McCallister v. State
| Decision Date | 15 February 2018 |
| Docket Number | No. 87S00–1609–LW–497,87S00–1609–LW–497 |
| Citation | 91 N.E.3d 554 |
| Parties | Mathew W. MCCALLISTER, Appellant (Defendant), v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee (Plaintiff). |
| Court | Indiana Supreme Court |
Attorney for Appellant : Jacob P. Wahl, Jasper, IN
Attorneys for Appellee : Curtis T. Hill, Attorney General of Indiana, Angela N. Sanchez, Supervising Deputy Attorney General, Indianapolis, IN
A Warrick County jury convicted Mathew McCallister of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. In this direct appeal, McCallister challenges (i) the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his convictions, (ii) various evidentiary rulings by the trial court, and (iii) the propriety of his sentence. We affirm the trial court's judgment.
We recite the facts most favorable to the judgment. During February 2014, Defendant, Mathew McCallister, lived with his girlfriend, Kelli Wyrick, in a series of hotels in Evansville, Indiana. Also living in Evansville hotels then were their friends Shawn Grigsby and Grigsby's girlfriend. The two couples would sometimes visit each other's rooms to use illegal drugs. On February 16, the couples were staying in adjoining rooms at a local Fairfield Inn, and they invited McCallister's sister, Jade Stigall; her fiancé, David Lackey; and McCallister's friend, Joseph Nelson; to join them at the hotel to smoke methamphetamine.
At some point that evening, everyone left McCallister's room except Stigall and Nelson. After the two had smoked meth, Nelson inched closer to Stigall on the shared bed and asked if she would "like to play". Stigall considered Nelson's pitch to be an unwelcomed sexual advance. She sent her fiancé, Lackey, a text message explaining what had happened and asked him to return to the hotel. Lackey could not return immediately but told McCallister what had reportedly happened between his sister and Nelson. McCallister then called his sister to get her first-hand account. After hearing his sister's version, McCallister told Lackey and Grigsby to get Nelson out of the hotel and drive him to a local convenience store, where McCallister and Wyrick would meet them.
After midnight on February 17, Grigsby and Lackey followed McCallister's instructions, and the two of them returned to the hotel. They picked up Stigall and Nelson and then left for the convenience store in a vehicle Stigall had borrowed. They met McCallister and Wyrick at the convenience store. McCallister got into the vehicle and directed Stigall, who was driving, to a rural area outside of Boonville in adjacent Warrick County. As they drove, McCallister, who was in the backseat with Nelson and Grigsby, told Nelson to "start making amends" with "which God or to which sort he believes in." McCallister asked Stigall to repeat what had happened, and she recounted that Nelson asked her whether she "wanted to play". Nelson tried to apologize, but Stigall told him to "shut the fuck up." McCallister also asked Grigsby "if he had ... the clip", apparently referring to the magazine of Grigsby's automatic handgun, which Grigsby was showing off earlier that evening.
McCallister eventually directed Stigall to park near the Liberty Mine, a coal mine located in a remote area of Warrick County. The mine has open stock piles and provides coal via railroad car to the Alcoa Corporation plant in nearby Newburgh. McCallister left the vehicle first, followed by the other guys and then Stigall. McCallister and Grigsby walked alongside Nelson, with Stigall and Lackey walking a short distance behind. Stigall saw Grigsby give his gun to McCallister.
As they walked, the men went around a corner and were momentarily out of Stigall's field of vision. When she turned the corner, she saw Nelson on his knees with McCallister and Grigsby standing behind him. She then saw a "spark go off from the gun" and "heard the pop and seen [sic] the flash" as McCallister shot Nelson in the back of the head. An obstructed view prevented Stigall from seeing the gun in McCallister's hand, but she saw McCallister's arm raised directly behind Nelson's head, observed the flash and heard the gunshot, and then watched McCallister's arm drop to his side as Nelson fell forward. As the group left the crime scene, they left Nelson's body behind.
