Michael Dale St. Clair v. Commonwealth Of Ky.

Decision Date23 September 2010
Docket NumberNo. 2005-SC-000828-MR.,2005-SC-000828-MR.
Citation319 S.W.3d 300
PartiesMichael Dale ST. CLAIR, Appellant,v.COMMONWEALTH of Kentucky, Appellee.
CourtUnited States State Supreme Court — District of Kentucky

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COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Donna Lynn Boyce, Appellate Branch Manager, Emily Holt Rhorer, Linda Roberts Horsman, Shannon Renee Dupree, Assistant Public Advocate, Department of Public Advocacy, Frankfort, KY, Counsel for Appellant.

Jack Conway, Attorney General of Kentucky, David A. Smith, Assistant Attorney General, Franklin Todd Lewis, Executive Director, William Robert Long, Jr., Assistant Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General, Frankfort, KY, Counsel for Appellee.

Opinion of the Court by Chief Justice MINTON.

Michael St. Clair was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. On appeal, this Court affirmed his capital murder conviction but reversed his death sentence and remanded the case to the trial court for a new capital sentencing trial.1 Following the new sentencing trial, St. Clair was again sentenced to death. This appeal followed.

We now must reverse the death sentence imposed following the new sentencing trial because the trial court failed to comply with this Court's directive to follow the statutory language in instructing the jury on the applicable aggravator required to support a death sentence. The trial court instead fashioned an erroneous jury instruction that deprived St. Clair of his right to a unanimous verdict. Although we reverse solely on this issue, we also address other issues raised in this appeal that are likely to recur upon remand.

I. FACTS.

The facts underlying St. Clair's murder conviction appear in detail in our opinion on his first appeal. Briefly summarized, the facts are that St. Clair and a co-defendant, Dennis Reese, were indicted for the 1991 murder of Frank Brady in Bullitt County, Kentucky.

Brady was shot and killed just a few weeks after St. Clair and Reese escaped from an Oklahoma jail where St. Clair was awaiting sentencing after a jury there convicted him of two murders. During the weeks between the escape and Brady's murder, St. Clair and Reese travelled widely across the southwestern United States on a crime spree that included the kidnapping and murder of Timothy Keeling. Eventually, they reached Hardin County, Kentucky, where they kidnapped Frank Brady and took his pickup truck. Reese and St. Clair set fire to Keeling's truck to destroy incriminating evidence and took Brady into a secluded area of Bullitt County, where he was shot execution-style.2 Soon after this murder, a Kentucky state trooper stopped Reese and St. Clair in Brady's vehicle in Hardin County; and St. Clair fired shots at the trooper's vehicle.3 Reese and St. Clair fled the scene and soon parted ways.

After St. Clair and Reese were jointly indicted in Bullitt County for Brady's murder, Reese pled guilty and agreed to testify against St. Clair. St. Clair pled not guilty, and a trial ensued in which St. Clair testified and claimed an alibi defense. The primary factual issue at trial was whether Brady had been killed by St. Clair, Reese, or an unidentified accomplice. The jury convicted St. Clair of the murder, and the trial court sentenced St. Clair to death in accordance with the jury's recommendation.4 Although we affirmed the conviction, we remanded for a new capital sentencing phase trial.

II. WE MUST REVERSE BECAUSE TRIAL COURT ERRED IN NOT CONFORMING WITH STATUTORY LANGUAGE IN INSTRUCTING JURY ON AGGRAVATOR.

This case must be reversed and sent back again for re-sentencing because the trial court failed to comply with this Court's clear directive to instruct the jury on the germane aggravating circumstance in conformance with the statutory language describing this aggravating circumstance. In St. Clair I, we reversed because the trial court failed to instruct the jury on the availability of life without parole (LWOP) as a sentencing option. St. Clair I also addressed other issues likely to recur on remand, including proper jury instructions concerning the statutory aggravating circumstance at issue here, which is described in Kentucky Revised Statutes (KRS) 532.025(2)(a)(1): [t]he offense of murder or kidnapping was committed by a person with a prior record of conviction for a capital offense....” 5 Specifically, we directed the trial court to follow this statutory language in instructing the jury on this aggravator.6

