Neal v. State
| Decision Date | 04 June 2009 |
| Docket Number | No. 2007-KA-01899-SCT.,2007-KA-01899-SCT. |
| Citation | 15 So.3d 388 |
| Parties | Jermaine NEAL v. STATE of Mississippi. |
| Court | Mississippi Supreme Court |
James A. Williams, attorney for appellant.
Office of the Attorney General by Ladonna C. Holland, attorney for appellee.
EN BANC.
¶ 1. Jermaine Neal was convicted of the murder of his girlfriend, Lakeshia Cleveland. The Circuit Court of Tallahatchie County sentenced Neal to life in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. Neal appeals. He makes the following ten assignments of error for our determination:
I. Whether the jury instructions failed to track the material elements of the indictment.
II. Whether the voir dire process prejudiced the jury against Neal and denied him a fair trial.
III. Whether Neal was entitled to a change of venue.
IV. Whether the trial court erred in not conducting an examination of a juror who left the courtroom without permission.
V. Whether hearsay testimony denied Neal his right to confrontation.
VI. Whether Neal received ineffective assistance of counsel.
VII. Whether there was a valid conviction despite the trial court's failure to state that the court accepted the jury's verdict.
VIII. Whether Neal was entitled to lesser-offense jury instructions on the crimes of heat-of-passion manslaughter and desecration of a human corpse.
IX. Whether cumulative error requires reversal.
X. Whether the evidence was sufficient to support the verdict and whether the verdict was against the overwhelming weight of the evidence.
¶ 2. On August 21, 2006, Jermaine Neal and Lakeshia Cleveland were living together in Scobey, Mississippi. Two of Cleveland's children also lived in the home at this time: A.B., who was approximately eight months old, and C.D., age nine.1 A.B. supposedly was Neal's son, but Neal recently had become suspicious of whether he really was A.B.'s father. C.D. had a different biological father. On this particular day, Mary Loerker, the couple's neighbor, picked up C.D. from the bus stop after school. When C.D. attempted to get into his house, the windows and doors were locked, which, according to C.D., was abnormal. C.D. went to Loerker's residence and eventually fell asleep.
¶ 3. Shortly after 1 a.m. on the morning of August 22, 2006, Neal began pounding on Loerker's door, claiming that "his baby" was dead. Loerker called the police. Tallahatchie County Sheriff's Deputy Rodzinsky Weekly responded to the dispatch. Upon Deputy Weekly's arrival, Neal approached Weekly's car carrying A.B. He informed Deputy Weekly that the baby's mother was dead in their house. At this point, Deputy Weekly handcuffed Neal and placed him in his patrol car. Deputy Weekly entered the home. He witnessed a large amount of blood on the master bed, a blood trail leading from the master bedroom to the bathroom, and Cleveland's decapitated, naked body floating in the bathtub. Deputy Weekly contacted Sheriff William Brewer and Investigator Brandon Hodges.
¶ 4. Investigator Hodges testified that when he arrived on the scene, he entered the home and noticed the blood-stained bed, the blood trail to the bathroom, a blue comforter in the bathroom, and a bottle of bleach near the bathtub. He observed that someone had written the words, "Bitch take care of my son" and "Lame" in marker on the bathroom wall. Investigator Hodges requested assistance from Investigator Walter Davis of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. When Investigator Davis arrived, Hodges and Davis got into the back seat of the patrol car with Neal, read Neal his Miranda rights, obtained Neal's waiver of his rights, and received Neal's written consent to search the residence. See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966).
¶ 5. The officers questioned Neal in the patrol car for about twenty minutes. Neal communicated that he had worked the three-to-eleven p.m. shift that night. He said that when he returned home, he found Cleveland's body in its present condition, with the baby still in his crib just as Neal had left him before going to work. After the interview, Sheriff Brewer transported Neal to the police department for further questioning; the Mississippi Department of Human Services was contacted to retrieve the two children. Officers subsequently obtained Neal's clock-in sheet from work, which indicated that Neal had clocked in ten minutes late on the date the murder occurred. Neal's supervisor indicated that this was highly unusual, because Neal was always at work early.
¶ 6. At the jail, Neal gave his permission for officers to collect his clothing, fingernail clippings, and a DNA swab. Investigator Hodges noticed that while Neal had no blood on his outer clothing, there was a blood stain on his underwear. That afternoon, officers again gave Neal his Miranda rights, obtained Neal's waiver of his rights, and questioned him. See id. At first, Neal was adamant that he was not involved in the murder. However, later that day, he told the officers that if they would let him use a pay phone, he would tell them where he put Cleveland's head. After using the pay phone, Neal informed the officers that he had disposed of Cleveland's head in Grenada Lake; he agreed to show them the exact location.
¶ 7. Despite Neal's indication that he would cooperate with the investigation, he proved to be evasive about the location of Cleveland's head, and it was never found. Initially, officers transported Neal to a dam at Grenada Lake where Neal said he had thrown Cleveland's head in the water. But when the investigators told Neal that it would have been impossible for him to have thrown the head that far, Neal changed his story and said that he threw it off the main spillway. After failing to locate Cleveland's head near the spillway, investigators obtained video surveillance tapes of the spillway from the time in question. The tapes did not show that Neal had been there.
