People v. Coleman

• Decision Date: 25 February 1985
• Docket Number: Cr. 22266
• Citation: 38 Cal.3d 69,211 Cal.Rptr. 102,695 P.2d 189
• Court: California Supreme Court
• Parties: , 695 P.2d 189 The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Ralph Terry COLEMAN, Defendant and Appellant.

Page 102

211 Cal.Rptr. 102

38 Cal.3d 69, 695 P.2d 189

The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Ralph Terry COLEMAN, Defendant and Appellant.

Cr. 22266.

Supreme Court of California In Bank.

Feb. 25, 1985.

Thomas W. Condit, Roseville, under appointment by the Supreme Court, and Bradley A. Bristow, Sacramento, for defendant and appellant.

Quin Denvir, State Public Defender, Christine Zilius, Deputy State Public Defender, Ralph Santiago Abascal, Albert H. Meyerhoff, Richard M. Pearl, Ronald T. Vera, Morris Baller, John Huerta, Vilma Martinez, Peter Schey and Gary Goodpaster, Sacramento, as Amici Curiae on behalf of defendant and appellant.

George Deukmejian, Atty. Gen., Robert H. Philibosian, Chief Asst. Atty. Gen., Arnold O. Overoye, Asst. Atty. Gen., Joel Carey, J. Robert Jibson and Raymond L. Brosterhous, II, Deputy Attys. Gen., for plaintiff and respondent.

REYNOSO, Justice.

This is an appeal from a judgment of conviction entered after defendant was found guilty by a jury of two counts of first degree murder, one count of second degree murder (Pen.Code, §§ 187, 189), ¹ and assault with intent to commit murder (former § 217, repealed by Stats.1980, ch. 300, § 2, p. 628). The jury additionally found that defendant used a firearm in the commission of the murders ( § 12022.5), and it found to be true the alleged "special circumstance" that defendant committed multiple murders ( § 190.2). The prosecution having declined to seek the death penalty, defendant waived jury trial of the penalty phase of the proceeding, and was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole for one conviction of murder with special circumstances. Sentences on the remaining counts were ordered to run concurrently and merged with the life sentence. The jury found the defendant sane.

Defendant raises a number of issues on appeal, notably the propriety of excluding noncitizens from juries (an issue raised in Rubio v. Superior Court (1979) 24 Cal.3d 93, 154 Cal.Rptr. 734, 593 P.2d 595), admissibility of a tape-recorded jailhouse conversation We find the admission of three hearsay letters written by the victim a substantial period of time before her death, which referred to alleged prior threats against her by defendant and her fear of future violence, was error which prejudicially affected defendant's trial and we reverse the convictions. (See, Shepard v. United States (1933) 290 U.S. 96, 54 S.Ct. 22, 78 L.Ed. 196; People v. Hamilton (1961) 55 Cal.2d 881, 13 Cal.Rptr. 649, 362 P.2d 473; People v. Talle (1953) 111 Cal.App.2d 650, 245 P.2d 633.) Because we reverse on this basis, we do not decide defendant's remaining contentions of error. ²

and of letters written long before the murders by one of the victims (his wife, Shirley Coleman) which accused him of threatening on numerous occasions to kill his family, and the propriety of remanding this case to the sentencing court to permit it to exercise its discretion under section 1385 whether to strike the special circumstance in accordance with People v. Williams (1981) 30 Cal.3d 470, 179 Cal.Rptr. 443, 637 P.2d 1029.

On March 4, 1978, after an argument with his wife about household expenses which led to a heated exchange concerning the couple's other marital problems, including the wife's past infidelities, defendant retrieved a rifle and shot her, fatally, in the base of the head. He then went upstairs to a bedroom and killed his 9-year-old son and 16-year-old niece and shot at (but missed) his 13-year-old daughter, Kimberly.

Kimberly testified that when she arrived home that evening at 7, her parents were seated at the kitchen table "figuring out bills." After taking a bath, Kimberly came downstairs at one point, about 10 p.m. She heard defendant accuse his wife of twice paying a debt to the niece. When she denied it, he asked, "Are you willing to pay the consequences if you are wrong?"

Kimberly went upstairs to bed. She and her brother and cousin remained awake listening to the radio with the door slightly ajar. After about an hour, Kimberly heard someone come upstairs and walk past the bedroom then return downstairs. A minute or two later, the children heard a loud shot. Kimberly heard defendant say, "I won't have to take any more of this [expletive deleted]." Suddenly, the bedroom door "flew open," and defendant appeared with a rifle in his hand. Defendant told them, "I'm sorry I have to do this." The children screamed and scrambled under the bed in an attempt to hide. The niece screamed, "No, Uncle Ralph, don't," and was shot. Defendant then threw the bed out of the way and shot his son, Kevin. Finally, he shot at Kimberly, whose face he narrowly missed.

