People v. Leonard

• Citation: 58 Cal.Rptr.3d 368,40 Cal.4th 1370,157 P.3d 973
• Decision Date: 17 May 2007
• Docket Number: No. S054291.,S054291.
• Court: California Supreme Court
• Parties: The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Eric Royce LEONARD, Defendant and Appellant.

58 Cal.Rptr.3d 368

40 Cal.4th 1370

157 P.3d 973

The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Eric Royce LEONARD, Defendant and Appellant.

No. S054291.

Supreme Court of California.

May 17, 2007.

Wesley A. Van Winkle, Berkeley, under appointment by the Supreme Court, for Defendant and Appellant.

Bill Lockyer and Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Attorneys General, Robert R. Anderson, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Mary Jo Graves, Assistant Attorney General, Ward A. Campbell and Patrick J. Whalen, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

Erickson Beasley Hewitt & Wilson and Todd Boley, Oakland, for California Department of Developmental Services as Amicus Curiae, upon the request of the Supreme Court.

KENNARD, J.

A jury convicted defendant Eric Royce Leonard of six counts of murder (Pen. Code, § 187),¹ and it found true two special-circumstance allegations of robbery murder (§ 190.2, subd. (a)(17)) as well as one special-circumstance allegation of multiple murder (§ 190.2, subd. (a)(3)). The jury also convicted defendant of two counts of robbery (§ 211), and it found that he had personally used a dangerous or deadly weapon in the commission of each offense (§ 12022.5, subd. (a)). At the penalty phase, the jury returned a verdict of death. Defendant's appeal to this court is automatic. (§ 1239, subd. (b).) We affirm the judgment in its entirety.

I. Facts

A. Guilt Phase—Prosecution's Case

At 11:30 p.m. on the night of February 12, 1991, California Highway Patrol Officers James Young and Barry Hoover went to a Quik Stop convenience store on Auburn Boulevard in Sacramento. Young bought a pack of gum and spoke for a few minutes to the clerk, Zeid Obeid. At roughly the same time, Sallie Jane Thomas drove her fiance, Stephen Anderson, to his new job as a clerk at Quik Stop. She saw a young White male wearing a black trench coat, black slacks, and black shoes, walking down the street about a block from the store. Thomas dropped Anderson off at Quik Stop and returned home.

About 15 minutes thereafter, Lester Morris arrived at Quik Stop and saw a man lying on the pavement in the parking lot, near the front door of the store, with blood on his stomach. Morris felt the man's pulse, realized he was still alive, and ran into the store seeking help. There he found two men lying on the floor in pools of blood. Morris, who was deaf and had impaired speech, tried to call 911 from a pay phone but he could not make himself understood. A pickup truck pulled into the parking lot soon after, and the driver, Joshua Reed, made the call for him.

Highway Patrol Officers Young and Hoover, summoned back to the scene, found store clerks Anderson and Obeid lying near two open cash registers. Anderson was dead. Obeid, who was unconscious, was taken to the hospital, as was the man found lying outside the store, who was identified as Thor Johnson. Both men later died without regaining consciousness. Anderson and Obeid had each been shot twice in the head, once from more than 18 inches away and once at very close range (less than two inches). Johnson had been shot once in the back of the head at a distance of greater than 18 inches.

Sacramento County Sheriffs deputies found three expended shell casings inside the Quik Stop store. A fourth casing was found just outside the store, and a store employee later found a fifth casing inside the store. Five bullets were recovered from the bodies of the victims. Both the shell casings and the bullets were .25-caliber ammunition. The currency had been removed from both of the store's cash registers, leaving only food stamps and coins. The deputies found a box of shredded beef jerky, several lids to plastic jerky containers, and a bottle of grapefruit juice on top of an ice cream cabinet inside the store; they also found additional beef jerky containers as well as several pieces of jerky on the pavement outside the rear of the store.

At 9:00 p.m. on February 19, 1991, one week after the Quik Stop murders, John Connolly ordered and paid for a small pizza from the Round Table Pizza restaurant at the Country Club Center in Sacramento, six blocks from the Quik Stop store. He then went to the Glacier Lounge, a nearby bar, planning to pick up the pizza later. At 10:50 that night, Alexander Ting, a 17-year-old high school student, rode his bicycle to a market at the Country Club Center. After parking his bicycle, he walked in front of the Round Table Pizza restaurant, where he saw a man in a dark trench coat standing at the front counter. Ting bought a soda and ice cream at the market and returned to his bicycle about 10 minutes later. The man in the trench coat was standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, looking from side to side.

