Land v. State
| Citation | 678 So.2d 201 |
| Parties | Michael Jeffrey LAND v. STATE. CR 93-483. |
| Decision Date | 13 January 1995 |
| Court | Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals |
Joe Morgan, Jr., Birmingham, for appellant.
James H. Evans, Atty. Gen. and Kenneth Gibbs, Asst. Atty. Gen., for appellee.
Michael Jeffrey Land, the appellant, was convicted of two counts of capital murder involving the death of Candace Brown. A jury found him guilty of murder during a burglary in the first degree and murder during a kidnapping in the first degree. By a vote of 11 to 1, the jury recommended that he be sentenced to death. The circuit court followed the jury's recommendation and sentenced the appellant to die in the electric chair. The appellant raises 12 issues on this direct appeal of those convictions.
On the evening of May 18, 1992, Candace Brown went to her parents' home to pick up her two-year-old son. Ms. Brown's mother and brother followed her home because her residence had been burglarized five days earlier. After ascertaining that the house was secure, Ms. Brown's family members left about 9:00 p.m.
The following morning, Ms. Brown did not report to work. Her landlord came to the residence to oversee the installation of a fence. He noticed that a window near the rear entry had been broken, that the telephone wires had been cut, and that the driver's side window of Ms. Brown's automobile, which was parked in the driveway, had been shattered. He notified the police at 8:30 a.m.
When officers from the Birmingham Police Department arrived, they found that all the doors to the house were locked, and that a storm window had been removed and several window panes had been cut and stacked by a rear entry to the house. In the dust on one of the panes of glass was what appeared to be a shoe imprint with a distinctive tread design bearing the letters "USA."
The police found a two-year-old child alone and unharmed in the house. They also found a note with the name and telephone number of the appellant and the appellant's mother on a bulletin board in the house. The appellant's mother was a Birmingham police officer. Officers telephoned her and ascertained where the appellant worked.
About 2:00 p.m. on May 19, Detectives Steven B. Corvin and Larry Fowler went to the Riverchase Galleria, where the appellant was repairing the mall roof. Corvin and Fowler told the appellant that they wanted to ask him some questions relating to the disappearance of Candace Brown and the appellant agreed to accompany the detectives to the police station. The appellant was taken to an interrogation room and informed of his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). He signed a waiver of rights form and agreed to have his statement tape-recorded.
In a statement beginning at 2:42 p.m., the appellant stated that he knew Candace Brown but that he had not seen her in about a week, had no idea where she was, and had no knowledge about a burglary of her residence on May 18. However, he admitted that he had burglarized her house on May 13, 1992, and that during that burglary he had "cut the phone lines." 1 R. 23. When asked where he had been the night before, the appellant stated that he had visited with his girlfriend, Shelly Wade, until shortly before midnight. He said that after he left Ms. Wade he fell asleep in his car in the parking lot at Ms. Wade's apartment complex, and that he awoke and left the parking lot at 4:00 a.m. and drove to his grandfather's house. The appellant claimed that he reported to work at the Galleria before 6:00 a.m. on the morning of May 19. The appellant told police that he had had lunch that day with Marie Fortis, who he claimed was another girlfriend, and that his car was at Ms. Fortis's house in Bessemer.
During the course of the interview with the appellant, Detective Fowler noticed what appeared to be bloodstains on the appellant's tennis shoes. After the appellant completed his statement, Fowler asked to see the appellant's shoes. At that point, Fowler noticed that the tread design on the bottom of the shoes appeared to match the imprint on the window glass at Candace Brown's house. In the meantime, Birmingham Police Lt. Carl M. Quinn had telephoned Marie Fortis. Ms. Fortis denied having had lunch with the appellant and stated that his car was not, and had never been, at her house.
After conferring with Detective Fowler and Lt. Quinn, Detective Corvin informed the appellant that his statement was incompatible with the evidence found at the scene of the burglary. The detective also told the appellant that Ms. Fortis had denied having lunch with him or having his car. Corvin told the appellant that he needed to tell the truth about the disappearance of Candace Brown and the burglary of her home.
