Lane v. State
| Decision Date | 29 September 1994 |
| Docket Number | No. 23825,23825 |
| Citation | 881 P.2d 1358,110 Nev. 1156 |
| Parties | Gerald Carter LANE, Appellant, v. The STATE of Nevada, Respondent. |
| Court | Nevada Supreme Court |
Michael R. Specchio, Public Defender, Janet Cobb Schmuck, and Jane McKenna, Deputy Public Defenders, Washoe County, for appellant.
Frankie Sue Del Papa, Atty. Gen., Carson City, Dorothy Nash Holmes, Dist. Atty., and Gary H. Hatlestad, Deputy Dist. Atty., Washoe County, for respondent.
On May 22, 1992, Gerald Lane and James Millhouse left a party and headed to downtown Reno. Lane brought a gun with him. After visiting several casinos, the men separated Millhouse testified that he heard a gunshot and that when Lane rejoined Millhouse, he told Millhouse that he had just shot a man. The two men then ran away. Millhouse was running ahead of Lane when a bicyclist rode past him. Millhouse heard another gunshot. The man on the bicycle was William Boone. According to Boone, he was riding home at approximately 5:00 a.m, carrying bags of groceries on his handlebars. He saw Millhouse in the bushes and rode across the street away from Millhouse. He then saw Lane standing in a driveway. Lane ran up behind Boone and yelled out to him. Lane then shot Boone in the right hand, whereupon Boone lost control of his bicycle and his groceries spilled out onto the ground. Boone stopped and Lane began to approach, but Lane was distracted by something and quickly ran away.
for about five minutes. When Millhouse next saw Lane, Lane was talking to Frederick Spruell. According to Spruell, Lane approached him at approximately 4:00 a.m. and, after asking him if he was looking for "something," asked him how much money he had. Lane then told Spruell to "give it up." When Spruell declined to do so, Lane shot him in the stomach and fled
Millhouse testified that he saw Lane running toward him, yelling for Millhouse to join him. Millhouse claimed he said no, and went directly toward a cab and begged the cab driver to take him home. When the cab driver refused, Lane and Millhouse proceeded South on Virginia Street, stopped at a bar for a while, and eventually entered a different cab. Millhouse told the cab driver, Raymond Dunham, to drive to the Peppermill. Along the way, however, Lane told Dunham to drive to the nearby Lakeview Apartments.
When they arrived at the apartments, Millhouse prepared to pay the fare, but Lane pulled out the gun. Millhouse testified that he ran off at this point and seconds later heard gunshots. The police found the cab a short time later. Inside the cab was Dunham. He was dead. Dunham had been shot three times in the head from a position directly behind him.
According to Dorothy Moore, Lane arrived at her apartment, and told her that he had shot a cab driver in the head three times and taken money. He displayed the money to Moore and then went into the kitchen and washed the gun off in the sink. He then placed the gun in a potato chip bag and hid it underneath the bed until she told him she did not want it at her apartment.
Lane was arrested and convicted, pursuant to a jury verdict, of one count each of first degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, robbery with the use of a firearm, attempted murder and attempted robbery with the use of a firearm. He was sentenced to death. Lane appeals from his judgment of conviction and sentence based on five theories.
First, Lane argues that the capital sentencing process was administered in a racially discriminatory manner in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Second, Lane claims he was denied a fair trial because the jury was not impartial. He claims that a juror improperly influenced the jury by reading certain materials to them, causing prejudice against Lane. Third, Lane asserts that the district court erred in denying Lane's motion to suppress statements made during interrogation because the statements were involuntary. Fourth, Lane states that he was denied a fair penalty hearing because the district court admitted evidence which violated NRS 176.015 1, and which was unduly prejudicial. Fifth, Lane argues that he was denied a fair penalty hearing because the district court allowed duplicative aggravating factors in the instructions given to the jury. We consider each of Lane's contentions in turn.
Lane asserts that the imposition of the death penalty denied him equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He bases this contention on a survey he has provided to this court indicating that the Washoe County District Attorney's office has sought the death penalty in eighty percent of the cases involving a black defendant with no prior felony conviction whereas it has not sought the death penalty in eighty percent of the cases involving a white defendant with a prior felony conviction. Lane concludes from this survey that "[i]f accused of murder in Washoe County, it is better to be a white felon than a black with no prior felony convictions."
A defendant who alleges an equal protection violation has the burden of proving the existence of purposeful discrimination and a discriminatory effect. McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 292, 107 S.Ct. 1756, 1766-67, 95 L.Ed.2d 262 (1987). In McCleskey, the defendant, McCleskey, claimed that Georgia's capital punishment statute violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 481 U.S. at 291, 107 S.Ct. at 1766. McCleskey presented a statistical study to demonstrate that race infected the administration of Georgia's statute in two ways. Id. First, he claimed that persons who murdered whites were more likely to be sentenced to death than persons who murdered blacks. Id. Second, McCleskey contended that black murderers were more likely to be sentenced to death than white murderers. Id.
