People v. Chavez

• Court: Appellate Court of Illinois
• Writing for the Court: JUSTICE ELLIS
• Citation: People v. Chavez, 2025 IL App (1st) 221601, 262 N.E.3d 753 (Ill. App. 2025)
• Docket Number: 1-22-1601
• Decision Date: 24 April 2025
• Parties: The PEOPLE of the State of Illinois, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Emilio CHAVEZ, Defendant-Appellant.

262 N.E.3d 753

2025 IL App (1st) 221601

The PEOPLE of the State of Illinois, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Emilio CHAVEZ, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 1-22-1601

Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, SECOND DIVISION.

Filed March 25, 2025

Rehearing Denied April 24, 2025

Appeal from the Circuit Court of Cook County. No. 17 CR 16291, Honorable James Michael Obbish, Judge Presiding.

James E. Chadd, Douglas R. Hoff, and Hannah Lazar Pieterse, of State Appellate Defender’s Office, of Chicago, for appellant.

Kimberly M. Foxx, State’s Attorney, of Chicago (Enrique Abraham, Brian K. Hodes, Tasha M. Kelly, and Leslie Billings, Assistant State’s Attorneys, of counsel), for the People.

OPINION

JUSTICE ELLIS delivered the judgment of the court, with opinion.

¶ 1 Seventeen-year-old defendant Emilio Chavez arranged to buy cannabis from Joshua Rayborn. The would-be transaction turned violent, and by defendant’s own admission, he fatally shot Rayborn and walked away with about $2,000 worth of Rayborn’s cannabis. A jury rejected defendant’s claim that Rayborn tried to rob him, rather than the other way around, and convicted defendant of first degree murder, on a theory of felony murder predicated on armed robbery.

¶ 2 Defendant raises four appellate issues. First, he argues that his custodial statement should have been suppressed, because the police failed to read him the simplified version of the Miranda warnings (see Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)) our legislature has required for “minors” and then went on to use deceptive tactics of “minimization” and “maximization” on a youthful suspect. Second, he says, his statement was the fruit of a warrantless arrest that violated the Illinois Constitution. Third, he alleges that the trial court erred in excluding several “violent and frightening” posts that defendant claims to have seen in Rayborn’s Instagram feed before the shooting, which he claims were relevant for various evidentiary purposes. Finally, defendant argues that the trial court improperly considered the proceeds from the armed robbery as “compensation” for the offense, within the meaning of this statutory aggravating factor. We affirm defendant’s conviction and sentence.

¶3 BACKGROUND

¶ 4 I

¶ 5 Rayborn was shot and killed on September 18, 2017. A janitor by day and former rap artist known as “Rate YK,” Rayborn moonlit as a cannabis supplier to high-school students and other small-time dealers. Rayborn would arrange to meet his customers in the hallway of his apartment building, where he lived with his wife and two young children.

¶ 6 One such customer was defendant, then a 17-year-old high-school senior with a thriving business selling cannabis, in small parcels, to his fellow students. A classmate named Dionte Flowers, who also did business with Rayborn, had recently introduced him to defendant, who was looking for a new source. By all accounts, the arrangement started off well: defendant’s first two transactions with Rayborn went smoothly, and Rayborn’s product was a hit with defendant’s customers. So defendant contacted Rayborn directly, bypassing Flowers, to arrange a third, and this time larger, purchase—three-quarters of a pound of cannabis for $2,050. But this transaction left Rayborn with a fatal gunshot wound to his chest.

¶ 7 There were no eyewitnesses to the shooting, other than defendant himself, but Rayborn’s wife, Odemaris, did hear an apparent gunshot and an ensuing struggle. Odemaris testified that her husband took a call around 11 p.m. on the night of the shooting and then stepped out of their apartment to “serve” a customer. Odemaris knew that her husband sold cannabis in the hallway of the building. On this particular occasion, she did not see him with any cannabis as he stepped out, but then again, she was busy in the kitchen making him something to eat. A couple minutes later, by her estimate, she heard a loud noise in the hallway followed by “scuffling.” She looked out into the hallway and saw her husband lying against the wall, moaning in distress.

¶ 8 In addition to the gunshot wound, Rayborn had abrasions on his nose and forehead, two lacerations on his right hand, and injuries to his knees. The assistant medical examiner concluded that his injuries were consistent with a “terminal fall,” meaning one that occurred at or near the time of death.

¶ 9 Defendant also showed signs of a scuffle. On the morning after the shooting, he picked up his then-girlfriend, Alexandra Mora, on the way to school. Several years later, long after they had parted ways, Mora would recall at trial that defendant had bruises on the left side of his face and near his eye and some scrapes and scratches on his back.

