Martinez v. People

• Court: Colorado Supreme Court
• Writing for the Court: JUSTICE BOATRIGHTdelivered the Opinion of the Court.
• Citation: Martinez v. People, 2015 CO 16, 344 P.3d 862 (Colo. 2015)
• Decision Date: 16 March 2015
• Docket Number: 12SC803
• Parties: Joe Anthony MARTINEZ, Petitioner v. The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Respondent.

344 P.3d 862

2015 CO 16

Joe Anthony MARTINEZ, Petitioner

v.The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Respondent.

Supreme Court Case No. 12SC803

Supreme Court of Colorado.

March 16, 2015

Attorneys for Petitioner: Douglas K. Wilson, Public Defender, Shann Renee Jeffery, Deputy Public Defender, Denver, CO

Attorneys for Respondent: Cynthia H. Coffman, Attorney General, Elizabeth Fraser Rohrbough, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Denver, CO

En Banc

Opinion

JUSTICE BOATRIGHT delivered the Opinion of the Court.

¶ 1 In this appeal, we review the court of appeals' opinion upholding the petitioner's conviction for first-degree murder after deliberation under a complicity theory. When the trial court defined the element of “after deliberation” for the jury, it used language that this court has held to be constitutionally deficient. At trial, defense counsel objected to the language on the grounds that it was cumulative and unnecessary but erroneously acknowledged that it correctly stated the law. The trial court overruled the objection, and the jury later found the defendant guilty as charged. On appeal the defendant raised for the first time the argument that this court previously disapproved of the definition of “after deliberation” used in the jury instructions, and that the erroneous deliberation instruction was so prejudicial as to require reversal under the plain error standard. He also renewed his claim, first raised in a motion for a judgment of acquittal, that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of first-degree murder after deliberation. The court of appeals reviewed the instruction for plain error and ultimately upheld the defendant's conviction. We now affirm.

¶ 2 We hold that the plain error standard applies because defense counsel's trial objection failed to identify the ground that rendered the instruction erroneous. We conclude that the instructional error did not amount to plain error because overwhelming evidence proved that the defendant deliberated, and the jury instructions as a whole adequately explained the law. Additionally, we hold that there was sufficient evidence to convict the defendant of first-degree murder after deliberation. We therefore affirm the judgment of the court of appeals and remand the case to that court with instructions to return the case to the trial court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I. Facts and Proceedings Below

¶ 3 During the early morning hours of June 29, 2005, the victim, Daniel Medina, called his ex-wife, Christine Sayesva, eighteen times. Then, around 3 a.m., he woke the ex-couple's son and told him that they had to “go take care of something.” The victim was angry and wanted to bring guns, but his son convinced him to leave the firearms at home and “handle it like men.” The victim drove his son to Sayesva's house, got out of the car, and sent his son inside to find Sayesva. At the time, the defendant, Joe Martinez, lived with Sayesva, his girlfriend. When the victim and his son arrived, Sayesva was in the kitchen. Sayesva, the defendant, and Gabriel Tapia (the co-defendant),¹ had recently returned to Sayesva's house after a late night out. As the victim's son approached the house, he noticed that the porch light was off, but the door was open, and the family's dogs were nowhere to be seen. He testified that this was “pretty odd.” He saw neither the defendant nor the co-defendant, but spoke briefly with his mother in the kitchen. She seemed upset. Within minutes, he heard gunfire and rushed his little sister and her friend, who were asleep on the couch, to an upstairs bedroom. When he went back downstairs, the victim was dead in the street, and the defendant and co-defendant had left in Sayesva's car.

¶ 4 Physical evidence showed that the victim confronted the defendant and co-defendant on Sayesva's porch. No witnesses saw what happened on the porch, but several heard a loud argument followed by gunshots. One neighbor heard a male voice shout, “Get out of my house,” followed by a series of “popping noises.” The victim was shot five times and dragged, alive but incapacitated, into the street in front of Sayesva's house. One bullet had broken his right femur, another had disabled his right arm, and three more had pierced his chest and abdomen. A bullet impact on the porch suggests that a sixth round was fired, though investigators later recovered only five intact fired bullets and several metal fragments. The evidence conflicts as to whether one or both men dragged the victim away from the house, but several neighbors saw both the defendant and co-defendant standing over the victim as he lay in the street. The defendant stood by the victim's head and the co-defendant by his feet while both men continued to shout at the victim. One neighbor heard the defendant say, “See what happens when you mess with my house.” The co-defendant then shot the victim in the face with Sayesva's six-shot revolver, killing him.

