to live with his younger brother Robert. The house in which Robert lived belonged to Herbert Ritchey, a friend of the King family. Ritchey had a collection of guns and ammunition in the house.

Because the defendant was upset over his marital problems, he took off from work for a week in early March and went to Kansas to visit his wife's parents. The defendant's father and the defendant's daughter accompanied him on the trip. The defendant appeared extremely distressed during the visit and made known the fact that he did not want a divorce. After returning to Colorado, while talking with his daughter during weekend visitation, the defendant learned that his wife had spent the weekend with another man. The defendant took off from work another week to consult an attorney about obtaining a divorce and custody of his daughter.

During the weekend of March 23-24, 1985, the defendant again had custody of his daughter and was to return his daughter to his wife on Sunday. On Sunday morning, however, the defendant dropped off his daughter at his parents' home in Pueblo. The defendant then took two .22 caliber revolvers and some ammunition from Ritchey's house and drove his brother's pickup truck to Colorado Springs in order to talk with Mona. One of Mona's neighbors observed the defendant talking to Mona in the morning outside Mona's house and also saw the defendant drive away shortly thereafter in a pickup truck. Another neighbor noticed the pickup truck earlier driven by the defendant in the driveway of Mona's house at about 4:00 p.m and also saw Mona return home in her car a few minutes later. Shortly thereafter this same neighbor saw that the pickup truck had left the scene.

The next day, March 25, the defendant's father became concerned because the defendant had not picked up his daughter to return her to Mona. The father telephoned Mona but received no answer and drove to Colorado Springs. Finding Mona's house locked, the father looked through a window and saw a body on the kitchen floor and immediately telephoned the police.

The police found the bodies of the defendant's wife and his sister-in-law inside the home. Mona's body was near the front door. She had been shot seven times with two different weapons. Carla's body was inside the door leading from the kitchen to the outside patio. She had been shot five times.

The next day, March 26, the defendant was arrested while driving a pickup truck in a southerly direction on Interstate Highway 25. The arresting officers recovered two fully loaded revolvers and several .22 caliber cartridges from the pickup truck and several other .22 caliber cartridges from the defendant's pocket. The defendant at the time of the arrest was wearing bloodstained clothes. The truck driven by the defendant was later identified as the same truck observed outside his wife's house on Sunday morning. A firearms expert testified that the shell casings at the scene of the crimes as well as the bullets recovered from the bodies of the defendant's wife and sister-in-law were fired from the revolvers taken from Ritchey's house in Pueblo.

At trial, defense counsel called a defense-retained psychiatrist, Doctor William Ingram, who had examined the defendant on several occasions while the defendant was in the Colorado State Hospital and in the county jail awaiting trial. Defense counsel elicited from Doctor Ingram, without objection by the prosecution, the methodology used by psychiatrists in evaluating an accused's mental state. Doctor Ingram testified that the history given to him by an accused plays a significant part in psychiatric diagnosis. The doctor testified that he obtained information from the defendant about his family and educational background, his marital status, his social and medical history, and the events surrounding the crimes in question. The doctor also questioned members of the defendant's family, studied the defendant's medical records at the state hospital, where the defendant had undergone a competency examination in connection with the pending charges, and then questioned the defendant about the crimes and evaluated the defendant's reactions to those questions. Defense counsel then sought to elicit from Doctor Ingram that part of the psychiatric examination in which the defendant described to the doctor his actions and thoughts during and shortly after the killings. The prosecution objected to this testimony as hearsay, and the trial court sustained the objection. The trial court, however, ruled that defense counsel would be permitted to make an offer of proof later in the trial.

Defense counsel then resumed the examination of Doctor Ingram before the jury. Doctor Ingram gave his opinion, again without objection by the prosecution, that the defendant was suffering from severe depression and "emotional overload" at the time of the killings as a result of his deteriorating marriage and his concern over the custody of his daughter; that the defendant had intended to kill himself in the event he was not successful in getting his wife to talk to him "in this last try" but suddenly redirected his suicidal impulse to homicidal actions against his wife and sister-in-law; and that it was very unlikely, although not impossible, that the defendant planned to kill his wife and sister-in-law on this occasion. ²

At the conclusion of Doctor Ingram's direct examination, defense counsel made an offer of proof outside the presence of the jury with respect to the defendant's statements to Doctor Ingram concerning his actions and thoughts during and shortly after the killings. Defense counsel stated that Doctor Ingram would testify that the defendant made the following statements to him during the psychiatric examinations: that the defendant had no intention to shoot his wife or anyone else, but obtained the pistols for the purpose of threatening to shoot himself in order to get his wife's attention; that as the defendant was sitting on the couch, waiting for his wife to return, he told his sister-in-law that he intended to shoot himself and pulled the gun out of a bag and placed it next to himself; that as his sister-in-law moved towards him to try to get the gun, the defendant shot her; that he then reloaded, intending to shoot himself, but his wife came through the door, and that the defendant did not specifically recall shooting his wife and had no memory of his activities until he was driving in the mountains where he finally fell asleep in the pickup truck. Defense counsel argued that such statements were admissible under CRE 803(4) as statements made for the purpose of medical diagnosis and also were admissible under CRE 703 as facts or data on which Doctor Ingram based his expert opinion about the defendant's mental state at the time of the killings.

The trial court rejected defense counsel's offer of proof. In its ruling, the trial court failed to consider whether such evidence might be admissible under CRE 803(4) as statements made for the purpose of a psychiatric diagnosis. Instead, the trial court acknowledged that such evidence might be admissible under CRE 703 as facts or data underlying Doctor Ingram's expert opinion, but stated that the defendant's statements to the doctor were self-serving and that their admission for the limited purpose of serving as a basis for Doctor Ingram's opinion would unduly confuse the jury.

At the conclusion of the evidence, the trial court instructed the jury on the elements of first-degree murder after deliberation and the lesser included offense of second-degree murder. The jury returned guilty verdicts on both counts of first-degree murder, and the trial court imposed consecutive life sentences...