People v. Guillebeau

• Decision Date: 26 June 1980
• Docket Number: Cr. 17182
• Court: California Court of Appeals Court of Appeals
• Parties: PEOPLE of the State of California, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Johnny Alfred GUILLEBEAU, Defendant and Appellant.

Page 45

166 Cal.Rptr. 45

107 Cal.App.3d 531

PEOPLE of the State of California, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Johnny Alfred GUILLEBEAU, Defendant and Appellant.

Cr. 17182.

Court of Appeal, First District, Division 4, California.

June 26, 1980.

Hearing Denied August 21, 1980.

Douglas R. Schmidt, Winslow & Schmidt, San Francisco, for defendant and appellant.

George Deukmejian, Atty. Gen., Robert H. Philibosian, Chief Asst. Atty. Gen., Crim. Div., Edward P. O'Brien, Asst. Atty. Gen., John T. Murphy, John H. Sugiyama, Deputy Attys. Gen., San Francisco, for plaintiff and respondent.

CALDECOTT, Presiding Justice.

Appellant, Johnny Alfred Guillebeau was convicted, following a jury trial, of murder first degree, attempted murder, rape and burglary first degree. The jury also found that appellant inflicted great bodily injury on his victim during the rape and the burglary.

Appellant moved for a new trial, or in the alternative, for the reduction of the murder verdict to the second degree. The court denied both aspects of the motion. The court then sentenced appellant to prison for the terms prescribed by law. In so doing, the court ordered the following: that the sentence for the rape count be served consecutively to the sentence for the murder count; that the sentences on the attempted murder and the burglary counts be stayed; and that the sentences for the great bodily injury findings be served consecutively to the sentence on the last count to be served.

Timely notice of appeal was filed on July 8, 1977.

On October 7, 1976, Linda Shepherd was living with her two young daughters in a second floor unit of a four-unit apartment building in the City of Richmond. Early that evening, Linda fed her younger daughter, four-month-old Sheila Louise Echols Goshen, and put her to bed in the crib. Then, after completing the rest of her housekeeping responsibilities, Linda and her other daughter, three-and-a-half-year-old Carla Williams, watched television in the bedroom, and eventually fell asleep together between 10:00 and 11:00 p. m. At that point, a light was still on in the bedroom, and another was on in the kitchen. The window by the living room was left open about six inches. A slightly bent screen was on the outside of the window. Curtains were hanging straight down on the outside of the window.

Between 2:30 and 3:00 a. m., Linda awoke when she felt tapping on her shoulder. An intruder, later identified as Johnny Guillebeau, had a knife to her throat, and said, "Hey, keep it cool; keep it cool." As he said this, he motioned toward Carla, who had awakened and had begun to cry. He warned Linda that he would cut Carla's throat if she cried. In response, Linda calmed Carla to avoid any harm to the child. When Linda had quieted down the little girl, appellant led Linda to the living room.

Once in the living room, appellant ordered Linda to disrobe, and when she refused, appellant took off her clothes. Immediately, Linda started to scream, and appellant threatened, "keep quiet, or I'll cut your throat." With that, he forced her onto the couch and raped her. When he finished his sexual assault, appellant got astride Linda and, with both hands grasping his knife, appellant stabbed her in the middle of the neck with the dull blade. Following this, he successively thrust twice more into her throat and tried to slash her from the vagina upwards but apparently the knife was too dull to cut the flesh.

Linda pretended to die from these wounds. When appellant turned away and started walking toward the bedroom where Carla was placed, Linda rushed toward him and hit him in the face. He struggled with her. He hit her, and knocked her onto the couch, and then stood on the coffee table and kicked her in the face. He cut her finger with the knife during this struggle. He then jumped up on a couch and leaped through the window in the living room. She looked out the window after him and saw him running down the steps and away.

Once appellant was gone, Linda tried to contact a friend or her neighbors for help. Finally, on the third try, she reached the woman who lived next to her and had the neighbor call the police.

A number of officers from the Richmond Police Department quickly responded, and one officer called an ambulance. Officer Larry Brady, one of the first officers to arrive, saw Linda with extensive amounts of blood covering her robe, her throat, and her hands. Inside the apartment, Brady found a blood stain on the couch. He noticed shoe impressions left in blood around the coffee table and observed that the screen that should have covered the living room window was missing and that the curtain in front of the window, rather than hanging straight down, was resting over the couch.

