People v. Lindsey
| Decision Date | 24 July 1961 |
| Docket Number | Cr. 6826 |
| Citation | 14 Cal.Rptr. 678,56 Cal.2d 324,363 P.2d 910 |
| Parties | , 363 P.2d 910 PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Richard Arlen LINDSEY, Defendant and Appellant. |
| Court | California Supreme Court |
Paul Major, Van Nuys, under appointment by Supreme Court, for defendant and appellant.
Stanley Mosk, Atty. Gen., and William E. James, Asst. Atty. Gen., for plaintiff and respondent.
Defendant pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree, and, upon a trial on the sole issue of penalty, the court sitting without a jury fixed the punishment at death. 1 The appeal comes to us automatically under subdivision (b) of section 1239 of the Penal Code.
According to the confession defendant made to the police and his testimony at the trial, the circumstances surrounding the murder were as follows: While defendant was driving in Kern County on the afternoon of January 12, 1961, with his wife, who was in her seventh month of pregnancy, he told her he wanted a little girl for sexual purposes. They went to the Shafter Labor Camp where his wife talked to some children about cleaning her home, and a small boy went to a nearby house and brought back Rose Marie Riddle, who was about six years old. Rose Marie got into the front seat of the car with defendant and his wife, and after traveling some distance they stopped at the side of the road, where defendant and his wife drank some whiskey. When the girl said she wanted to go home and started to cry, defendant's wife slapped her. The girl continued to cry, and defendant's wife said to him that somebody would hear her and that they 'might as well get it over with.' Defendant turned off the highway onto a dirt road and drove about two or three hundred yards, where his wife removed Rose Marie's panties and got into the back seat. Defendant assaulted Rose Marie and choked her, and when his wife said, 'I guess she's dead,' he carried the girl out of the car and put her on the ground. Defendant's wife said that she thought she heard something, that the girl was not dead, and that she would kill her. She took a pipe wrench from the car and struck her on the head several times. They left her on the ground and drove away.
A doctor who performed an autopsy found several bruises about the genitalia, neck, shoulders, and buttocks, numerous contusions and lacerations about the head, and spermatozoa within the vaginal orifice. He also found injuries to the brain and a tear of the vaginal fornix opening into the abdominal cavity. He testified that in his opinion the most probable cause of death was 'cranial cerebral' injuries but that death might have been produced by strangulation or by the initial shock from the genital injury and that it was highly probable that the genital injury would have eventually proved fatal due to infection in the abdominal cavity.
There was evidence that defendant was 30 years of age and that he had served terms of imprisonment for auto theft, had been in jails 20 or 30 times and had been married six times. He would sometimes 'go into a mad tantrum,' and on some of these occasions he made violent physical attacks on other persons. In 1956 he was in an automobile accident and suffered very serious head injuries, and subsequently, at the request of his parents, he was twice committed to a hospital in Texas for about 50 days. The diagnosis made at the hospital was that there were no signs of psychoses and that he was a sociopathic personality, a type of person who cannot get along in society and is unable to conform to the rules of society. A psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution and one appearing as a witness for the defense agreed with the diagnosis made at the Texas hospital, and they stated that in their opinion defendant wase 'legally sane' both at the time of the trial and at the time of the killing.
Section 1368 of the Penal Code provides, 'If at any time during the pendency of an action and prior to judgment a doubt arises as to the sanity of the defendant, the court must order the question as to his sanity to be determined by a trial by the court without a jury, or with a jury, if a trial by jury is demanded * * *.' In support of the claim that there should have been a hearing under this section, our attention is called to the evidence of his confinement in the hospital in Texas, his fits of violence, his head injury, and the circumstances surrounding the kidnaping and the killing of Rose Marie. However, as we have seen, both the psychiatrist who testified for the defense and the one testifying for the prosecution were of the opinion that there were no signs of psychoses and that defendant was 'legally sane.' While his testimony was...
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