Lukehart v. State
| Decision Date | 28 September 2000 |
| Docket Number | No. SC90507.,SC90507. |
| Citation | 776 So.2d 906 |
| Parties | Andrew LUKEHART, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee. |
| Court | Florida Supreme Court |
Nancy A. Daniels, Public Defender and Chet Kaufman, Assistant Public Defender, Second Judicial Circuit, Tallahassee, Florida, for Appellant.
Robert A. Butterworth, Attorney General and Barbara J. Yates, Assistant Attorney General, Tallahassee, Florida, for Appellee.
We have on appeal the judgment and sentence of the trial court imposing the death penalty upon Andrew Lukehart. We have jurisdiction. Art. V, § 3(b)(1), Fla. Const. We affirm the convictions of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse and the sentence of death. However, we remand to the trial court for a resentencing on the aggravated child abuse conviction and direct the trial court to complete the sentencing guidelines scoresheet.
The victim in this case, five-month-old Gabrielle Hanshaw, was killed by Lukehart, who lived in Jacksonville with Gabrielle's mother, Misty Rhue, along with Rhue's other daughter, Ashley, and Rhue's father and uncle. On February 25, 1996, Lukehart and Rhue spent Sunday afternoon running errands in Rhue's car with the two children. When the four returned to their house on Epson Lane, Rhue took two-year-old Ashley, who had been ill, to her bedroom for a nap, and Lukehart cared for Gabrielle, the baby, in another room. At one point, Lukehart entered the bedroom and took a clean diaper for the baby. At approximately 5 p.m., Rhue heard her car starting in the driveway, looked out the window, and saw Lukehart driving away in her white Oldsmobile. Rhue searched the house for the baby and did not find her. Thirty minutes later, Lukehart called from a convenience store and told Rhue to call the 911 emergency number because someone in a blue Chevrolet Blazer had kidnapped the baby from the house. After Rhue called 911, Jacksonville Sheriff's Detectives Tim Reddish and Phil Kearney went to the Epson Lane house.
Shortly thereafter, Lukehart appeared without shirt or shoes in the front yard of the residence of a Florida Highway Patrol trooper in rural Clay County. At about that same time, the car that Lukehart had been driving was discovered about a block away from the trooper's house. The car was off the road and had been abandoned with its engine running. Law enforcement officers from the Clay County Sheriff's Office and the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office interviewed Lukehart and searched in Clay County for the baby during the ensuing eighteen hours. At about noon on Monday, February 26, Lukehart told a lieutenant with the Clay County Sheriff's Office that he had dropped the baby on her head and then shook the baby and that the baby had died at Misty Rhue's residence. Lukehart said that when the baby died, he panicked, left Rhue's residence, and threw the baby in a pond near Normandy Boulevard in Jacksonville. Law enforcement officers searched that area and found the baby's body in a pond.
On March 7, 1996, Lukehart was indicted on one count of first-degree murder and one count of aggravated child abuse. The trial was held February 26 and February 27, 1997. During the trial, the State put into evidence the testimony of law enforcement officers who were involved in the search for the baby and who were with Lukehart during the evening of February 25 through the morning of February 26, 1996. The State also presented statements made by Lukehart. The State presented the testimony of the medical examiner, who testified that the baby's body revealed bruises on her head and arm that occurred close to the time of death and that prior to death the baby had received five blows to her head, two of which created fractures.
Lukehart chose to testify in his defense at trial. Before Lukehart testified, the trial court appropriately advised him that he had a right not to testify and that if he did testify, he would be subject to cross-examination. In his testimony, Lukehart said that, while he was changing the baby's diaper on the floor at Rhue's residence, the baby repeatedly pushed up on her elbows. He forcefully and repeatedly pushed her head and neck onto the floor "until the last time I did it she just stopped moving, she was just completely still." Lukehart testified to being six-feet one-inch tall and weighing 225 pounds. He stated that he used "quite a bit" of force to push the baby down. He testified that he tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and when the baby did not revive, he panicked and grabbed the baby and drove to a rural area. He said that when he stopped and was in the process of getting out of the car, he accidentally hit the baby's head on the car door. Lukehart testified that he threw the baby into the pond where her body was found. He admitted that he had not told law enforcement officers the truth in his earlier accounts of the incident and that, although he did not intend to kill the baby, he was responsible for her death. He said that he eventually told Lieutenant Jimm Redmond of the Clay County Sheriff's Office that he was responsible for the baby's death and that he had revealed the location of the baby's body because "I felt bad, I felt guilty."