At 11:08 p.m., John Connolly returned to the Round Table Pizza restaurant for his pizza. He found the door open and the restaurant apparently empty. Connolly called out that he had returned for his pizza. When nobody answered, Connolly (a regular customer) took his pizza from the oven and left.

At approximately 11:00 p.m. that same night, Andrew Keogh, the assistant manager of another Round Table Pizza restaurant, telephoned the Round Table Pizza restaurant at the Country Club Center. When no one answered, he asked employee Renee Bennett to make several additional calls between 11:05 and 11:20. When there was still no answer, Keogh asked Bennett to drive to the restaurant at the Country Club Center to make sure everything was all right. When Bennett arrived there, the door was open, although the restaurant should have closed at 11 o'clock. In the scullery, she found the three restaurant employees lying motionless on the floor in pools of what appeared to be blood. She called Keogh. He drove over to the restaurant and immediately called 911.

Sheriffs deputies and paramedics arrived within minutes. They determined that two of the employees—Sarah Crook and Kyle Reynolds—were dead. The third employee, Andrea Coladangelo, was taken to a hospital, where she died without regaining consciousness. Each victim had been repeatedly shot in the head—Crook twice; Reynolds and Coladangelo three times each. Two of the restaurant's three cash registers had been emptied. Eight cartridge casings and five expended bullets were found at the scene, and two others were retrieved from the victims' bodies. All were .25-caliber ammunition.

The Sacramento County Sherriff's Department mounted a massive manhunt for the killer, interviewing hundreds of people. One of the persons they spoke to was defendant, who lived near the two crime scenes. He was interviewed at the sheriffs department after he was spotted, two days after the Round Table killings, walking down a street not far from the Quik Stop store at night and wearing a trench coat. Defendant told Sheriffs Deputy Robert Bell that he had been at Quik Stop on the night the murders were committed there, but he did not arrive until after the sheriffs barricades were set up. He also said he went to the Country Club shopping center early on the evening of the Round Table murders, but did not enter the restaurant. Because defendant was quiet, timid, frightened, and confused, and he appeared to be mentally disabled as a result of epilepsy, Bell wrote in his report that defendant was not a likely suspect. Bell did, however, take defendant's photograph.

In May 1991, three months after the murders, Sheriffs deputies, still searching for the killer, interviewed Charlotte Henstra and Shane Whitcomb. Henstra worked at a small grocery one block from the Quik Stop store. She said that on the night of the Quik Stop murders, a young man in a trench coat and black dress shoes with tassels had come into her store and stayed for approximately 45 minutes, leaving at about 10 p.m. That same night, between 9:45 and 10 o'clock, Whitcomb, who worked at an office complex near the Quik Stop, saw a man in a trench coat and Italian loafers with tassels, who appeared to have come through a hole in a fence next to the office's parking lot. When Whitcomb asked the man for a cigarette lighter, the man made a strange grunting noise and kept walking.

On June 4, 1991, with the investigation at a standstill, Sheriffs Detective Stanley Reed learned of Deputy Bell's February 1991 interview with defendant. Reed and Lieutenant Raymond Biondi found the photograph Bell had taken of defendant and showed it to Charlotte Henstra and Shane Whitcomb. Both said that defendant looked like the person they had seen the night of the Quik Stop murders. Reed and Biondi then showed the photograph to the manager of Zeke's, a gun store located near the two crime scenes, who said he had seen defendant in the store. The next day, Reed and Biondi showed a photographic lineup containing defendant's picture to Sallie Thomas, who had seen a man in a trench coat walking near Quik Stop when she had driven her fiance' to work there less than half an hour before the killings. She picked out defendant's photograph as being the "most familiar." They showed the same lineup to Alex Ting, who had seen a man in a trench coat outside the Round Table Pizza restaurant on the night the killings occurred there. He picked out defendant's photograph as "a possibility."

On June 6, 1991, Lieutenant Biondi and Detective Reed conducted a videotaped interviewed with defendant at the sheriffs department. During the interview, which is described in greater detail in part III. B., post, defendant admitted that he had bought ammunition from Zeke's. He also telephoned his father, Douglas Leonard, telling him he had put some of that ammunition into his father's ammunition box. He also said that his father's gun used the same kind of bullets as the gun used to commit the murders. After the interview, Biondi and Reed took defendant back to his apartment. There, defendant gave them an ammunition box and a baggie that between them contained 36 .25-caliber cartridges. With defendant's permission, Biondi and Reed...