People v. Evans
| Decision Date | 17 December 2020 |
| Docket Number | No. 343544,343544 |
| Citation | 966 N.W.2d 402,335 Mich.App. 76 |
| Parties | PEOPLE of the State of Michigan, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Delilah Sherwood EVANS, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | Court of Appeal of Michigan — District of US |
Dana Nessel, Attorney General, Fadwa A. Hammoud, Solicitor General, Jean Cloud, Prosecuting Attorney Pro Tem, Joshua D. Abbott, Chief Appellate Attorney, and Emil Semaan, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, for the people.
State Appellate Defender (by Lindsay Ponce) for defendant.
Before: Swartzle, P.J., and Beckering and Gleicher, JJ.
Gleicher, J. Delilah Evans stood trial for the murder of her mother, Sonia Riang. Evans advanced an insanity defense, and two expert witnesses testified on her behalf. The prosecution had no expert. To rebut the defense experts' testimony, the prosecuting attorney relied on cross-examination. The jury found Evans guilty but mentally ill and convicted her of first-degree premeditated murder, MCL 750.316(1)(a).
Cross-examination is a powerful legal engine for discovering the truth. But when it repeatedly transgresses well-established boundaries, an improper cross-examination denies a defendant a fair trial. The prosecutor's interrogation of one of the experts in this case, Dr. Meghan Rowland, crossed the line on multiple occasions. The prosecutor likened Dr. Rowland to a cartoon character, accused her of writing her report in crayon, baselessly accused her of withholding evidence, misrepresented her testimony, and badgered her relentlessly. Counsel's performance denied Evans a fair trial.
Evans's additional challenges to her conviction lack merit. Based on the prosecutor's misconduct, however, we must vacate Evans's conviction and sentence and remand for a new trial.
Evans, age 17, stabbed her mother, Sonia Riang, 124 times with a kitchen knife. Evans then showered, used bleach to clean blood from surfaces, placed a blanket over Riang's body, and left the apartment where she and Riang lived. At a nearby convenience store, Evans asked the clerk to call the police. Evans made several bizarre statements to the arresting officers, including that she had just been held at gunpoint by a different officer who forced her into an act of prostitution and that she had dropped out of high school because her teachers, too, had forced her into prostitution.
During a custodial interview, Evans admitted to killing Riang, but intermittently devolved into delusional rambling. Evans claimed that Riang was not actually her mother, but a witch named Helen who had two heads and had kidnapped Evans when she was a child. Riang cast spells, Evans reported, and could make noodles "boil and pop." Her father was Satan, Evans declared, and had participated in the kidnapping.
Evans asserted that she decided to kill Riang because she was a witch (alternatively, a dragon) and had threatened to kill Evans.
Evans admitted that she had stabbed Riang's back and chest, smothered her with a pillow, and, when these efforts did not bring about Riang's death, stabbed her neck. Gnats flew out of Riang's stomach during the attack, Evans maintained. According to the detective who conducted the interview, Evans's description included "rants" about dark angels and voices in her head. She claimed that she had turned herself in because she was "1000 years old." Evans was placed in a single cell in the mental health unit of the Macomb County jail.
This was not the first time that Evans had displayed evidence of mental illness. Two weeks before the murder, Riang brought Evans to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation because she was "acting crazy." Evans was discharged after a brief evaluation and was not seen by a psychiatrist.1 When she was lodged in the Macomb County jail, however, a jail physician placed Evans on suicide preventions and prescribed an antipsychotic medication and an antianxiety drug. According to the jail's director of mental health, Evans was "actively psychotic," was experiencing delusions, and appeared to be responding to "internal stimuli." Other jail notes documented jail staff members' suspicion that Evans was experiencing hallucinations.
Dr. Rowland, the first expert called by the defense, is employed by the Center for Forensic Psychiatry. The Center for Forensic Psychiatry is an independent branch of the state government. People v. Hayes , 421 Mich. 271, 288, 364 N.W.2d 635 (1984). Dr. Rowland conducted her assessment pursuant to a statute requiring that a defendant asserting an insanity defense undergo an examination by a Center professional.2 She interviewed Evans for more than six hours, both to assess her competency to stand trial and to determine whether she was criminally responsible. Dr. Rowland concluded that Evans met the criteria for competency but was legally insane when she murdered her mother.