¶ 5 A neighbor saw the defendant “grab [the co-defendant] to lead him away,” and the two fled in Sayesva's car. The defendant drove, and the co-defendant sat in the front passenger's seat. Alerted by witnesses, the police soon stopped the car and arrested both men. Officers found Sayesva's revolver under the car on the passenger's side; it appeared that the co-defendant had tried to abandon it as he got out of the car when he was arrested. Officers also found unspent cartridges in the car and in the defendant's pockets. All were the same caliber and brand as the rounds fired at the murder scene. At trial, a firearms expert testified that Sayesva's revolver fired the bullet that killed the victim.²

¶ 6 The People charged the defendant with first-degree murder after deliberation under a complicity theory. At trial, the prosecution's theory of the case was that the defendant knew about the calls to his girlfriend and had planned the murder. The prosecution argued that the defendant left the front door open, the porch light off, and the dogs penned behind the house. The defendant and co-defendant lay in wait with Sayesva's revolver, and when the victim arrived, one of them shot him five times before he could enter the house. There was evidence that the defendant then helped the co-defendant drag the 180–pound victim from the porch to the street. In addition, the bullets found in the defendant's pocket and the evidence that six shots were fired on the porch indicate that the defendant at least assisted in reloading the six-shot revolver before the co-defendant delivered the seventh and fatal shot. The prosecution dismissed the idea that the defendant was an innocent bystander and emphasized the triangle of relationships among the defendant, the victim, and Sayesva. The prosecution argued that the defendant, aware of the many phone calls to his girlfriend, wanted retribution because the victim “mess[ed] with [his] house.” The co-defendant, by contrast, was present only because of his friendship with the defendant.

¶ 7 At the close of evidence, the trial court and counsel proposed instructions for the jury. Among the written instructions that the jury ultimately received was an incorrect definition of “after deliberation.” Specifically, Instruction 12 told the jury that “[t]he only time requirement for deliberation and premeditation is an interval sufficient for one thought to follow another. The length of time required for deliberation need not be long.” This court had previously held in Key v. People that this instruction is constitutionally deficient because it distorts the legislature's definition of “after deliberation,” which requires an appreciable period of judgment and reflection. 715 P.2d 319, 322–23 (Colo.1986). When the court discussed the jury instructions with counsel, defense counsel erroneously conceded that the “sufficient for one thought to follow another” language correctly stated the law. She acknowledged that “[c]learly the law is now and has been recently that deliberation requires enough time for one thought to follow another.” She argued that Instruction 12 was superfluous and unnecessary, however, given that Instruction 11 also defined “after deliberation.”³ Defense counsel repeated this specific objection three times but was overruled each time because she continued to acknowledge that the pre-Key cases cited by the prosecution were still good law. The court then submitted the case to the jurors. They found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder after deliberation.

¶ 8 After the defendant's conviction, the defense filed a motion for a judgment of acquittal or a new trial, which renewed the argument that Instruction 12 was “unnecessary and prejudicial.” Once again, the motion failed to mention Key or alert the court that the instruction was legally incorrect. The trial court discovered the mistake on its own. It denied the defense's motion anyway, finding that the erroneous instruction was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The trial court reasoned that the jury had received the proper definition of “after deliberation” in Instruction 11, and moreover, there was overwhelming evidence that the defendant had deliberated. Accordingly, the court ruled that the error did not merit a new trial. The court also found that there was sufficient evidence to convict the defendant and refused to grant the defense's request for a judgment of acquittal.

¶ 9 The defendant appealed. The court of appeals noted that the defense relied on a different argument against Instruction 12 on appeal than defense counsel had asserted at trial. People v. Martinez, No. 09CA572, slip op. at 15–16, 2012 WL 3854617 (Colo.App. Sept. 6, 2012). In its brief to the court of appeals, the defense abandoned the argument that the instruction was superfluous and instead contended that it conflicted with Key. Because the defense did not preserve the argument that Instruction 12 was legally incorrect, the court of appeals reviewed the jury instructions for plain...