The jury convicted Lukehart of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse as charged. At the penalty phase, the State established that Lukehart had pleaded guilty to felony child abuse for injuring his former girlfriend's baby and that Lukehart was on probation for that prior felony conviction. By a vote of nine to three, the jury recommended death. In its sentencing order, the trial court found that the following three statutory aggravators had been established: (1) that the murder was committed during commission of the felony of aggravated child abuse; (2) that the victim was under twelve years of age; and (3) that appellant had a prior violent felony conviction and was on felony probation (two factors merged). The trial court also found and gave some weight to the statutory mitigators of Lukehart's age (twenty-two) and his substantially impaired capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law. The court found and gave some weight to the following nonstatutory mitigators: Lukehart's alcoholic and abusive father; Lukehart's drug and alcohol abuse; Lukehart's being sexually abused and suicidal as a child; and Lukehart's being employed. Finding that aggravators outweighed mitigators, the court sentenced Lukehart to death for the first-degree murder conviction and to fifteen years' imprisonment for the aggravated child abuse conviction.
In this Court, Lukehart appeals his convictions and death sentence and raises twelve claims.1
Lukehart first contends that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress his statements to law enforcement officers. Specifically, he argues that his statements were not voluntary because the officers (1) did not initially advise him of his Miranda2 rights when he was handcuffed and waiting for detectives to arrive; (2) denied him counsel and interrogated him after his unequivocal request for a lawyer; and (3) coerced his statement regarding his role in the victim's death by advising him repeatedly of his Miranda rights during the investigation, by showing him a picture of the victim, and by referring to the need to find the baby's body in order to have a Christian burial.
Lukehart argues that all of his statements to law enforcement officers were illegally obtained and thus should not have been allowed into evidence at trial. He contends that his exculpatory statements, which the State introduced through law enforcement officers during its case-in-chief and which Lukehart recanted at trial, were harmful because they portrayed Lukehart as a liar and were irrelevant to the manner in which the baby died. He maintains that introduction of his inculpatory statements deprived him of his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Therefore, Lukehart asks this Court to grant him a new trial.
In his pretrial suppression motion, Lukehart moved to suppress the statements made to law enforcement officers during the eighteen-hour period beginning the early evening of February 25, 1996, when he walked out of the wooded area in Clay County into the yard of the highway patrol trooper, and ending with his arrest after he led law enforcement officers to the baby's body. Following an evidentiary hearing, the trial court denied the motion. The defense renewed its objection at trial.
At the pretrial hearing on the motion to suppress, the trial court heard extensive testimony from the law enforcement officers and from Lukehart. We find it necessary to set out that evidence in detail for an accurate understanding of the flow of events during this eighteen-hour period between the death of the baby and Lukehart's statement at about noon the following day that he had caused the baby's death.
This evidence includes the testimony of Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Richard Earl Davis, Jr., who at about 7 p.m. on February 25, 1996, was watching television with his family in his home located in a sparsely populated area in rural Clay County. After hearing a helicopter flying over his house and seeing "the front yard lit up," Trooper Davis called 911 and was told "there was a white male that was in the woods, that they were looking for that possibly abducted a five month old baby." Trooper Davis went outside and almost immediately saw a white male wearing only shorts and tennis shoes "in the ditch coming up toward my house."
That person, who was later identified as Lukehart, said something that Trooper Davis believed was "I'm the one they're looking for." Trooper Davis went back into his house and obtained his gun belt and handcuffs. Trooper Davis returned outside five seconds later and saw the white male still standing...
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