¶ 8. On the ride back to the sheriff's department from the spillway, Investigator Davis questioned Neal further and took notes. Investigator Davis asked Neal why Cleveland did not struggle while she was being decapitated. In response, Neal asked to see the pad on which Investigator Davis had been writing. Neal wrote on the pad that he had shot Cleveland twice in the head before decapitating her.
¶ 9. The next afternoon, Investigators Davis and Hodges again gave Neal his Miranda rights, obtained Neal's waiver of his rights, and performed another interview, which was videotaped. See id. During this interview, Neal told the officers that he and Cleveland had gone to Batesville that morning. When they returned home, they lay down for a nap. Neal said that while Cleveland was asleep, he shot her twice, then he retrieved a knife from the kitchen and cut off her head. Neal said that he put Cleveland's decapitated body inside a comforter, dragged it to the bathroom, filled the bathtub with water, put Cleveland's body into the bathtub, and poured bleach on it to remove his fingerprints. Neal stated that he retrieved Cleveland's head from the bed and placed it into a bag along with the knife. It was at that point that he wrote on the bathroom wall. Then Neal departed; he threw the bag containing Cleveland's head into Grenada Lake, disposed of the gun at a construction site, and continued on to his job.
¶ 10. When asked what prompted him to murder Cleveland, Neal responded that "it was just a lot of pressure." Neal stated that although he and Cleveland had not been arguing on the day of the murder, he had begun to suspect that Cleveland was being unfaithful and that the baby, A.B., was not his son. Neal confessed that he had attempted to conceal his guilt of the murder by sending text messages from Cleveland's cell phone to Cleveland's friend's cell phone and from his own cell phone to Cleveland's cell phone. Subsequently, the police searched for the items Neal disposed of, including dragging the spillway and employing a dive team. But despite searching every location Neal identified, neither Cleveland's head, the knife, nor the gun were ever recovered. No shell casings were located at the crime scene.
¶ 11. Neal claims that a jury instruction on murder constructively amended the indictment. Neal was charged and convicted under Mississippi Code Section 97-3-19(1)(a), which states that the killing of a human being will be considered murder "[w]hen done with deliberate design to effect the death of the person killed, or of any human being." Miss.Code Ann. § 97-3-19(1)(a) (Rev.2006). Neal's indictment charged that Neal "on or about the 22nd day of August ... 2006 ... did willfully, unlawfully, and feloniously decapitate Lakeshia Cleveland, a human being; Jermaine Neal acted with the deliberate design to effect the death of Lakeshia Cleveland, in direct violation of Section 97-3-19(1)(a)."2, 3 The jury was instructed that it could find Neal guilty of murder if it found beyond a reasonable doubt that Neal had killed Cleveland with the deliberate design to effect her death, and not in necessary self-defense. Thus, the murder instruction allowed the jury to return a verdict of guilt if it believed that Neal had killed Cleveland in some manner other than by decapitation.
¶ 12. Neal also argues that the State's evidence showed that he killed Cleveland by shooting her in the head; therefore, the evidence was insufficient to enable a rational jury to find beyond a reasonable doubt that he had killed Cleveland by decapitation as charged in the indictment. In support of this contention, Neal avers that the report of Cleveland's autopsy, which was not requested to be admitted into evidence by either party, states that Cleveland's decapitation was post-mortem. Essentially, Neal contends that the murder instruction should have been redrafted to...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Dickerson v. State
... ... 57. It is well established that when error is predicated upon the denial of a jury instruction requested by the defendant, the defendant need not make a contemporaneous objection to the denial in order to preserve the error for appeal. Neal v. State, 15 So.3d 388, 408 ( 50) (Miss.2009) (citing Green v. State, 884 So.2d 733, 736 (Miss.2004) ). Errors pertaining to the refusal of jury instructions are procedurally preserved by the mere tendering of the instructions, suggesting that they are correct and asking the Court to submit them ... ...
-
Wilson v. State
...that “an offended party's failure to object to jury instructions at trial procedurally bars the issue on appeal.” Neal v. State, 15 So.3d 388, 397 (Miss.2009) (quoting Smith v. State, 835 So.2d 927, 939 (Miss.2002) ). Nevertheless, an “obvious error which was not properly raised by the defe......
-
Willie v. State
...deficient and that the deficient performance prejudiced the defense. Strickland , 466 U.S. at 687, 104 S.Ct. 2052.¶ 16. In Neal v. State , 15 So.3d 388 (Miss. 2009), the defendant, Jermaine Neal, argued on appeal that, among other things, his trial attorney's failure to object to hearsay te......
-
James Earl BOYD v. State of Miss.
...dignity of the State of Mississippi. 10Hunter v. State, 684 So.2d 625, 636 (Miss.1996) (citing Neal v. State, 451 So.2d 743, 757 (Miss.1984)). 11Neal v. State, 15 So.3d 388, 397 (Miss.2009) (citing Harris v. State, 861 So.2d 1003, 1016 (Miss.2003)). 12Miss.Code Ann. § 97-3-7(2)(b) (Rev.2006......