While Brady was examining the scene, an ambulance crew arrived to take Linda to the hospital. Before she was taken away, Linda repeatedly asked who would care for the baby. Officer Brady, thinking she meant Carla, who was crying nearby, responded that the child was alright and would be taken care of.

Shortly thereafter, Girthy Litt, a neighbor, walked into the apartment. Brady asked where she was going. The woman answered that she was going to get Linda's baby. Brady inquired as to where the baby was and she pointed to a bedroom in the back. The officers began to understand that there was another child.

Sergeant Les Solaro went into the bedroom designated by the neighbor. He approached the crib, lifted the blanket inside, and discovered infant Sheila's body. A large gash was observed on the baby's throat and a large amount of blood covered the baby and the bedding in which her body rested. Dr. William Bogart, a pathologist, testified that Sheila's throat had been cut from one side to the next and that the wound resulted in the baby's death.

On October 12, while in the hospital, Linda made a composite sketch of her assailant with the help of a police technician. Officer George Newton saw the drawing and offered his opinion that it looked like either appellant or appellant's brother, Ira Guillebeau. Several days later, Linda observed both a photographic and a physical lineup, and at each lineup, positively identified appellant as the one who had sexually assaulted her. Linda also made an identification of appellant at the preliminary investigation.

A number of officers noted that they saw bloody shoeprints on the stairs leading from Linda's apartment. Those prints seemed to have been made by shoes with rippled soles. They also appeared to be similar to the prints left inside the apartment. Kathryn Holmes, a criminologist in the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department, conducted comparison studies of the bloody shoeprints in Linda's apartment and concluded that the shoeprints had probably been made by the shoes appellant was wearing at the time of his arrest.

Holmes also testified to the presence of semen in a stain on Linda's couch. That stain was about 28 inches from a patch of blood on the other end of the couch. Holmes hypothesized that assuming the blood came from the throat area, the semen stain corresponded to where Linda's vagina would have been when she had been lying on the couch. Furthermore, the stain had Blood Group A substance in it. Both Linda and the appellant secrete Group A substances into their bodies (i. e., the Group A substances on the couch could have come from either Linda or appellant, or both).

The defense witness most helpful to appellant was his mother, Doris Guillebeau. Briefly, she offered the following alibi:

On October 7, 1976, appellant was living with Mrs. Guillebeau in her home in San Pablo. That evening, appellant and his brothers played cards for several hours. In fact, appellant and one brother, Neil, continued with their card games until 1:30 or 2:00 a. m. At that time, Mrs. Guillebeau told the two to go to bed. Appellant went to sleep after getting a bowl of ice cream. Neil went immediately to bed. Mrs. Guillebeau subsequently fell asleep between 2:30 and 3:00 a. m., but nevertheless knew for certain that appellant was still at home.

I

Appellant's first contention is that the trial court committed error by ruling that the jury would be informed of the dual plea of "not guilty" and "not guilty by reason of insanity" at the same time, prior to trial. Appellant insists that the entry of dual plea prior to trial prejudicially affects a criminal defendant's case because the jury would be more prone to convict the defendant in the guilty phase knowing that he has an opportunity to present an insanity defense and thus avoid any punishment. Appellant's contention is untenable for several reasons.

First, PENAL CODE SECTION 1026¹ explicitly contemplates that the dual pleas of "not guilty" and "not guilty by reason of insanity" are to be entered instantaneously and outlines the procedure to be followed in such a case. Thus, section 1026 provides in pertinent part that: "When a defendant pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, and also joins with it another plea or pleas, he shall first be tried as if he had entered such other plea or pleas only, and in such trial he shall be conclusively presumed to have been sane at the time the offense is alleged to have been committed. If the jury shall find the defendant guilty, or if the defendant pleads only not guilty by reason of insanity, then the question whether the defendant was sane or insane at the time the offense was committed shall be promptly tried, either before the same jury or before a new jury in the discretion of the court." (Emphasis added.)

This section, which separates a criminal case involving the defense of insanity into two parts, has produced a system popularly labeled as "bifurcated trial." (Louisell & Hazard, Insanity as a Defense: The Bifurcated Trial (1961) 49 Cal.L.Rev. 805.) While the bifurcated trial system has been criticized on a variety of grounds (deprivation of due process; denial of right to jury trial; double jeopardy;...