Defendant left the room. Five or ten minutes later, Kimberly emerged from the bedroom. She heard defendant call her name, and, a minute or two later, she went downstairs and saw him talking on the telephone. She saw her mother's body in the kitchen. She went over to defendant and embraced him. He stuttered and repeated the name of his sister, and asked Kimberly to talk to her on the telephone. He also told Kimberly he was "sorry." Defendant subsequently walked upstairs. His sister, upon hearing what had happened, advised Kimberly to leave the house quickly, without telling defendant, which she did.

After Kimberly left, defendant called the police and stated that he had "killed [his] family." (Some neighbors who had heard the screams and shots had already called them.) When police arrived, defendant was sitting on the sofa with his face in his hands. He admitted either that he had "just shot" or "just killed" his family. All the victims had been shot in the head, Shirley Coleman from a distance of probably The defenses were diminished capacity and insanity. Defendant testified that he and his wife sat down to pay bills at 6 or 6:30 p.m. Although he consumed perhaps three 16-ounce cans of beer in the approximately five hours before the shootings, he was "thinking fairly clearly." (His blood alcohol was measured at .05 percent an hour after the slayings.) About the time the children arrived home, defendant and his wife began to argue. The argument became bitter when defendant became "angry" at her because of a charge at a department store. As the argument "began to get more heated and more heated," defendant brought up his wife's past deceit and infidelities and accused her of resuming her difficult and uncooperative ways. At some point in this diatribe, his wife observed that there was nothing he could do about it, "it" referring to the "situation that [they] were in." At that, defendant went to his room, retrieved the rifle, removed it from its case, returned to the kitchen, and shot his wife. (He testified that he shot her in the face from a distance of six or eight feet; he was at a loss to explain the pathologist's testimony that the wound indicated that the bullet entered the base of her head from less than an inch away.)

less than a half-inch, according to the pathologist.

When he went upstairs to retrieve the rifle, defendant "guess[ed] [he] would have had to" have decided to kill his wife, but he could not recall thinking purposefully. He testified that "everything we had been discussing, everything from the past just all blurred together" and that he "wasn't thinking about anything." When he pointed the rifle at her, he "wasn't thinking" of his act in such a way that he was aware that it would "probably kill" his wife. He never though about whether he was justified in shooting her or whether there was an excuse for doing it. Immediately, he started up the steps toward the children's room. He "didn't think" about whether he had decided to kill the children. Nor did he recall thinking that he would kill them to spare them difficult lives, though when he was examined by "the doctors" he guessed that was what he thought. He only vaguely remembered the actual shootings, though he remembered a scream and shooting into the darkened room.

For a long time prior to the killings, defendant, who is black, had suffered a good deal of stress related to his wife's past infidelity and to perceived job discrimination and harassment due to his interracial marriage to a caucasian woman. He came to suspect a number of friends and acquaintances in his hometown of possible participation in a conspiracy to "project[ ] ... things" at his family and him, with his wife as the apparent focal point of the conspiracy. At his brother's suggestion, sometime after the family's arrival in California, defendant compiled a list of "people involved" with "the things that were going on in Youngstown, Ohio"--i.e., people who "could possibly be a part of the things that were projected at my family and myself," which included such diverse persons as his wife's family (her parents strongly opposed the marriage), some policemen acquaintances, one of defendant's sisters, some marine buddies, their pastor (with whom defendant's wife admittedly had an affair), and a priest with suspicious "mannerisms."

As early as 1972, defendant complained of difficulties at work apparently related to his marriage. On one occasion he overheard some fellow employees at Strauss Stores in Youngstown obliquely intimating that his wife was a prostitute. After a confrontation with a sales clerk over a 25-cent bonus commission, defendant began to suffer "constant harassment," in the form of small incidents seemingly calculated to make his work more difficult, such as disturbing the mannequins and the cutting up of sales sheets into ribbons which defendant would have to piece together. After a temporary stint at U.S. Steel, defendant went to work at an assemblyline job at General Motors (GM). After a time, coworkers at GM began to drop hints about an affair between defendant's wife and his pastor. "Harassment" followed, in the form of an overload of work, delayed In 1974, while he was still at GM, defendant sought help at a local mental health clinic for...