Magallanes v. State, 05-64.

• Court: Wyoming Supreme Court
• Writing for the Court: Golden
• Citation: Magallanes v. State, 142 P.3d 1147, 2006 WY 119 (Wyo. 2006)
• Decision Date: 26 September 2006
• Docket Number: No. 05-64.,05-64.
• Parties: Eddie Teniente MAGALLANES, Appellant (Defendant), v. The STATE of Wyoming, Appellee (Plaintiff).

142 P.3d 1147

2006 WY 119

Eddie Teniente MAGALLANES, Appellant (Defendant), v. The STATE of Wyoming, Appellee (Plaintiff).

No. 05-64.

Supreme Court of Wyoming.

September 26, 2006.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Representing Appellant: Tonya A. Morse, Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Representing Appellee: Patrick J. Crank, Wyoming Attorney General; Paul S. Rehurek, Deputy Attorney General; D. Michael Pauling, Senior Assistant Attorney General. Argument by Mr. Pauling.

Before VOIGT, C.J., and GOLDEN, HILL,^* KITE, BURKE, JJ.

GOLDEN, Justice.

[¶ 1] Eddie Magallanes was convicted following a jury trial of first-degree premeditated murder in the death of Joseph Lopez and conspiracy to commit that murder. In this appeal, Magallanes challenges the adequacy of the evidence supporting those convictions and asserts claims of ineffective assistance of trial counsel and prosecutorial misconduct. Finding no merit in the issues raised by Magallanes, we affirm.

ISSUES

[¶ 2] Magallanes submits the following issues for our review:

I. Whether there was sufficient evidence for the jury to find [Magallanes] guilty of murder in the first degree where the evidence failed to show a conclusive cause of death, where no witness testified that they saw [Magallanes] actually shoot the victim, and where there is no physical evidence linking the victim to the crime?

II. Whether ineffective assistance of counsel, specifically in failing to follow up on DNA and scientific testing, denied [Magallanes] his constitutional right to a fair trial?

III. Whether the prosecutor committed misconduct by misstating the law, vouching for the credibility of a witness, and misstating facts in closing argument?

FACTS

[¶ 3] During the evening hours of January 17, 2004, Joseph Lopez and his younger brother, Anthony, went to the home of Emilio Teniente in Greeley, Colorado. There, they met Bobby Rojas, Magallanes and his brother, Jesse Magallanes (hereinafter "Jesse"). The six young men sat around drinking, conversing, and listening to music. After a period of time, Teniente, Rojas, Lopez, Magallanes and Jesse decided to drive to Cheyenne to party.

[¶ 4] Jesse drove that evening, and Teniente occupied the front passenger seat. In the rear, Magallanes sat behind Jesse, Lopez sat in the middle, and Rojas sat behind Teniente. At some point during the drive to Cheyenne, Lopez made an inflammatory comment to Magallanes about his mother. Magallanes became angry and began punching Lopez. Thereafter, punches were thrown by all three occupants of the back seat. When the men reached Cheyenne, Jesse stopped the car, and he and Magallanes pulled Lopez out of the vehicle. Apparently believing they intended to leave Lopez there, Teniente told them to put Lopez back in the car because "he knows who I am."

[¶ 5] After placing Lopez back in the car, the men went to the house where Teniente's sister Sophia lived. Sophia immediately noticed blood on Lopez's face and admonished the men for fighting. She then helped Lopez clean up and gave him a clean shirt to wear while she washed the one he had been wearing. After that, things calmed down between the men and they sat around drinking and talking with Sophia and one of her female friends, Vanessa Hernandez. Approximately two hours later, Teniente suggested they return to Greeley, and the five men left Sophia's house.¹

[¶ 6] Shortly thereafter, Lopez began to scold the others for hitting him earlier. He told them they should have killed him and that they needed to take care of him before they returned to Greeley because his family would get revenge for the beating he had taken. At that point, Magallanes struck Lopez, and Teniente pulled out his .25 caliber semi-automatic pistol, pointed it at Lopez's head and told him to shut up. Teniente then directed Jesse to drive to Campstool Road. When they arrived at the College Drive overpass on Campstool Road, Magallanes and Teniente had Jesse stop the vehicle under the bridge.

[¶ 7] Magallanes removed Lopez from the car and started beating and kicking him, eventually driving him to the ground. By this time, Jesse and Teniente were outside the vehicle. While Jesse attempted to stop the fracas, Teniente passed his pistol to Magallanes and told him to "shoot that guy." Magallanes then shot Lopez twice in the head, once above the left ear and once toward the back of the head. The four men left Lopez on the road and returned to Sophia's house, where Magallanes and his brother dropped off Teniente and Rojas before heading home. Approximately forty-five minutes later, around 2:00 a.m., Sophia and Hernandez drove Teniente and Rojas back to Greeley.