At that time, the appellant agreed to make a statement but refused to permit it to be tape-recorded. Once again the appellant was informed of and waived his Miranda rights. In his second statement, the appellant claimed that he met two men at a service station on May 19. The appellant identified these men only by the names "Tony" and "Edward." According to the appellant, Tony and Edward asked him if he knew an easy mark for a burglary and the appellant suggested Candace Brown's house. The appellant said that Tony and Edward paid him $20 to cut the window glass of Ms. Brown's residence and that all three of them entered the kitchen.
According to the appellant, Candace Brown appeared in the kitchen and either Tony or Edward slapped her and knocked her to the floor. The appellant told Detective Corvin that Ms. Brown's nose and mouth began to bleed. He said that as Ms. Brown fell down, she grabbed his hand and he may have gotten "some blood on his gloves from that." R. 1010. When Corvin informed the appellant that police evidence technicians had found no trace of blood in Ms. Brown's house, the appellant said that "one of the guys [Tony or Edward] cleaned it up with some paper towels and put [the towels] in his pocket." R. 1010. The appellant said that after Ms. Brown was knocked down he got scared and left the residence, and that he did not know what happened after that.
The appellant admitted that his car was in the parking deck at the Galleria mall. Detective Corvin said the police "needed to look in his car," and the appellant replied, "What if I have something in there I'm not supposed to have?" R. 1012. Corvin said that the police were looking for evidence concerning the disappearance of Candace Brown and asked if the appellant was referring to drugs. The appellant replied that he had "a gun ... [a] .45 automatic," and that "the only way he would sign a paper consent [for] us to search the car is [if] we wouldn't charge him for carrying a gun." R. 1012-13. Without agreeing to the appellant's condition, Detective Corvin asked the appellant where his car keys were. The appellant handed the keys to Corvin.
Detective Fowler located the appellant's car in the Galleria mall parking deck, opened the trunk, and "made an inventory of what [he] could see visually without moving or handling any objects." R. 791. Fowler observed a .45 caliber automatic pistol in the trunk. The automobile was towed to a secure lot at 4:45 p.m. on May 19. It was searched on May 21 and a number of items were seized pursuant to a search warrant issued that same date.
The appellant was formally arrested at 6:20 p.m. on May 19, 1992, after giving his second statement. The following day, hikers discovered the body of Candace Brown in a rock quarry on Ruffner Mountain. Ms. Brown had been shot in the back of the head.
The prosecution presented a strong and compelling case of the appellant's guilt. The State's expert testimony tended to show that a pair of wire cutters found during a search of the appellant's vehicle had made the cuts on two pieces of telephone wire leading into the victim's residence, R. 1770; that glass fragments found on a pair of gloves seized from the appellant's automobile were consistent with the glass in the shattered driver's side window of the victim's car and with the glass in the broken window at the rear entry of the victim's residence, R. 1699; that the sole of the appellant's right shoe had the same distinctive tread design as a shoe imprint on a pane of glass from the victim's residence, R. 1721; that the projectile recovered from the victim's head was fired from the .45 caliber pistol found during a search of the appellant's car, R. 1777; and that the DNA profile of a semen stain on the victim's blouse matched the appellant's known blood sample, with a probability that only one in 20,620,000 white males. R. 1602.
The appellant contends that his cross-examination of Birmingham Police Detective Larry Fowler was improperly curtailed when the circuit court would not allow him to question Fowler about the contents of an internal police memorandum outlining an anonymous tip that two suspects other than the appellant had been named in the Candace Brown murder investigation.
The trial court correctly ruled that the content of the memorandum was inadmissible hearsay.
Johnson v. State, 612 So.2d 1288, 1293 (Ala.Cr.App.1992) (emphasis in original).
The circuit court correctly excluded evidence concerning the content of the memorandum.
The appellant claims that 25 photographs depicting the...
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