The United States Supreme court stated that to prevail under the Equal Protection Clause, McCleskey had to prove that the decisionmakers in his case acted with a discriminatory purpose. Id. at 292, 107 S.Ct. at 1766-67. The Court further stated that while it had accepted statistics as proof of intent to discriminate in certain limited contexts--for example, in jury venire-selection and Title VII cases--a prosecutor's decision to seek the death penalty was significantly distinguishable from these other two contexts. Id. at 293-94, 107 S.Ct. at 1767-68. The Court stated:
[T]he policy considerations behind a prosecutor's traditionally "wide discretion" suggests the impropriety of our requiring prosecutors to defend their decisions to seek death penalties "often years after they were made." Moreover, absent far stronger proof, it is unnecessary to seek such a rebuttal, because a legitimate and unchallenged explanation for the decision is apparent from the record: McCleskey committed an act for which the United States Constitution and Georgia laws permit imposition of the death penalty.
Id. at 296-97, 107 S.Ct. at 1769 (citations omitted).
As in McCleskey, in the case at bar prosecutors who have exercised their discretion in seeking the death penalty would be required to defend their actions years after these decisions were made. Additionally, as in McCleskey, the prosecutor in this case had a legitimate and unchallenged explanation for his decision: Lane committed an act for which the United States Constitution and Nevada laws permit imposition of the death penalty. In McCleskey, the Court also stated, "Because discretion is essential to the criminal justice process, we would demand exceptionally clear proof before we would infer that the discretion has been abused." Id. at 297, 107 S.Ct. at 1770. No such "exceptionally clear proof" exists in this case.
Assuming, arguendo, that Lane's statistics are accurate, we must reject his equal protection challenge because his statistics fail to prove the existence of purposeful discrimination or that the prosecutor's discretion has been abused. After careful consideration of Lane's claim, we conclude that the statistical survey of eighty-six murder cases prosecuted by the Washoe County District Attorney's office is inadequate to support a conclusion that Washoe County intentionally seeks the death penalty in a racially discriminatory manner. The survey's fatal flaw is that it fails to demonstrate that black and white First, Lane's statistics do not sufficiently narrow the factors which weigh into the prosecutor's decision to seek the death penalty. While the survey does tend to show that the death penalty has been sought more often for black non-felons than for white felons, the survey fails to take into consideration the relative strengths and weaknesses of those eighty-six cases, the individual characteristics of the offenses, whether aggravating or mitigating circumstances were present or absent, the nature of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, whether plea bargains were offered and accepted, and the individual characteristics and attitudes of each capital defendant.
persons who are similarly situated are treated differently.
Without such vital information, we cannot determine whether or to what extent race may have been implicated in the capital cases involved in the survey. We therefore have no basis for holding that there was a racially discriminatory purpose behind the Washoe County District Attorney's decision to seek the death penalty in this case.
During the jury deliberations, the trial judge received a note from several members of the jury informing the judge that one of the jury members, Tom Lacey, had informed the rest of the jury that he sells or sold marijuana and that he uses a published booklet "as his law and guidance in persuading his decisions." Directly prior to receiving this note, the trial judge had been informed by the bailiff that on the evening before, the bailiff had...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Leslie v. Warden
...113 Nev. at 1436-38, 951 P.2d at 1055-56; Paine v. State, 110 Nev. 609, 615-16, 877 P.2d 1025, 1028-29 (1994); Lane v. State, 110 Nev. 1156, 1167, 881 P.2d 1358, 1366 (1994), vacated on other grounds on rehearing, 114 Nev. 299, 956 P.2d 88 (1998); Paine v. State, 107 Nev. 998, 999-1000, 823......
-
Evans v. State
...519 U.S. 1152, 117 S.Ct. 1088, 137 L.Ed.2d 222 (1997); State v. Reeves, 258 Neb. 511, 604 N.W.2d 151, 160-61 (2000); Lane v. State, 110 Nev. 1156, 881 P.2d 1358, 1363 (1994), vacated on other grounds, 114 Nev. 299, 956 P.2d 88 (1998); People v. Hale, 173 Misc.2d 140, 661 N.Y.S.2d 457, 467 (......
-
Nika v. Gittere
...200.033(9)," and declining to revisit the issue. See Opinion, Respondents' Exh. 81, p. 15 (ECF No. 111-5, p. 16) (citing Lane v. State, 110 Nev. 1156, 881 P.2d 1358 (1994); Paine v. State, 110 Nev. 609, 877 P.2d 1025 (1994), cert. denied, 514 U.S. 1038 (1995); Bennett v. State, 106 Nev. 135......
-
Valdez v. State, 49541.
...impartial). 20. Id. at 873. 21. Id. 22. Meyer v. State, 119 Nev. 554, 561, 80 P.3d 447, 453 (2003). 23. Id. 24. Lane v. State, 110 Nev. 1156, 1164, 881 P.2d 1358, 1364 (1994), overruled on other grounds by Leslie v. Warden, 118 Nev. 773, 780-82, 59 P.3d 440, 445-46 (2002). 25. Meyer, 119 Ne......