Lee v. State

• Court: Arkansas Supreme Court
• Writing for the Court: ARNOLD; NEWBERN; NEWBERN
• Citation: Lee v. State, 327 Ark. 692, 942 S.W.2d 231 (Ark. 1997)
• Decision Date: 24 March 1997
• Docket Number: No. CR,CR
• Parties: Ledell LEE, Appellant, v. STATE of Arkansas, Appellee. 96-553.

Page 231

942 S.W.2d 231

327 Ark. 692

Ledell LEE, Appellant, v. STATE of Arkansas, Appellee.

No. CR 96-553.

Supreme Court of Arkansas.

March 24, 1997.

Dale E. Adams, Little Rock, for Appellant.

Winston Bryant, Attorney General, Kent G. Holt, Assistant Attorney General, Little Rock, for Appellee.

ARNOLD, Chief Justice

Twenty-six year-old Debra Reese was found brutally murdered in her home at 212 Cherry Street in Jacksonville on February 9, 1993. She had been beaten some thirty-six times with a tire thumper, a tool resembling a baseball bat that her husband Billy, a truck driver, had given to her for protection while he was away. Bruises on Debra's face and neck indicated that she had also been strangled. The appellant, Ledell Lee, was arrested and charged with Reese's murder. Following a jury trial, he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection. He raises seven points on appeal. We find no merit to any of his arguments and affirm the conviction and sentence.

Lee does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence, so we need not recite the facts in great detail. The State's theory at trial was that Lee committed the murder for pecuniary gain, and that he had searched the victim's neighborhood until he found the perfect target for his crime.

William McCullough Jr. lived near the victim's house and had been home on the morning in question. Sometime between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., he heard a knock at his door. McCullough went to the door and was met by a man who asked to borrow some tools. McCullough gave the man a driver ratchet and a socket, which he promised to return. The man did not return the tools.

At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and "did not trust this guy." The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived.

Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and "make a B-line inside just real fast." Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair.

Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as "Skip" walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder.

Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police.

I. Selection of jury panel

For his first allegation of error, Lee asserts that the use of voter registration records to select the jury panel in his case denied him a jury comprised of a true cross-section of the community. At the end of voir dire, Lee, who is African-American, observed that only ten of the seventy-five venirepersons assembled were African-American. Lee claims that the State failed to rebut his statistical evidence of systematic exclusion of African-Americans from the jury panel in his case.

Selection of a petit jury from a representative cross-section of the community is an essential component of the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. Danzie v. State, 326 Ark. 34, 930 S.W.2d 310 (1996); Davis v. State, 325 Ark. 194, 925 S.W.2d 402 (1996). It is axiomatic that the State may not deliberately or systematically deny to members of a defendant's race the right to participate, as jurors, in the administration of justice. Davis v. State, supra; Sanders v. State, 300 Ark. 25, 776 S.W.2d 334 (1989). In order to establish a prima facie case of deliberate or systematic exclusion, a defendant must prove that: (1) The group alleged to be excluded is a "distinctive" group in the community; (2) the representation of this group in venires from which the juries are selected is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of such persons in the community; and (3) this underrepresentation is due to systematic exclusion of the group in the jury-selection process. Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 99 S.Ct. 664, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979).

In this case, the first prong of the Duren test is clearly met, as African-Americans represent a distinctive group in the community. Regarding the second prong, Lee offered statistical evidence compiled from the 1990 census that Pulaski County has a population of 349,660, of which 58,280 are African-American citizens over age eighteen. Of the 349,600, the county has 200,297 registered voters. Lee also proffered the testimony of a mathematics professor that there was a two-percent chance that the jury panel in Lee's case could have been randomly selected from the population of Pulaski County.

Lee did not meet his burden of proof by merely showing that the jury venire called in his case was not racially representative of the community. Davis v. State, supra; Mitchell v. State, 323 Ark. 116, 913 S.W.2d 264 (1996). The second prong of the Duren test requires a fair and reasonable representation of the distinctive group in every venire from which juries are selected, not just the particular venire summoned at his trial. See Danzie, 326 Ark. at 43, 930 S.W.2d 310, citing Duren, 439 U.S. at 364-66, 99 S.Ct. at 668-70. Lee has not provided us with any evidence as to the number of African-Americans on every jury venire in Pulaski County.

In order to satisfy the final prong in Duren, Lee must produce evidence that demonstrates that the alleged misrepresentation of African-Americans is due to a systematic exclusion in the jury-selection system itself. Lee acknowledges in his brief our previous holdings that, where the venire is chosen by computer, using the random-selection process maintained by Ark.Code Ann. § 16-32-103 (Repl.1994), there is no possibility of a purposeful exclusion of African-Americans. Because Lee failed to satisfy the second and third elements of the Duren test, the trial court did not err in denying his motion to prohibit the use of voter registration records to select the jury panel in his case.

II. Destruction of blood evidence

Lee's second point on appeal is that the capital murder charge should have been dismissed due to the destruction of possibly exculpatory evidence. When Lee was arrested and taken into custody on the day of the murder, among the items police seized from him was a pair of Converse tennis shoes he was wearing. Kermitt Channell, a serologist with the State Crime Lab, examined the shoes and observed what he believed to be a small spot of blood on the sole of the left shoe, and another spot on the tongue of the right shoe. Channell performed what he termed a "Takayama test" on the shoes, which confirmed the presence of blood, but consumed the entire sample, thus removing the opportunity for independent analysis by the defense. Lee presented the testimony of Robert Reis, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, who testified that, while Channell had done his job "quite thoroughly," the State Crime Lab's guidelines needed reevaluation since the advent of more sensitive methods of DNA analysis. According to Reis, other tests could have been performed on the shoes without destroying the sample.

Lee claims that his counsel should have been notified that the blood evidence on the shoes was about to be destroyed. He further asserts that the State breached its duty under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963), to preserve potentially exculpatory evidence. According to Lee, the State's failure to preserve enough of the sample on the shoes so that he could conduct his own tests deprived him of due process guaranteed by the federal and state constitutions.

We addressed a similar claim in Wenzel v. State, 306 Ark. 527, 815 S.W.2d 938 (1991). In Wenzel, a rape case, the defendant argued that his due process rights were violated when FBI technicians consumed all of the semen samples found on the victims' vaginal swabs. We emphasized that the State's duty to preserve evidence is limited to that which "might be expected to play a significant role in the suspect's defense," and that the "evidence must both possess an exculpatory value that was apparent before the evidence was destroyed, and be of such a nature that the defendant would be unable to obtain comparable evidence by other reasonably available means." Wenzel, 306 Ark. at 532-3, 815 S.W.2d 938, quoting California v. Trombetta, 467 U.S. 479, 488-9, 104 S.Ct. 2528, 2533-34, 81 L.Ed.2d 413 (1984). We...