[¶ 8] Shortly before 2:00 a.m., Michael Hampton, a security officer for Frontier Refinery, left the refinery and drove east on Campstool Road. As he approached the area of the overpass, he saw what appeared to be debris on the roadway and attempted unsuccessfully to swerve and avoid it. After hitting it, Hampton stopped his vehicle and discovered that the object was the body of a young man. The Laramie County Sheriff's Office was immediately contacted.

[¶ 9] During the ensuing investigation, law enforcement learned that Lopez had accompanied Teniente and others to Cheyenne the previous evening. Law enforcement's investigation into Lopez's murder, however, was hampered by an orchestrated effort to cover up what had taken place in Cheyenne. As part of the cover-up, Rojas, Jesse, Sophia and Hernandez told a similar fabricated story that Lopez had left Sophia's home by himself and never returned, and conveniently failed to mention Magallanes' presence in Cheyenne on the night in question. Those fabrications started to unravel when Sophia was arrested for possession of a controlled substance.

[¶ 10] Based on information obtained from the ongoing investigation, the State charged Magallanes with the premeditated murder of Lopez and with conspiring with Teniente to commit that murder. In September 2004, a jury found him guilty on both charges. The district court sentenced Magallanes to concurrent terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. This appeal followed.

DISCUSSION

Issue I — Evidentiary Sufficiency

[¶ 11] Magallanes contends that his conviction for first degree murder cannot stand because: (1) the State failed to conclusively prove Lopez's death was caused by the bullet wounds to his head; (2) no witness actually saw Magallanes shoot Lopez; and (3) there was no physical evidence linking Lopez to the crime.² In reviewing Magallanes' sufficiency of the evidence claim, we must determine whether a rational jury could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Vlahos v. State, 2003 WY 103, ¶ 36, 75 P.3d 628, 637 (Wyo.2003). We do not consider conflicting evidence presented by Magallanes, and afford to the State every favorable inference that may be reasonably and fairly drawn from the evidence it presented. Id., ¶ 36, 75 P.3d at 637-38. We have consistently held that it is the jury's responsibility to weigh the evidence, assess the credibility of the witnesses and resolve conflicts in the evidence. Leyo v. State, 2005 WY 92, ¶ 11, 116 P.3d 1113, 1116-17 (Wyo.2005). We will not substitute our judgment for that of the jury when applying this rule; our only duty is to determine whether a quorum of reasonable and rational individuals could have come to the same result as the jury did. Id.; Vlahos, ¶ 36, 75 P.3d at 638.

[¶ 12] Magallanes' complaint concerning the cause of Lopez's death rests largely on selected portions of the testimony of Dr. Stephen Cina, the forensic pathologist who autopsied Lopez. Dr. Cina testified he could not determine whether Lopez died before or after being run over by Hampton's vehicle, but that Lopez would not have been exposed to that vehicle had the gunshots not left him incapacitated and lying in the roadway. Magallanes argues this latter conclusion is unsupported by the record, speculating that Lopez may have been shot someplace other than the road and somehow managed to move himself onto the road after being shot twice in the head.

[¶ 13] In advancing this argument, Magallanes ignores the evidence that after his brother pulled over on Campstool Road — presumably on the right hand side of the road — Rojas remained seated on the right hand side of the rear passenger seat. Thus, when Magallanes, who was seated behind the driver, pulled Lopez out of the back seat and began to beat him, those activities can reasonably be inferred to have occurred on the road. Magallanes also ignores that the .25 caliber shell casings were also found on Campstool Road in close proximity to Lopez's body.

[¶ 14] Magallanes further fails to note evidence indicating that Hampton's vehicle did not hit Lopez's body until shortly before 2:00 a.m., which was approximately the same time Sophia and her friend embarked for Greeley to take Teniente and Rojas home and approximately forty-five minutes after Magallanes shot Lopez. That lapse in time is significant because, although Dr. Cina testified that the gunshot wounds to the brain might not have immediately resulted in death, and that the injuries caused to Lopez's body by Hampton's vehicle occurred either shortly before or shortly after Lopez expired, he also testified the bullet wounds would have incapacitated Lopez. Furthermore, Dr. Cina testified that Lopez had aspirated blood from those wounds and, from the amount of such blood discovered, Lopez could have been gasping for breath only for a short time after being shot.

[¶ 15] From that evidence, a rational jury could have reasonably inferred that Lopez was shot in the roadway and left there to die. A rational jury also could have reasonably concluded that the bullet wounds immediately rendered Lopez incapable of moving and, after a few minutes, no longer capable of gasping for breath, and that death's door was swinging shut, if not already closed, when Hampton encountered him that morning. We...