Stigall drove the three men back to Evansville. En route, McCallister directed Stigall to drive to a specific location where he disposed of the gun and the ammunition down a sewer drain. Then they returned to the hotel. Almost immediately, McCallister and Lackey "started freaking out about something" and promptly left. Stigall did not hear from McCallister or Lackey again until Lackey called her later that morning at about 8:00 a.m. Stigall helped collect the clothes they had been wearing while with Nelson. Lackey and Stigall burned those clothes in a rural area.
Later that morning, Nelson's corpse was discovered in a coal-conveyor chute at the Alcoa plant. Video surveillance at Alcoa showed that the body arrived from the mine on a train car and had been emptied into the plant's coal-conveyor system earlier that day. An autopsy revealed that Nelson was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head—a so-called "contact" wound, meaning that when the shot was fired, the gun's barrel was either touching, or no more than a half-inch away from, the victim's head. The bullet entered Nelson's neck about half an inch behind his right ear and exited through his right eye. The bullet's trajectory was consistent with Stigall's account that Nelson was murdered execution-style. A toxicology test showed that Nelson's body contained alcohol, methamphetamine, amphetamines, and cannabinoids, the last of which indicated marijuana use. Coal dust was found on Nelson's body but not in his lungs.
A few days after police recovered Nelson's body, they obtained surveillance video from the Fairfield Inn. The video showed Nelson leaving the hotel with Grigsby, Stigall, and Lackey, prompting police to suspect the three knew something about Nelson's murder. Police already had information to support unrelated drug charges against Stigall and Lackey, so they brought charges and arrested them in hopes of persuading one of them to explain what happened to Nelson. Stigall not only gave detailed information about the murder, but also took police to the sewer drain where police recovered Grigsby's handgun and to the burn pile, where she had disposed of the clothes. For his part, Lackey showed police where the murder occurred. There they found rocks stained with Nelson's blood and a spent shell casing, which ballistics testing showed was fired from the recovered handgun.
When McCallister went to trial in July 2016, Stigall had already pleaded guilty to assisting a criminal with murder. She testified that McCallister was the shooter. Grigsby, who by then had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder Nelson and received a twenty-year sentence, testified as a defense witness that he (Grigsby) had shot Nelson. After a six-day trial, the jury found McCallister guilty of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, a class A felony.
During the penalty phase, the jury found as an aggravating circumstance that McCallister committed the murder while on parole. The jury also determined this aggravating factor outweighed any mitigating circumstances, and it unanimously recommended a sentence of life without parole. The trial court imposed that sentence for murder and a concurrent forty-year term for conspiracy. McCallister now appeals his convictions and sentence.
McCallister contends the evidence was insufficient to sustain either his murder or conspiracy convictions. For sufficiency challenges, we neither reweigh evidence nor judge witness credibility. Gibson v. State, 51 N.E.3d 204, 210 (Ind. 2016), reh'g denied. We consider only the evidence most favorable to the judgment together with all reasonable inferences that may be drawn from the evidence. Id. We will affirm the judgment if it is supported by substantial evidence, even if the evidence is conflicting. Id. On this record, we hold that the evidence supports McCallister's convictions, and that he fails to satisfy our stringent "incredible dubiosity" rule, according to which a reviewing court may substitute its judgment for that of the jury only where the evidence supporting the defendant's guilt is uncorroborated and so highly implausible as to be unreliable.
In support of reversal, McCallister argues that the evidence supporting his convictions is "directly contradicted by other direct evidence". That is true but beside the point. There was indeed conflicting evidence about whether McCallister was the trigger man. And McCallister contends that Stigall, the sole witness who testified that he had shot Nelson, was not credible. But these arguments misapprehend our limited role as a reviewing court. We do not reweigh evidence or substitute our view of the evidence for that of the jury. Nor do we ask whether the jury might have reached a different result based on the evidence it heard. Our inquiry, rather, is whether record evidence supports the jury's verdict. Under that standard, the evidence is sufficient to support McCallister's convictions.
Stigall gave detailed testimony outlining what happened before, during, and after McCallister shot Nelson. As recounted above, after learning that Nelson had propositioned his sister, McCallister directed her and the others to take Nelson to a convenience store. Surveillance video corroborated that Nelson, Stigall, and the others left the hotel and met McCallister at the store. Next, she testified that McCallister got into her car at the store and directed her where to...
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