In the first appeal, St. Clair argued, “that the trial court's capital sentencing phase jury instructions erroneously reformulated the KRS 532.025(2)(a)(1) aggravating circumstance.” 7 The trial court's instruction on aggravating circumstances in the penalty phase of the first trial stated as follows:

In fixing a sentence for the Defendant for the offense of murder, you shall consider the following aggravating sentence which you may believe from the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to be true:

1. The Defendant has a prior record of conviction for murder, a capital offense.

And this Court concluded, [g]iven our construction of the KRS 532.025(2)(a)(1) aggravating circumstance, we agree with [St. Clair's] contention that the trial court's articulation of that aggravating circumstance changed its meaning.” 8 In the opinion, we explained that the statutory language required that the defendant actually have the prior record of conviction for a capital offense at the time the instant offense of murder (or kidnapping) was committed: We find KRS 532.025(2)(a)(1) susceptible to but one natural and reasonable construction: the aggravating circumstance is implicated only when the defendant has already been convicted of a capital offense prior to the commission of the present capital offense.” 9 This Court directed that: “Upon remand, the trial court should instruct the jury in accordance with the statutory language, i.e. ‘the murder was committed by a person with a prior record of conviction of a capital offense.’ 10 Now, despite our directive to follow the statutory language of KRS 532.025(2)(a)(1), we again face an improper jury instruction on the same aggravating circumstance.

This time, the trial court's instruction asked the jury to determine whether the following aggravator was established: [t]he murder was committed by the Defendant and the Defendant has a prior record of conviction of murder, a capital offense.” As St. Clair argues, this instruction did not require the jury to find that St. Clair had a capital conviction at the time the Brady murder was committed. This issue was properly preserved in the second sentencing trial by St. Clair's tendering a jury instruction that tracked precisely the statutory language of KRS 532.025(2)(a)(1):

In fixing a sentence for the Defendant for the offense of Murder, you shall consider the following aggravating circumstance which you may believe from the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to be true:
(1) The offense of murder was committed by a person with a prior record of conviction for a capital offense.

This Court explained in the first appeal that the statutory language required that the defendant actually have the prior record of conviction for a capital offense at the time the instant offense of murder (or kidnapping) was committed.11 And we agree with St. Clair that the trial court's instruction at issue in this appeal could erroneously allow a jury to find this aggravating factor even if the defendant did not have a prior record of conviction of a capital offense at the time the instant offense was committed but, simply, had accrued such a prior record of conviction by the time of trial. Because the jury was presented with evidence of many convictions for capital offenses, some of which pre-dated the commission of the Brady murder and some of which did not, one cannot determine whether the jury based its finding of this aggravator on a qualifying or a non-qualifying conviction. So the trial court's instruction not only failed to follow this Court's explicit directive following the first appeal, but the instruction, as given, deprived St. Clair of his right to a unanimous verdict. And “the denial of a unanimous verdict-where the error is properly preserved-is not subject to a harmless error analysis.” 12

As Justice Scott points out in his dissent on this issue, at first glance, it may appear that we approved a similarly worded instruction in our opinion reversing St. Clair's Hardin County capital kidnapping conviction, despite our disapproval of the instruction given by the trial court in this appeal and the previous appeal of the Bullitt County murder conviction. 13 In the Hardin County case, we authorized the trial court to instruct the jury on the aggravator at issue; and, despite any imprecise language, we did not intend to retreat from the direction to follow statutory language in fashioning an instruction on this aggravator, which we clearly made in our opinion on the original appeal in St. Clair's Bullitt County murder case. We note that a possible inconsistency was not raised by the parties in the case now before us.

Any apparent inconsistency between our resolutions of jury instruction issues in the Hardin County case versus the Bullitt County case must be resolved in favor of enforcing the directions we gave to the Bullitt Circuit Court upon remand in the original appeal in this case, however. Our 2005 opinion in the Hardin County kidnapping appeal was rendered after our 2004 opinion in the original appeal of the present case and explicitly took note of our resolution of this issue.14 But our opinion in the Hardin County appeal did not overrule, limit, or modify in any way our opinion rendered in the original appeal in this case. So it is obvious that despite our unfortunately imprecise language, we did not intend for there to be any discrepancy between those opinions. Instead, we merely intended to inform the Hardin Circuit Court upon remand that it could properly...

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