At the time of the interviews, Evans was medicated. She was able to describe to Dr. Rowland what had occurred before, during, and after the murder. She admitted to hiding a knife or knives before and after killing Riang, making an effort to clean the bloody scene, leaving the premises, and putting a cell phone in the snow. The prosecutor relied on these facts to assert that the murder was premeditated and not the product of an insane mind.
Dr. Rowland's 26-page, single-spaced report exhaustively described the records she reviewed and the conversations she had with Evans about the murder and events that preceded and followed it. The report included details that were consistent with Evans's having planned the murder. For example, Evans told Dr. Rowland that on the day she killed Riang, Evans was "playing with knives and ... thought about stabbing [her] mother." She retrieved several knives and hid one so that her mother could not see what she was doing. Evans described being angry at her mother, stabbing her repeatedly, and feeling guilt afterwards. The report noted that the results of a personality assessment Rowland administered were "non-valid" as Evans "appeared to answer questions in an attempt to portray herself in a negative manner."
The report is also replete with descriptions of Evans's delusions, including that she (Evans) had "angel wings because my dad suffocated me ... then I suffocated myself with a pillow when I was watching Aaliyah sing." Her brother was on "Facetime Live," Evans reported, and she (Evans) talked to "Jackie Chan" on Facetime "because he pays for it." She denied making any of the statements about "dark angels" recorded in her interview with the police, yet also quoted her mother as saying "she was the Statue of Liberty" and expressing that her mother had "a dragon head" and was "a witch." When she stabbed her mother in the stomach, Evans recalled, she "was expecting worms to fall out." Evans acknowledged awareness that she had "murdered [her] mother in cold blood" and that she hid a knife in a towel because she knew the police were going to show up.
Dr. Rowland concluded that during the murder, Evans "was experiencing a substantial disorder of thought and mood that significantly impaired her judgment, behavior, capacity to recognize reality and ability to cope with the ordinary demands of life surrounding the time of the alleged offenses." Specifically, Dr. Rowland found that Evans "exhibited tangential and disorganized thought, loose associations with reality, delusional thought content and reported auditory hallucinations that, in this evaluator's opinion, significantly impaired her ability to recognize reality at the time of the alleged offenses." Dr. Rowland premised her conclusion that Evans met the legal definition of insanity on a single and specific prong of the statutory test: that as a result of mental illness, Evans "lacked the substantial capacity to appreciate the nature and quality" of the situation. Dr. Rowland stressed in her report that Evans likely did have "the capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law (i.e., the ability to assess and choose alternate behaviors)" when she committed the crime. Nevertheless, because Evans lacked the ability to appreciate the nature and quality of her acts, Dr. Rowland concluded that Evans met the criteria for legal insanity.3
Steven Miller, Ph.D., was retained by Evans's counsel. He, too, opined that Evans was legally insane when she killed Riang. In Dr. Miller's view, Evans suffered from a "schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type," and her disease manifested in paranoia and mood swings. He agreed with defense counsel's statement that Evans's actions before, during, and after the killing of Riang "were acts of a deeply and fundamentally declining dilusional [sic] and irrational motivation on [defendant's] part[.]"
In lieu of calling an expert witness, the prosecutor sought to undermine the opinions of the defense experts through cross-examination. The prosecutor's impeachment primarily relied on three facts: the experts admitted that their opinions regarding legal insanity were "subjective" and that other experts and even laypersons could disagree; Evans's behavior before, during, and after the killing suggested logical and coherent thinking; and Evans had been deliberately deceitful by exaggerating her negative symptoms when completing the written psychological test.
The jury found defendant guilty but mentally ill of first-degree premeditated murder. The trial court conducted a sentencing hearing pursuant to Miller v. Alabama , 567 U.S. 460, 132 S. Ct. 2455, 183 L. Ed. 2d 407 (2012), to determine whether Evans should be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. After two short days of testimony and argument on that issue, the trial court imposed a life-without-parole sentence.
With her brief on appeal, Evans moved this Court to remand the case for a Ginther4 hearing regarding the effectiveness of her counsel during the Miller and sentencing hearings. We granted that motion, remanded the case for the...
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