¶10 II

¶ 11 A drug deal gone bad. That much seemed evident from the start. But how and why, and at whose hand? Odemaris was the first to notice what would turn out to be the most significant item of physical evidence. When she looked out into the hallway, she saw what she described as “half of a gun” on the floor, which the police then recovered from the stairwell of the building.

¶ 12 More specifically, it was the “bottom half,” meaning the handle and the trigger, of a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. Somehow, the gun had been broken into several component pieces. The disconnected recoil spring was separately found at the crime scene. But the slide and barrel were missing. When defendant was arrested and interrogated a month after the shooting, he told the detectives that the slide and barrel were in the glove compartment of his car. The police searched the car and found them.

¶ 13 The most telling fact about this gun was the location of the fingerprints. Not surprisingly, there were no prints on the handle or, for that matter, anywhere on the exterior of the gun. But the magazine was loaded into the handle, with live rounds, and locked into place when the police found it. And there were two prints on the magazine itself. One print was matched to defendant. Having achieved that result, the latent print examiner from the Illinois State Police (ISP) did not test the second print, pursuant to what she described as ISP’s “deferral policy.”

¶ 14 A firearms examiner, testifying at trial, confirmed the obvious: it is not possible to touch the magazine, where the prints were found, when it is loaded into the handle. The examiner also reassembled the gun and determined that there was nothing “loose” about the magazine or the release button that would cause the magazine to slip out by accident or happenstance—a claim, as we will soon see, that defendant would go on to make.

¶ 15 Among the other items found at the crime scene were several live 9-millimeter cartridges, as well as one spent cartridge that, according to forensic analysis, was fired from the broken-down gun; pieces of a cell phone; Rayborn’s flip-flop sandals; and an apparent bullet hole in the wall. The police did not find any money or cannabis at the scene.

¶ 16 Along with the slide and barrel of the gun, the search of defendant’s car, a month after the shooting, yielded more live 9-millimeter cartridges, another cartridge fired from this same gun, two glass jars containing cannabis, $1,130 in cash, and a plastic bag with defendant’s blood-stained clothing and shoes. A DNA swab of the shoes revealed a major profile that was a likely match for Rayborn. Additional swabs of these items and Rayborn’s fingernails included mixtures of DNA that could not be identified.

¶ 17 III

¶ 18 As noted, defendant was arrested and interrogated exactly one month after the shooting. That was the day after his eighteenth birthday. According to the detectives, it was also the day they received the results of the fingerprint analysis—the key piece of evidence that, in their view, established probable cause for the arrest. Until then, all they knew was that defendant had arranged to buy cannabis from Rayborn and that he was at the scene of the shooting. They knew this from his cellphone records and communications with Rayborn. But since he later admitted he was present and indeed that he shot Rayborn, we will not belabor the details of this evidence.

¶ 19 We will return to the details of defendant’s custodial interrogation and shifting accounts of events in due course. For now, suffice it to say that defendant admitted that he shot Rayborn. And by the end of the interrogation, he reluctantly conceded the detectives’ theory that he did so while robbing Rayborn of his cannabis.

¶ 20 Armed with this evidence, the State charged defendant on theories of intentional, strong-probability, and felony murder. Defendant gave notice that he would claim self-defense at trial. The State then dismissed the intentional and strong-probability murder counts. So the sole charge presented to the jury was felony murder, predicated on armed robbery.

¶ 21 The decision to drop the intentional and strong-probability counts and rely solely on felony murder precluded defendant’s claim of self-defense (which is not a defense to felony murder) and rendered the defense’s proposed Lynch evidence (which requires a self-defense theory) irrelevant and inadmissible. See People v. Lynch, 104 Ill. 2d 194, 83 Ill.Dec. 598, 470 N.E.2d 1018 (1984). But self-defense aside, the defense theory at trial remained that defendant had no plans of robbing Rayborn of his cannabis, resulting in his death; rather, defendant resorted to force for the purpose of defending himself, after Rayborn tried to rob him of his money.

¶ 22 IV

¶ 23 Defendant’s custodial statement was introduced at trial through the testimony of Chicago police detective Jeff Edwards, who interrogated defendant along with his partner, Detective Brian Daly. A redacted video was also published to the jury. What follows is a brief sketch of defendant’s evolving account of the shooting.

¶ 24 Defendant began by admitting that he had purchased cannabis from Rayborn. But only once, he said—with Flowers present, and without any violence transpiring. Over the course...